Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
* * * * * MEGA LD BACKFILE * * * * *

* * * * * Written by Julian Switala * * * * *

* * * * * Instructions * * * * *

1. !!!USE THE DOCUMENT MAP VIEW FUNCTION!!! 2. !!!MINIMIZE EVERYTHING IN THE DOCUMENT MAP FIRST!!! 3. This file has internal link, impact, and framework cards applicable to nearly all possible LD resolutions. 4. I suggest reading and cutting articles specific to the topic for links and uniqueness. 5. A LOT of the cards overlap and can be reasonably placed in different categories. However, there are very few duplicate cards (cards that could be in multiple categories only appear once in the file). Thus, if you're looking for a particular card in what seems like its most likely categorization, you may not find it there and will have to search elsewhere in the file. I guarantee that youll find what youre looking for if you search hard enough. (Some defense cards might be in the offensive sections etc.). 6. As such, I would advise against using this file in-round since the cards arent partitioned enough and many different cards are lumped together under a very broad heading. I would recommend writing blocks pre-round with this file. However, if you need carded answers to arguments you havent heard before or if you know the file extremely well, then go for it. 7. And given how LD works, youll probably be successful just by reading the taglines of these cards and then making short extrapolations and analytics on the fly 8. Have fun!

Page 1 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

* * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS * * * * *
* * * * * MEGA LD BACKFILE * * * * *...........................................................1 * * * * * Written by Julian Switala * * * * *.......................................................1 * * * * * Instructions * * * * *............................................................................1 * * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS * * * * *........................................................2 *****LIBERTY*****.......................................................................................14 **Autonomy Good / Coercion Bad**............................................................14

Human dignity is the highest standard........................................................................................................................ 14 Moral obligation to protect liberty................................................................................................................................ 14 Freedom comes before all other impacts ................................................................................................................... 14 Coercion outweighs, conditions like poverty are inevitable, its futile to try to solve....................................................15 Compulsory violate rights....................................................................................................................................... 15 Coercion is immoral denies individuals the capacity develop as moral agents........................................................15 Evaluate freedom first it is critical to both prosperity and fairness ...........................................................................16 Freedom outweighs without freedom, we are all reduced to the level of animals and slaves only freedom from government oppression solves................................................................................................................................... 16 Coercion restricts rights and destroys individual agency............................................................................................ 17 Coercion snowballsEvery increase in the states power brings us closer to tyranny...............................................18 There is no value to life in their framework coercion makes us into mere tools of the state.....................................18 Utilitarianism doesnt trump the impact of coercionindividuals cant be reduced to units of value...........................19 Every invasion of liberty must be rejected failure to do so leads to massive atrocities............................................19 Government coercion is immoral because it kills freedom and virtue by eroding the basis of free market capitalism 20 Coercion creates a slippery slope to more coercion................................................................................................... 21 Violations of liberty create a slippery slope to more governmental constraints. .........................................................21 Government coercion causes more violations of liberty.............................................................................................. 21 Government coercion destroys the value to life and cannot be morally justified.........................................................22 Coercion destroys value to life.................................................................................................................................... 22 Coercion ensures extinction. ...................................................................................................................................... 22 Coercion is the root cause of military conflict ............................................................................................................. 22 Global democratic consolidation is necessary to prevent many scenarios for war and extinction..............................24 Each use of coercive force paves the road for massive atrocities..............................................................................24 Government coercion creates evil............................................................................................................................... 25 Government coercion must be morally rejected.......................................................................................................... 25 Coercion must be rejected in every instance.............................................................................................................. 26 Coercion violates fundament human rights................................................................................................................. 26
**Property Rights Good**............................................................................27

Property rights are key to all rights.............................................................................................................................. 27 Property rights critical to moral agency....................................................................................................................... 27 Property rights are key to prevent Nazism.................................................................................................................. 27
**Rights Come First**..................................................................................29

Placing survival over individual autonomy replicates authoritarian regimes of control, subjugating individual rights to the values held by those in power .............................................................................................................................. 29 Violation of freedom negates the value of human existence and represents the greatest threat to human survival...29 Violating rights in the name of survival causes social paralysis and destroys the value to life....................................30 It is impossible for policymakers to know future consequences allowing more rights violations will justify worse consequences in the future......................................................................................................................................... 30 Rights outweigh all critical to human dignitye future................................................................................................ 31 Policymakers must protect individual rights................................................................................................................ 31 The calculation of utilitarianism is the foundation of totalitarianism.............................................................................32 Every alternative to rights leads to tyranny................................................................................................................. 32 Collective safety is no justification for rights violationsleads to slavery, genocide, and wars..................................33 Sacrificing rights to preserve life produces totalitarianism. ........................................................................................ 33 Err on the side of rights its the biggest consequence in the long term....................................................................34 Rights absolute cant infringe on one persons rights to increase well-being of others............................................34 Rights and basic liberties are a prerequisite of rational decisionmaking.....................................................................35 Right to health outweighs violation of right to life..................................................................................................... 35
**AT: Positive Rights Good**......................................................................37

Page 2 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Government protection of positive rights justifies war................................................................................................. 37 Limiting government protection to property rights is key to prevent atrocities.............................................................38
**AT: Util Protects Rights**.........................................................................39

Current price-tag thinking is insufficient- we have to make the tough decisions that incorporate individual rights instead of trying to spare laypeople from difficult decisionmaking..............................................................................39 Utilitarianism doesnt trump the impact of coercionindividuals cant be reduced to units of value...........................39 The sacrifice of innocence degrades humanity-- it is an absolute wrong....................................................................40 Util fails to protect moral rights it silences rights claims when not grounded in law..................................................40 Utilitarianism fundamentally fails to protect individual rights greatest good claims simply conflict.........................41 Utilitarianism reduces individuals to their mere utility value, making them expendable..............................................41 Calculation of human life leads to no value to life and the zero point of the holocaust...............................................41
**AT: Rimal**...............................................................................................43

Mutual coercion wont solve - they lack the knowledge and incentive to protect the environment and will perpetuate tyrannical coercion...................................................................................................................................................... 43 An authoritarian government would fail to conserve resources...................................................................................43 Their authors contradict themselves........................................................................................................................... 43
**AT: Coercion Bad**..................................................................................45

Illegitimate resource acquisition justifies redistribution................................................................................................ 45 Libertarians concede that extinction outweighs.......................................................................................................... 45 Redistribution is not an inherent affront to human dignity. As long as you believe helping others is good, redistribution doesnt threaten dignity......................................................................................................................... 45 The only way their alternative can capture this is if their alternative is allowed to imagine a world in which individuals all become charitable givers. This is abusive private actor fiat. If the neg can imagine this they can just imagine world peace and solve all of our case impacts..................................................................................................................... 45 Nozick's concept of dignity requires access to resources...........................................................................................46 Since initial acquisition was unjust, there are no legitimate entitlements ...................................................................46 Taxation redistributes freedom rather than limiting it.................................................................................................. 46 Taxes don't violate rights............................................................................................................................................ 46 Violations of liberty dont justify rejecting welfare........................................................................................................ 46 Welfare enhances self determination.......................................................................................................................... 47 Redistribution is justified on utilitarian grounds........................................................................................................... 47 Utilitarianism justifies the welfare state....................................................................................................................... 47 Extinction outweighs................................................................................................................................................... 47 Excess liberty creates a moral vacuum....................................................................................................................... 48 Libertarianism would undermine the moral basis of the liberal state...........................................................................48 Blanket statements about coercion are false, must evaluate coercion on a case by case basis................................48 Turn: Autonomy bad................................................................................................................................................... 48
**AT: I Solve Future Coercion**..................................................................50

Coercion snowballs Each increase becomes easier to justify. The only reason why we do not realize it is because the government uses the ploy of Altruism to take it step by step. As each program fails, it becomes necessary to move another step closer to more coercion. We are on a road to oppression. ..........................................................50 Linear every increase in coercive power decreases human dignity. .......................................................................50 Steps toward state power are steps toward tyranny .................................................................................................. 50 Coercion isnt justified to prevent coercion this mindset leads to war......................................................................51 Human dignity outweighs Utilitarianism fails to protect rights..................................................................................52 Non-absolute rights fails to protect freedom............................................................................................................... 52
**AT: Im not excessively coercive**...........................................................54

Every justification for coercion, no matter how legitimate, conditions us to accept further limitations on our liberty.. .54 Coercive efforts fail and snowball into massive atrocities every invasion of liberty must be forcefully rejected.......54 Uncompromising stance on libertarian principles is key..............................................................................................55 Allowing any realm of government control quickly snowballs to totalitarian collectivism.............................................57
**AT: Rawls**..............................................................................................58

Rawls conception of rights flawed fails to explain why small incursions on liberty would threaten citizenship........58 Rawls fails to provide warrants for the absolute preservation of basic liberties over other ends.................................58 Rawls conception of personal freedom cannot resolve utilitarian democratic ideals..................................................59
**AT: Egalitarianism / Equality / Distribution Good**..................................60

1. Distributive justice leads to global poverty.............................................................................................................. 60 2. Focusing exclusively on the poor stigmatizes the issueno solvency...................................................................60 3. Egalitarianism does not equate society .................................................................................................................. 60 4. Principles of justice cement the political sphereerode the possibility for real change ......................................61

Page 3 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

5. Inequality inevitablecapitalism ............................................................................................................................ 61 Hierarchies are inevitable even after the redistribution of wealth...............................................................................62 Equality is impossibleenvy ..................................................................................................................................... 62 Distribution of benefits to equalize the impoverished is indefensible encourages envy and moral disorientation....63 Egalitarian and Prioritarian thinking flawed no standard baseline for equality guarantees never-ending redistribution. ............................................................................................................................................................. 64 Acceptance of egalitarianism dominates the political sphere and makes us powerless to the abuses of elites .........64 Moral calls for egalitarianism are self defeating ......................................................................................................... 65 Err on the side of combining political consequences with humanitarianism ...............................................................65 Moral views of egalitarianism are self serving ............................................................................................................ 65 Egalitarianism isnt democraticinevitable dilemma ................................................................................................. 66 Forced attempts at equality perpetuate inequality .................................................................................................... 66 Egalitarianism hurts the poor .................................................................................................................................... 66 No such thing as a utilitarian defense of egalitarianism ............................................................................................. 67 Utilitarian calculus not egalitarian doesnt act on the principle of intrinsic equality...................................................67 In-egalitarianism solves benefits trickle down........................................................................................................... 68 The goal of the judge should not be to make sure each person is equalrather ensure each person is sufficient....68 Everything is relativethe goal should not be to carve everyone into the same statuerather ensure each person is sufficientthis is distinct from economic egalitarianism............................................................................................. 69 Egalitarianism fosters never-ending comparison and obligation a sufficientarian framework should take precedence................................................................................................................................................................. 69 Moderate sufficentarianism offers a pluralist approach to justice which maximizes contextual equality.....................70
*****PRIVATIZATION*****...........................................................................71 **Privatization Good / Government Bad**...................................................71

So-called welfare rights restrict freedom, rationalize the coercive transfer of wealth, and destroy charitable feelings, turning the case.......................................................................................................................................................... 71 Health care policies are coercive................................................................................................................................ 71 Free health care means slavery.................................................................................................................................. 72 The state is dehumanizing because of bureaucracy and the ability to make war.......................................................72 The government is inherently dehumanizing because it seeks to control people.......................................................73 Government is stripping doctors rights through coercive action.................................................................................73 The welfare state is flawed it looks only at the outcomes rather than the process which is immoral because looking at outcomes only assumes that the poor have been cheated not that they have tried and failed...............................74 Capitalism is the best system to foster freedom, which is a moral necessity..............................................................75 Limited government is key to prevent tyranny, which killed more people than both World Wars combined the plan provides positive rights, or entitlements that causally fail to protect the right to life....................................................75 Free markets are inherently non-violent because they rely on voluntary associations whereas governments force and compel, leading to violence. ................................................................................................................................ 76 Turn aff/neg creates dependence which decreases incentives to work tanks the economy.................................77 Taking wealth forcefully kills charitable desires.......................................................................................................... 77 The alternative results in beneficial forms of capitalism. Only altruism results in the dangerous forms of capitalism that their authors assume........................................................................................................................................... 78 Capitalism solves war economic interdependencies................................................................................................78 Economically free countries are less likely to go to war put away your democracy add-ons because the alt. solves better........................................................................................................................................................................... 79 The free market is a moral necessity.......................................................................................................................... 79 Government coercion destroys freedom the free market system is the highest moral ground and will solve all other problems .................................................................................................................................................................... 80 Government power inevitably leads to war and mass genocide limiting the power of the government and fostering individual freedom solves............................................................................................................................................ 82 Government provision is inefficient and ineffective three reasons..........................................................................83 Eliminating licensing requirements for medical establishments and restrictions on medical supplies, deregulating health insurance, and eliminating subsidies such as Medicaid key to greater effectiveness and availability of health care............................................................................................................................................................................. 84 Abolishing federal programs is the first step to solving poverty allows private sector to grow.................................85 Lower tax rates induce charitable giving studies prove............................................................................................85 Failure to privatize collapses the economy................................................................................................................. 86
**Alternative to Government Provision**.....................................................86

Page 4 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The alternative is to reject the coercive policies of the affirmative. By embracing negative freedoms, the free market will alleviate social ills, turning the case...................................................................................................................... 86 We should reject coercion for deliberative democracy................................................................................................87 Reject coercion in favor of capitalism and individual rights.........................................................................................88 Rejection of the collectivist welfare policies of the aff is critical to imagining a better world. Only through this can we establish concrete foundations for reasonable change...............................................................................................88 Alt view the invisible victims .................................................................................................................................... 89 Americans want smaller government when taxes matter............................................................................................90 AT: Cant imagine. Confinement to the politically possible makes change impossible. Prefer the reformist policies .................................................................................................................................................................................... 91
**Private Charities CP**..............................................................................92

Private charities are more successful than the government at providing aid..............................................................92 Government eligibility requirements skew aid distribution........................................................................................... 92 Governmental programs are inefficient; Private charities arent..................................................................................93 A greater diversity of solutions makes private charities more effective.......................................................................93 Private Charity causes an attitudinal shift encouraging recipients to escape poverty.................................................93 Private Charity promotes participatory democracy..................................................................................................... 94 Only the counterplan solves informal private networks are not only solve poverty but protect key values ..............94 Privatization promotes choice and increases quality of services to all people............................................................94 Product choice because of privatization will resolve the inefficiency preventing high quality goods and services......95 Privatizing is a prerequisite to eliminating poverty...................................................................................................... 95 Private charities solve poverty.................................................................................................................................... 96 Government programs are ineffective and trade-off with private efforts......................................................................97 Private charities solve coercion.................................................................................................................................. 97 Private charity best targets causes, not symptoms. ................................................................................................97 Taxes trade off with charity......................................................................................................................................... 98
*****UTILITARIANISM GOOD / DEON BAD*****........................................99 **Util Good For Rights**..............................................................................99

Utilitarianism upholds self-ownership and thus liberty................................................................................................. 99 Utilitarianism is best it protects rights while not totally rejecting all policies that might infringe................................99 Util protects rights in social and constitutional hierarchies..........................................................................................99 Utilitarian calculus is the only way to determine rights relative importance..............................................................100
**Util Good: Generics**.............................................................................101

Their moral imperatives revolve around a flawed libertarian method- consequences must be evaluated first to escape the cycle....................................................................................................................................................... 101 Policy must be viewed through a consequentialist framework- slipping into the libertarian mindset only recreates the root cause of the affirmative harms........................................................................................................................... 101 Governments must weigh consequences................................................................................................................. 102 Moral absolutism suffers from tunnel vision that generates evil and political irrelevance..........................................102 Utilitarianism key to policy making............................................................................................................................ 103 Policymakers should adapt utilitarian calculus applicable throughout society........................................................103 In a nuclear world, you have to weigh consequences............................................................................................... 104 Utilitarianism necessitates public policy that requires that leaders take the action which is in the best interest of people....................................................................................................................................................................... 104 Consequences matter the tunnel vision of moral absolutism generates evil and political irrelevance....................106 Deontology is bad in the context of public policy five reasons ..............................................................................106 At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins,

Page 5 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient, though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy......................................................................106 Maximizing all lives is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity...............................................107 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 (GMM 429). 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 (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agentcentered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agentcentered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kants 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 (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the endin-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many..................................................................................................................................... 107 Utilitarianism is the most moral outlookprovides the most benefits for the most number of people.......................107 Ethics are accessed through the evaluation of consequences through an impartial outlook....................................108 Turn calculation is inevitable and justified every action requires calculation, and refusing to engage in calculation means allowing the worst atrocities to occur............................................................................................................. 108 Rejection of prediction is an implicit prediction which undercuts good predictions...................................................109 Predictions are key to check disasters ..................................................................................................................... 110 Despite studies predictions experts are still trustworthy............................................................................................111 Consequentialism accesses their internal linkwe make the best decisions based on moral AND utilitarian consequences........................................................................................................................................................... 112 Concrete decision making - Only Utilitarianism makes justifications based on the end result rather then ambiguous language................................................................................................................................................................... 113 Utilitarianism prevents nuclear war........................................................................................................................... 113 Utilitarianism inevitable............................................................................................................................................. 114 Utilitarianism is inevitable - people are inherently utilitarians....................................................................................114 Consequentialism is best, short term impacts are key even when the long-term impacts are uncertain...................115 Concept of morals not mutually exclusive with utilitarianism.....................................................................................115 Successful integration of morality into utilitarian calculus possible...........................................................................116 Utilitarianism is inevitable it will indefinitely permeate human thought......................................................................117 Because of the advent of nuclear omnicide, ethics should not be held absolute .....................................................117 Once an action enters the policy realm we must use a Consequentialist approach, this is necessary to minimize suffering and conflict. ............................................................................................................................................... 117 Utilitarianism and other forms of calculation are inevitable.......................................................................................117

Page 6 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Individual and government choices on morality are different, once we play the role of policy makers we must follow a utilitarian calculus ..................................................................................................................................................... 118 Consequences come first for governments - only our evidence draws the distinction between moral theories for individuals and governments.................................................................................................................................... 118 Moral rights and wrongs are based on consequences proves Consequentialism is best......................................118 Ignoring consequences is immoral - they sacrifice others to preserve moral purity. It is most moral to act to produce the best end regardless of the moral cleanliness of the means................................................................................119 Justice must save humanity and weigh.................................................................................................................. 119 Utilitarian actions only act as a last resort. Lack of alternatives means the only inhuman action is to not act at all. 119 Overriding rights is justified when more rights of others and lives are at stake. .......................................................120 We must choose the lesser evil. Hard and fast rules about what is right must be made to limit further atrocities against civilization..................................................................................................................................................... 121 Moral policy only blocks decision making necessary to limit further damage. Injustice can only be destroyed by inaction to make sacrifices........................................................................................................................................ 122 Utilitarianism is the only moral framework and alternatives are inevitability self-contradictory..................................122 Politics can only be one of responsibility. Rational policy makers must consider first whether to put rights before all else. ......................................................................................................................................................................... 123 Only consequentialism can resolve conflicting moral values and promote healthy society.......................................124 Morals and questions of human dignity will constantly conflict making deontological policy making impossible......124 Human value and dignity is impossible to determine externally, utilitarianism is only alternative. ...........................125 The impossibility to attain knowledge of every outcome or abuse leaves utilitarianism as the only option for most rational decision-making........................................................................................................................................... 125 Not knowing conditions for each individual or ramifications forces us to adopt utilitarianism. Policy makers must use in their decision making............................................................................................................................................ 126 True equality is only attainable under utilitarian framework. ....................................................................................126
**AT: Rights / Liberty Come First**...........................................................128

Upholding life is the ultimate moral standard............................................................................................................ 128 Life is the end toward which all purposeful action is directed....................................................................................128 Life is the prerequisite to all other value.................................................................................................................... 128 Utilitarianism precludes any claim of moral rights rights not quantifiable...............................................................128 No legitimate reason to include rights discussion under util f/w................................................................................129 Utilitarianism is the only calculus that takes into account human response..............................................................129 Rights dont come first conflicting values and ideologies.......................................................................................130 Rights not absolute doesnt take into account intended good................................................................................130 No appropriate duty to satisfy rights of conscience. ................................................................................................. 130 No absolute rights competing values and rights of different groups.......................................................................131 Priority of liberty not viable as basis of government at best it would be a competing theory among other liberal conceptions of justice................................................................................................................................................ 131 No justification for violation of rights to prevent external loss - principle of intervening actions means that government is not held responsible for death of others. .............................................................................................................. 131 Government cannot act to uphold the rights of the subject on the basis of moral principle.......................................132
**AT: Util No Rights**...........................................................................133

Utility cant be maximized in the long term by violating rights...................................................................................133 Utilitarianism Protects Fairness................................................................................................................................ 133
**AT: Freedom / Liberty Outweighs Life/Util**..........................................134

Libertarianism denies emotional satisfaction outside that of freedom.......................................................................134 Utilitarian policy-making ensures there will be no unnecessary constrains on liberty because each scenario is weighed. .................................................................................................................................................................. 134
**AT: Calculations Bad**...........................................................................136

Turn calculation is inevitable and justified every action requires calculation, and refusing to engage in calculation means allowing the worst atrocities to occur............................................................................................................. 136 Multiplying probability by magnitude is the only moral option hard moral rules result in circular preferences and horrible consequences.............................................................................................................................................. 137
**AT: Catastrophes Low Probability**....................................................139

Policy-making requires assessment of all risks despite probability...........................................................................139 Policy makers risk political backlash when proper action isnt taken to prevent catastrophe....................................139
**A2: Strive for Perfection (Imagination)**................................................141

Imagination fails cant change reality..................................................................................................................... 141

**Deontology Bad**...................................................................................142

Deontology is bad when people disagree about what is right or wrong....................................................................142

Page 7 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

While the ethical choice is normally a good idea, a threshold should be used in the face of a catastrophe..............142 Morality co-opts ethical behavior because the focus falls on ideology, not action ...................................................142 Deontology is unable to distinguish between better ethics, but is logically no longer ethical when peoples lives are at risk........................................................................................................................................................................ 143 Hatred between groups of people make human rights violations inevitable..............................................................143 Deontology does not hold up against the threat of nuclear war................................................................................144 Deontology is a terrible system for policy- policies must use means to an end framework and are judged by their effectiveness ............................................................................................................................................................ 145 Deontology is irrelevant in policy making - intentions are impossible to know, only the outcome matters...............145 Deontology in policy making fails to uphold democracy and legitimizes oppression.................................................146 Deontology fails-- no way of evaluating conflicting obligations ................................................................................146 The need for exceptions means deontology fails as a theory...................................................................................147 The subjectivity of what rights are important means deontology fails. .....................................................................148 Deontologys absolutism prioritizes morality as a concept over moral results. .........................................................148 Deontologys absolutism means it will inevitably fail. ...............................................................................................149 Utilitarianism is the only way to access morality. Sacrifice in the name of preserving rights destroys any hope of future generations attaining other values. ................................................................................................................ 149 Destruction of social institutions that limit rights literally cause social chaos and make it impossible to project rightbased economies elsewhere. .................................................................................................................................. 150 There is no Utopia in which we can get rid of difficult moral decisions. Political inaction in times of risks can only be for the worst.............................................................................................................................................................. 150 Political inaction to prevent further death is the greatest inhumanity one can commit. ............................................151 Attempts to totalize systems of morals is impossible................................................................................................151 Construction of moral lines is counter-productive to decision making. .....................................................................151 Exceptions to all concrete lines of morals prove there exists no true deontological framework. ..............................152 Alternatives to cost-benefit analyses would result in political paralyses and crush decision-making .......................152
*****UTIL BAD / DEON GOOD*****..........................................................154 **Util Bad**................................................................................................154

People are not a means to a result, the results of an action are never as important as the action itself...................154 Normality bias causes us to underestimate the impact of discriminatory outcomes. This justifies a feedback loop where we accept the established order and treat disadvantaged populations as suitable victims necessary for our safety........................................................................................................................................................................ 154 Risk assessment is distorted by poverty trading on capital reserves exclude the poor..........................................158 Judge must recognize their complicity in reinforcing beliefs which justify a continuation of racism..........................158 Apocalyptic predictions are constructed by alarmists to advance personal interests................................................159 Predictions out of debate may be good, but in debate they should be held to a very low standard. The probability of one small political change from the status quo causing nuclear war or extinction is not only infinitesimal, its also ridiculous................................................................................................................................................................... 159 Moral conscience precedes rational decision making decisions are based off a moral backdrop..........................159 The quest for survival destroys all human values..................................................................................................... 161 Utilitarianism inherently only favors a privileged few.................................................................................................161 Calculation reduces life to zero................................................................................................................................. 161 Utilitarianism causes species extinction.................................................................................................................... 162 Utilitarianism is unsustainableadvocates ultimately revert back to morals to make decisions ..............................162 Prediction destroys human agency........................................................................................................................... 162 Utilitarianism = Killing................................................................................................................................................ 163 The calculation of utilitarianism is the foundation of totalitarianism...........................................................................165 Every alternative to rights leads to tyranny............................................................................................................... 165 Government coercion must be morally rejected........................................................................................................ 165 Consequentialism, by very nature, will fail in public policy to improve the well-being of others................................166 Consequentialism is based on the greater good, not on self-interests......................................................................166 There is a limit to what morality can require for us, which consequentialism fails to incorporate..............................167 Consequentialism can result in sacrifices on some for the sake of others................................................................167 Utilitarianism cant address the issues of equity and distributive justice ...................................................................167 Utilitarianism policies result in inequality .................................................................................................................. 168 Utilitarian thinking results in mass murder................................................................................................................ 168 Utilitarianism is used to justify mass murder by governments...................................................................................169 Medical utilitarian calculus ensures human dehumanization and annihilation..........................................................169 Utilitarianism takes away all value to live.................................................................................................................. 170

Page 8 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Rights incompatible with utilitarianism...................................................................................................................... 170 Util ignores fundamental rights and creates a slippery slope until rights lose all significance...................................171 Morality is complex Blanket claims that we need to save people in poverty prevent us from making rational choices .................................................................................................................................................................................. 171 The utilitarian viewpoint is flawed. It is impossible for society to be viewed as a single............................................173 Utilitarians view society as a single entity, which devalues the rights and human dignity of.....................................173 Utilitarianism views people as locations of utilities, whose purpose is to bring good to the......................................173 Adapting the consequentialist viewpoint justifies the deaths of millions of innocents in............................................174 Utilitarianism taken alone allows unjustified war; full weight must be given to..........................................................174 Policy decisions directed at maintaining human survival through whatever means will encourage genocide, war, and the destruction of moral values................................................................................................................................. 175 Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and perpetuates societal inequality by evaluating utility as a whole .................................................................................................................................................................................. 176 Although utilitarianism claims to result in equality, its nature to only regard people as one entity rather than a group of individuals inherently contradicts the principle of equality.....................................................................................177 Owning oneself is a moral imperative utilitarianism imposes interpersonal obligations to society, which destroys morality..................................................................................................................................................................... 177 Aims to maximize overall utility despite competing interests in the public is utilitarianism destroys individualism. 178 Utility maximization destroys individualism............................................................................................................... 178 Utilitarianism forces individuals to sacrifice their own goals in order to increase utility ............................................178 Risks taken by the government to increase overall utility will severely compromise the individual which will result in fatality....................................................................................................................................................................... 179 Government coercion threatens individual freedom and renders morality meaningless...........................................179 Utilitarianism promotes inequity and inherently discriminates against minority like slavery .....................................180 Utilitarianism destroys value to life by forcing the individual to take risks on a cost-benefit basis in an effort to increase overall utility of an entity, while demoralizing the individuals own system of values..................................181 The only way to preserve individualism is to allow all persons to have the right to own themselves regardless of any negative consequentialist impacts............................................................................................................................ 181 Utilitarianism allows larger powers like the government to control the individual as long a greater utility is achieved. It is immoral to violate the sanctity of human life.......................................................................................................... 182 Utilitarianism suppresses individual choice-making freedom gives value to life.....................................................182 Governments have a responsibility to maintain human rights and individualism utilitarianism undermines human rights ........................................................................................................................................................................ 183 Theories of right preserve value to life government politics with the intention of increasing overall utility through environmentalism destroy morality and deceives the individual................................................................................183 Utilitarianism inevitable even in deontological frameworks.......................................................................................184 Compromising moral values and trading off for other injustices proves deontology is impossible............................184 Age of nuclear deterrence makes preventative measures necessary. Its too late to consider otherwise. ...............185
**Deon Good**..........................................................................................186

Consequences can only be evaluated AFTER morals Rights come first.............................................................186 Deontology InevitableIt is grounded in human behavior........................................................................................186 Deontology precludes util- the values of deontology come first................................................................................186 Deontology comes first, the means must justify themselves utilitarianism justifies the Holocaust. ......................187 Deontology precludes util- the values of deontology come first................................................................................188 Deontology comes before util- utilitarianism can be a last resort to preserve fundamental rights.............................188 Deontology preserves fundamental rights and still accesses the ultimate good, accessing the same things as util. 189 Evaluating the deontological aspects of a policy is critical to policy making.............................................................190 Deontology key to giving human life value................................................................................................................ 191 Deontology does not dismiss consequences, categorical imperative means deont still maximizes happiness........191 Callahan embraces reason and says it must be used in combination with a moral obligation to make decisions....192 Policy makers cannot depend solely on economics, but need to apply ethics to make efficient policies..................193 Deontology is essential for the maintenance of international human rights because it restricts the practice of justifying the actions of the government by the ends achieved, creating what is essentially a humane international order......................................................................................................................................................................... 194 Certain premises have an intrinsic moral value that comes before consequences of actions. Evaluating consequences first puts our fate and the fate of the masses in the hands of............................................................194 Recognizing rights and putting them before a utilitarian calculus is the only rational and.........................................195

Page 9 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Deontological principles of rights should be considered first other interpretations are assigned no moral value if conflicting with the principles of rights because viewing the debate from a deontological perspective is the only way to guarantee freedom................................................................................................................................................ 197 By guiding social choice, deontology ultimately achieves the same result as utilitarianism without compromising the individual................................................................................................................................................................... 197 An action taken to maximize utility by a powerful entity like the government is illegitimate and immoral. Deontological moral law guides the individual to realize obligations he has to society and will ultimately solve for societys problems .................................................................................................................................................................................. 198 The utility of a society only has value when its individuals are treated with dignity. A free society that sacrifices some of its own individuals to prevent human extinction is morally corrupt........................................................................198 Maintaining proper moral values is the only way to obtain a free society, which outweighs nuclear extinction.........199 Living without freedom transcends nuclear war ....................................................................................................... 199 A deontological framing maximizes the good by emphasizing rights and acting on an individualist basis................200 Both utilitarians and non-utilitarians respect the moral principle of equality and freedom. However, only deontology can meet this principle because it allows for individual decisions.............................................................................200 Deontology morality maximizes good to its fullest extent while utilitarianism is indifferent to distribution of good . . .201 Evaluating morality through rights and justice is intrinsically good while utilitarianism denies humans of their basic rights......................................................................................................................................................................... 201 Deontological morality promotes individualism, protecting humans from utilitarian obligations to society................202 Humans should morally have a right to themselves and the right to their property the government is immoral to deny property rights regardless of their utilitarian intentions.....................................................................................203
*****MORALITY GOOD / BAD*****...........................................................204 **Morality Good: Obligations, Moral Laws, etc**.......................................204

Moral justice vital sets us apart from animalistic tendencies..................................................................................204 Moral law outweighs other considerations integral to human nature......................................................................204 Moral rationality key to sustainable decisionmaking avoids animalistic tendencies...............................................205 Utilitarianism fails to take into account prima facie rights moral resolution of conflicts necessary..........................205 Failure to satisfy moral obligations leads to violent backlash....................................................................................205
**Morality Bad**.........................................................................................207

Ethics is structurally flawed, in that it implies a transgression...................................................................................207 The ideology of good and evil is inherently flawed.................................................................................................. 207 The real drive behind ethics is desire, not the will to do good.................................................................................208 Morality is a demand for the impossible as it is based on our desires......................................................................208 Ethics is merely a tool by which personal morals are imposed on others, which is the root of discontent in society 209 It is impossible to determine whether an action is truly ethical or not........................................................................209 Ethics in terms of attempts to do something good only re-entrenches the presence of the omnipresent evil..........209 People already realize they have a moral obligation but dont actually follow them or treat them as anything but another obligation..................................................................................................................................................... 210 Ethics fails to take into account human nature and therefore does not allow the individual to embrace oneself. Instead, it forces a model that is not grounded in humanity and actually alienates human life.................................210 Philosophers provided ethics as a rational foundation for thought and moral responsibility but never really quested or compared them, only when questioned can they actually be considered.................................................................211 Ethics is a faade, a back bone by which western philosophers could bounce contrived ideas, ethics as a whole must be questioned to critique the culture that creates it instead of the inconsequential rationalizations.................212 Morality is complex Blanket claims that we need to save people in poverty prevent us from making rational choices .................................................................................................................................................................................. 212
**Ethical Action & Legality Mutually Exclusive**.......................................214

Ethical action cant be based on the legal and illegal................................................................................................ 214 Ethical action and legality cannot be related............................................................................................................. 214
**State Ethics Bad**..................................................................................216

A Government that drops political obligation in order to obtain correct moral or ethical responsibility has the ability to totalize into a destructive regime that strips human dignity (turn).......................................................................216 Ethico-politics gives governments the logocentric nature that leads to the worst atrocities in humanity such as the Holocaust (turn)........................................................................................................................................................ 217 Whenever ethics is reinforced through ideals and norms chosen by the state it results in a world where people are desensitized. Any universally imposed ethics will result in the destruction of man as people gain the conscience of a machine. (turn).......................................................................................................................................................... 218 The affirmative cant reach out to the other when mandated by the state to do so, your evidence is perverted on this, using the state allows authoritative action against the other.....................................................................................219

Page 10 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The goal of ethics to the other and the ethics of the refugee actually furthers state control. Only by challenging sovereignty can we have independent ethics........................................................................................................... 219 Deconstructing universal conceptions of right and ethics actually opens up the possibility for responsibility to the other. Working within the state re-entrenches current oppressive dualisms.............................................................220 Government enforcement of responsibility takes away from the individuals ability to think and act on an individual level of morality, which is key to regaining lost sense of morality in politics..............................................................221 Government established norms of ethical and moral right and wrongs lead to the dulling conscience of the individual taking out all solvency. It also leads to accepting the shift to totalitarian regimes in the name of crises...................222 Forcing ethical views upon people through politics results in the ethics being short lived as individuals are unable to feel invested in these new ideals.............................................................................................................................. 224 State ethics violate the very idea of democratic ethics (no solvency).......................................................................224
**Universal / Absolutist Ethics Bad**.........................................................226

Universal morality is impossible because everyone has individual passions and views...........................................226 Institutional ethics results in a homogenous mindless unconscious. Only by advocating individual ethics can humans gain value for themselves......................................................................................................................................... 226 Any project that defines a universal ethical claim fosters indifference. Only by finding ethics in the absence of universal norms can ethical action take place........................................................................................................... 227 Their form of moral absolutism prioritizes clean moral hands over moral results: they are more concerned with not acting directly immoral than preventing much larger immoral consequences...........................................................228 Ignoring consequences is immoral - they sacrifice others to preserve moral purity. It is most moral to act to produce the best end regardless of the moral cleanliness of the means................................................................................229
**Aesthetic Ethics Good**.........................................................................230

Foucault proposed an aesthetical ethics in which individuals choose their ethics based on an aesthetic existence. Poster 07.................................................................................................................................................................. 230 Narcissism were the Other is supposed to discover themselves is opposed by Foucault, indicating that we should live aesthetically instead and draws a line between this narcissistic enlightenment and aesthetic values Poster 07.................................................................................................................................................................. 230 Aesthetic judgments, or judgments free of bias and societal opinion, are the best alternatives to judging morals and ethics without placing our own vanity and egos as the hidden priority......................................................................231 By placing our own individual art and judgment before the worlds ethics we have the ability to question the institutionalized ethics that leads our lives and form our own idea of ethics by the superior imperatives...............233
**AT: Kants Categorical Imperative**.......................................................236

Institutionalized ethics, such as the Kants Categorical Imperative, places regulations of what is right and what is thought to be wrong without explanation or freedom to assume an alternative pathway by the individual.............236 Kants categorical imperative results in duty being impersonal. This results in a society where we work simply out of necessity and no person choice resulting in the destruction of ourselves like the German writer Heinreich von Kleis .................................................................................................................................................................................. 237 Kants categorical imperative creates a world where people are impersonal to the notion of duty. A nation following this categorical imperative of impersonal duty will assure its destruction as it makes a nation of conscience lacking machines.................................................................................................................................................................. 238 The categorical imperative destroys any individualism and promote sovereignty by claiming in the name of selfpreservation we must embrace a universal ethics.................................................................................................... 239
*****BIOPOWER*****................................................................................241 **Link: State Ethics**.................................................................................241

The affirmatives attempt to secure society allows for the government to rule a state of exception on behalf of Humanitarian Imperatives. It allows the sovereigns biopower to go global...............................................................241 The modern humanitarian movement is rendered in biopolitical terms and actually works to extend the states biopolitical control to a global scale........................................................................................................................... 242 The States attempt to be ethical is just a cover to increase biopolitical control over the population. Humanitarian intervention is meant to justify state sponsored security and control over life...........................................................243 The idea of human rights and a states obligation to protect things like hunger is just the moving of security discourse into the private life. This idea of an ethical responsibility is just the states excuse for further biopolitical control of everyday life.............................................................................................................................................................. 244 The State exploits and destroys the Other in the name of humanitarian intervention and for the sake of humanity as a whole..................................................................................................................................................................... 245 The ability of the state to apply good or bad ethical claims is the root of security discourse. In the name of ethics the affirmative gives the state increased biopolitical control........................................................................................... 246 In the name of humanitarian and ethical concerns the government intervenes even more into the person life of the people. The biopolitical order is reinforced by the idea that the state has a responsibility to its people and therefore has a right to control it............................................................................................................................................... 248

Page 11 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Link: Ethics**..........................................................................................250

Foundationalism is a moral stance that leads towards a homogenous biopolitical structure....................................250 Attempts to coercively generalize ethical stances results in reinforcing the already hierarchal and dominating system of the state, this coercively brings people into the states control and is biopolitical.................................................250
*****GOVERNMENT PROVISION*****.....................................................252 **Rimal**....................................................................................................252

Authoritarianism and constraints are key to avoid overpopulation and resource crunch that will end life.................252 Constitutional liberties encourage an unsustainable relationship with natural resources..........................................253 Private property and liberty encourages unsustainable resource consumption........................................................253 Welfare is key to avoid the resource crunch that will end all life...............................................................................254 Tyranny is inevitable its only a question of how quickly we allow it to form............................................................254 Frontline: Mutual coercion agreed upon by the majority will check bad instances of coercion..................................255 Uniqueness: A global authoritarian revolution is coming there is a lack of political interest in the promotion of democratic freedoms................................................................................................................................................ 255 Uniqueness: Authoritarianism is spreading globally its already enmeshed in global political and economic institutions................................................................................................................................................................. 256
**AT: Privatization**..................................................................................258

Privatization Fails More Than Succeeds................................................................................................................... 258 No moral common good exists arguments that the free market will provide for those in poverty are loose predictions and are nto morally motivated................................................................................................................ 258 Privatization Raises Death Rate............................................................................................................................... 259 Individual investors will be less profitable than the government ensuring the failure of privatization........................259 Privatization Not Efficient.......................................................................................................................................... 260 Privatization Creates Disaster................................................................................................................................... 260 Corporations running the privatized economy are analogous to big governments....................................................260
*****THE USFG*****..................................................................................261 *****Courts*****..........................................................................................261 **Social Reform / Movements**................................................................261

Judicial rulings fail to spur social movements on their own.......................................................................................261 Courts cant produce social reform 3 reasons........................................................................................................ 261
**Courts Good: Generic**.........................................................................262

Judicial supremacy key to maintaining constitutional unity and rights of minorities..................................................262 Not adhering to precedent kills Court legitimacy....................................................................................................... 262 Undermining the Constitution causes extinction ...................................................................................................... 262
**Hollow Hope / Courts Bad**...................................................................263

The Supreme Court Prevents democracy................................................................................................................. 263 Link- Environment. The Courts were only able to help the environment once the other branches had acted...........263 Controversial Supreme Court decisions spur confusion, accomplishing nothing......................................................263 The Supreme Court undermines minority rights movements causing tension in American communities and dependence on flawed legislation............................................................................................................................. 264 Litigation distracts time and money from successful grassroots movements............................................................264 Courts merely join movements- they dont produce social change...........................................................................265 Court rhetoric prevents the mobilization of the public, short circuiting personal autonomy. .....................................265 Civic Engagement is key to democracy.................................................................................................................... 266
**AT: Hollow Hope / Courts Good**..........................................................267

Civil obedience follows legislation- social change is a product of congressional law................................................267 Lawsuits can facilitate social movements................................................................................................................. 267 Court decision can be transformativeits proven by the fact that Brown affected far more than just public schools .................................................................................................................................................................................. 268 Court decisions are insufficient in changing public opinion.......................................................................................268 Judicial victories do not have a catalytic effect......................................................................................................... 268 Courts mobilize social change wage discrimination rulings prove.........................................................................269 Symbolic legal support to rights claims advance social movement...........................................................................269 Even losses in the Courts lay the groundwork for political success..........................................................................270 Social success requires a shift in ideology that the Courts and individuals must achieve together..........................271 Rosenbergs hollow hope analysis is flawed, court decisions polarize citizenry in exceptional ways. .....................271 Judges are seen by the public as essential to social change....................................................................................272 Courts cant solve broader womens rights even precedent setting decisions fail because courts lack the essential tools to solve for alt. causalities ............................................................................................................................... 272 Rosenberg is wrong bad theory and no reason why congress and the executive do provide change ..................272

Page 12 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Perm on the counterplan solves the DA to be effective, the court must work with other branches of government .................................................................................................................................................................................. 273 Courts solve social change massive swings in public opinion dont matter, minor changes in assumptions overtime build up and influence actors.................................................................................................................................... 273 Social change doesnt need to be seen, court decisions simply need to challenge current assumptions to provide for change elsewhere..................................................................................................................................................... 274 The Hollow Hope theory is wrong Rosenberg misrepresents the efficacy of the lower courts in court decision enforcement.............................................................................................................................................................. 274 Rosenberg fails to take into account problems with implementation at the Congressional level...............................274 Courts are important the Hollow Hope fails to take into account that the judiciary works with and results in the action of other branches of government to enforce decisions...................................................................................275 Rosenberg asks too much of court decisions he implies there is intent where there isnt justices rely on enforcement at the local level................................................................................................................................... 275 In cases of lost hope, the court didnt actually act on the social change- hollow hope is a myth..............................277 Rosenberg and followers exaggerate the power the court has to lose hope.............................................................277 Turn: Court action encourages further litigation and strategy- Brown proves...........................................................278 Social movements will continue even if they dont win- resources, need to fight opposition ....................................279
*****Congress*****.....................................................................................280 **Social Reform / Movements**................................................................280

Congress is the most effective agent for solving societal problems..........................................................................280

**Centralization / Government Bad**........................................................281

The affirmatives acceptance of centralization prevents social movements by discouraging individual actionthe result is extinction Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Peace Through Social Empowerment, "Primary Causes," http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp14.html) ......................281 Voting negative challenges the inevitability of centralization and opens up local communities for action.................281 Decentralization Solvency - Seeking institutional solutions while failing to question the assumptions that underlie such institutions will inevitably fail ............................................................................................................................ 281 No net benefitthere is only a risk the CP alone solves best. .................................................................................................................................................................................. 282 Centralization and individualism are zero-sumthe growing power of centralized power necessarily decreases the significance of individuals ........................................................................................................................................ 282 The centralization of power in the center of an organization inevitably trades off with the individual........................283 Perm fails- power cannot reside in two places at once............................................................................................. 283 The perm cannot solve. The endorsement of a mass movement, no matter how well meant, will inevitably lead to a loss of individual power............................................................................................................................................. 283 Centralized power inevitably trades off with the local................................................................................................284 Central government action discourages individual movements to solve the problem because they posit problems as out of our control..................................................................................................................................................... 284 The government is the root cause of problems......................................................................................................... 285 Decentralization solves democracy and poverty....................................................................................................... 285 The government is the root cause of environmental destruction, wars, and economic upheavals............................285 The centralization of power inevitably leads to global destruction............................................................................286 Individual engagement in democracy is key to preventing a collapse.......................................................................286 Decentralized government is key to development of democracy..............................................................................287 Localization is a pre-requisite to solving democracy ................................................................................................287 Localized efforts are key to solve war and democracy .............................................................................................287 Decentralization promotes democracy ..................................................................................................................... 288 Decentralization promotes democracy ..................................................................................................................... 288 Inefficiencies of the federal government are inevitable this is an inherent characteristic in federal enterprise tradition resulting in corruption and misallocation .................................................................................................................. 290 Healthcare is the epitome of overcentralization. It's current practice denies the power of local communities, whilst sacrificing quality healthcare for profits. ................................................................................................................... 290 The concentration of power makes populism inevitableall social movements will regress to ineffectiveness because of their demands for universality ................................................................................................................ 292 Decentralization of power is key to solving the population crisis. .............................................................................293 We can't provide a blueprint for the world of the alternative. Doing so would only further the domination of centralized power. ...................................................................................................................................................................... 293 Their evidence is biased- the media will use it's control of information to maintain its hold on power ......................294

Page 13 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Centralization is being broken down in the status quo-technology allows individuals to reach large audiences .....294
**Centralization Good / States Bad**........................................................295

Furthering the neoliberal agenda justifies genocide and extinction...........................................................................295 Federal devolution to the states exacerbates neoliberalism.....................................................................................295 Devolutionary policies can lead to a full blown neoliberal shift..................................................................................295 Policies passed to the state reinforce neoliberal ideologies......................................................................................296 Devolution to the states reinforces low-income disparities .......................................................................................296 Devolution to the states destroys political influence for the low-income....................................................................296 Passing jurisdiction to the states increases governmental control over individuals..................................................297 Devolutionary policies increase the stigmatization placed on the poor.....................................................................297 Devolutionary policies inherently bring destabilization and kills solvency.................................................................297 State policies are inefficient implementation differences........................................................................................ 298 Devolution inherently makes policies less equal ...................................................................................................... 298 Enforcing neoliberalism causes endless wars.......................................................................................................... 299 Neoliberalism makes poverty inevitable.................................................................................................................... 299 Even single policies risk a huge ideological shift empirically proven......................................................................300
**Separation of Powers**..........................................................................302

Collapse of constitutional balance of power risks tyranny and reckless warmongering............................................302 Lack of separation of powers causes nuclear war.................................................................................................... 302

*****LIBERTY***** **Autonomy Good / Coercion Bad**

Human dignity is the highest standard

George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 19 92, p. 9

In sum, there seems to be no generally credible foundation for a critique of rights. Rights emerge as the only or best way of protecting human dignity, and human dignity remains the highest standard. This is not to deny that there will be strenuous differences of interpretation of various rights and quarrels over the comparative importance of various rights. But by now even some antiindividualists, whether secular or religious, accept the idea of rights as useful or even as an indispensable ingredient in their own thinking about politics and society. Moral obligation to protect liberty Edward Crane, President of the Cato Institute, VITAL SPEECHES OF THE DAY, September 15-17, 1996, p. 597 Those are words that we need to hear more of. It's true, freedom and morality do, ultimately, depend on each other for their existence. But as government grows year in and year out, under Democratic and Republican administrations, as regulations multiply, politically correct public education expands, and our tax burden gets ever greater, I can't help but think the reservoir of morality in America is much deeper than our reservoir of political liberty. The crisis we confront is a political crisis - one that merits our immediate attention. We have, it seems to me, a moral imperative to challenge the political status quo and to roll back the 20th century's legacy of statism. It is our heritage as Americans to live in a civil society - not a society that is increasingly politicized. If we want a more moral society, then, as Barry Goldwater said, liberty must be our main interest. Thank you.

Freedom comes before all other impacts Sylvester Petro, professor of law at Wake Forest, Spring 1974, Toledo Law Review, p480
However, one may still insist on echoing Ernest Hemingway I believe in only one thing: liberty. And it is always well to bear in mind David Humes observation: It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Thus, it is unacceptable to say that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of no import because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That road leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration. Ask Solzhenstyn, Ask Milovan Djilas. In sum, if one believes in freedom as a supreme value and proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically

Page 14 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

identified and resisted with undying spirit.

Coercion outweighs, conditions like poverty are inevitable, its futile to try to solve. Kelley, founder and senior fellow of the Atlas Society, 98
(David Kelley, founder and senior fellow of the Atlas Society, 1998, A life of one's own, p68-69)

there is not always a hard and fast distinction between the number of alternatives one has and the degree of ones freedom to choose among them. Theoretically, any obstacle, restraint, or limitation may be looked at in either of two ways: we may view it (1) as something that eliminates one or more alternatives a person would otherwise have available or (2) something that prevents the person from choosing one or more alternatives. The difference lies in whether we consider the limitation as affecting the range of alternatives he has or the process of choosing among them. Advocates of positive freedom have exploited this fact, insisting that lack of a certain opportunity because of poverty, illness, or disability deprives a person of the freedom to choose that opportunity. Conversely, we could in principle view overt coercion, physical force, or violence, not as something that prevents a person from choosing an alternative but as something that removes alternatives he would otherwise have. There are real differences between (1) and (2). One difference is whether the obstacle or limitation is imposed by reality or by other people. When some fact of reality affects the range of alternatives we face, it is wishful thinking to regard it as an obstacle to what we would otherwise be free to do. Facts are facts. The world operates a certain way, according to causal laws, and the constraints imposed by nature are the foundation for human choice, not a barrier to it. A farmer plants a field and tends it over the growing season, but a
To be sure, hailstorm destroys the crop before he can harvest it. It would be bizarre to say that the hailstorm abridged his freedom to reap what he has sown. As a natural event, the hailstorm is a misfortune that eliminates the possibility of a harvest. By contrast, if a government price-support regulation forbids the farmer to harvest the crop, the restraint arises from human action and does abridge his freedom to what he otherwise could.

Compulsory violate rights Ayn Rand, 1964, Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter, author of numerous books
including Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The Virtue of Selfishness pg 129
-=Max Rispoli=-

A single question added to each of the above eight clauses would make the issue clear: At whose expense? Jobs, food, clothing, recreation (I), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide them? If some men are entitled by right to the products of the

work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. Any alleged "right" of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as "the right to enslave. A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one's own effort. Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision
of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the Pursuit of happinessnot of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

Coercion is immoral denies individuals the capacity develop as moral agents. Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 37-8
More hopeful is the strategy, pursued by a large number of libertarian philosophers, of appealing to a broadly

Page 15 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Aristotelian account of morality (Mack 1981; Machan 1989; Rasmussen and Den Uyl 1991; Smith 1995).

the fundamental moral question is not What is the right thing to do? but rather What traits of character should I develop? Only when one has determined what traits these are -- that is, what habitual patterns of
On Aristotles view, action count as virtues can one go on to answer the subordinate question of how one ought to act in a particular case (the answer being that one should act the way someone possessing the virtue relevant to that situation would act).

What count as the virtues, in turn, are just those qualities most conducive to enabling human beings to fulfill the potentials which distinguish them as the unique sorts of beings they are those qualities, that is, which best allow human beings to flourish given their distinctive human nature. Given that human beings are by nature rational animals, we can flourish only if we practice those virtues governing practical and theoretical reason . It follows that we
have reason to acquire intellectual virtues like truthfulness and practical virtues such as temperance and courage, and to avoid such corresponding vices as licentiousness and cowardice. Given that human beings are also by nature social animals, we can only flourish if we practice also those virtues governing interaction with other human beings, so that we have reason to acquire such social virtues as honesty and loyalty. Though the moral life will involve

decision-making about what to do in a particular concrete situation, then, it involves more basically the gradual development of a good character by the taking on of the virtues and the weeding out of vices it essentially involves, that is, a process of self-perfection. Only a person who voluntarily decides to do so can carry out this process ,
however virtue must be freely chosen if it is truly to count as virtue. Moreover, the specific requirements of virtuous behavior depend to a considerable extent on the unique circumstances of the situation and the individual person involved, circumstances knowable only to that person himself in the concrete contexts of moral decision- making. The

moral life, then, is only fully possible under conditions wherein the individual is capable of self-direction (in Rasmussen and Den Uyls terms), the absence of coercion and interference from outside forces . Allowing others such self-direction is
necessary too if the individual is to allow those others also to develop the virtues; and in general, respecting others autonomy is essential if one is successfully to cooperate with them as fellow citizens, and thus fulfill ones own nature as a social being. Given the centrality of self-direction to self- perfection, then, respect for the rights of self-ownership

turns out to be required for the successful pursuit of the moral life.
Evaluate freedom first it is critical to both prosperity and fairness
Richard L. Stroup (professor of economics at Montana State University) 1987: REFLECTIONS ON FREEDOM, FAIRNESS, AND THE CONSTITUTION Freedom (with accountability) is the key to both prosperity and to any reasonable and realistic conception of fairness. Only with entrepreneurial freedom will the innovation required to increase prosperity occur. And only through freedom and prosperity can fairness in the sense of benefits accruing to those with low incomes, as well as fair treatment under the lawbe maintained. Both freedom and prosperity are incompatible with extensive regulatory or tax/transfer powers in the hands of government. This paper argues that freedom, fairness, and prosperity are unalterably linked and require strong constitutional constraints on government. A powerful case can be made for small, secure, but constrained and competing governments ofthe sort a federal system suggests. As James Buchanans work indicates, in todays world Hobbesian anarchy is not likely to yield freedom, economic growth and prosperity, or fairness. In this world, I believe we do need government. Restraints on government, however, are the key to freedom and fairness. Few would dispute the need for restraints to maintain freedom, but the restraints on government are necessary for fairness as well. Why? Individuals are not equally endowed with effectiveness in market earnings, nor in the market for political influence. There will be elites in any system, and those who are not members of the elite are far better offwhen the influence of elites is diffused, as in a free society with constrained governmentwith freedom of entry and exit, operating under the rule ofwilling consent. Thus a government with the power to prevent arbitrary abuse of some people by others, but with sharply limited power to coerce others directly and in detail, is likely to provide maximum freedom,and hence maximum prosperity and fairness as well.

Freedom outweighs without freedom, we are all reduced to the level of animals and slaves only freedom from government oppression solves Ludwig von Mises (Austrian Economist and Philosopher) 1960: The Economic Foundations of Freedom.
http://mises.org/efandi/ch1.asp Animals are driven by instinctive urges. They yield to the impulse which prevails at the moment and peremptorily asks for satisfaction. They are the puppets of their appetites. Man's eminence is to be seen in the fact that he chooses

Page 16 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

between alternatives. He regulates his behavior deliberatively. He can master his impulses and desires; he has the power to suppress wishes the satisfaction of which would force him to renounce the attainment of more important goals. In short: man acts; he purposively aims at ends chosen. This is what we have in mind in stating that man is a moral person, responsible for his conduct. Freedom as a Postulate of Morality All the teachings and precepts of ethics, whether based upon a religious creed or whether based upon a secular doctrine like that of the Stoic philosophers, presuppose this moral autonomy of the individual and therefore appeal to the individual's conscience. They presuppose that the individual is free to choose among various modes of conduct and require him to behave in compliance with definite rules, the rules of morality. Do the right things, shun the bad things. It is obvious that the exhortations and admonishments of morality make sense only when addressing individuals who are free agents. They are vain when directed to slaves. It is useless to tell a bondsman what is morally good and what is morally bad. He is not free to determine his comportment; he is forced to obey the orders of his master. It is difficult to blame him if he prefers yielding to the commands of his master to the most cruel punishment threatening not only him but also the members of his family. This is why freedom is not only a political postulate, but no less a postulate of every religious or secular morality. The Struggle for Freedom Yet for thousands of years a considerable part
of mankind was either entirely or at least in many regards deprived of the faculty to choose between what is right and what is wrong. In the status society of days gone by the freedom to act according to their own choice was, for the lower strata of society, the great majority of the population, seriously restricted by a rigid system of controls. An outspoken formulation of this principle was the statute of the Holy Roman Empire that conferred upon the princes and counts of the Reich (Empire) the power and the right to determine the religious allegiance of their subjects. The Orientals meekly acquiesced in this state of affairs. But the Christian peoples of Europe and their scions that settled in overseas territories never tired in their struggle for liberty. Step by step they abolished all status and caste privileges and disabilities until they finally succeeded in establishing the system that the harbingers of totalitarianism try to smear by calling it the bourgeois system. The Supremacy of the Consumers The economic foundation of this bourgeois system is the market economy in which the consumer is sovereign. The consumer, i.e., everybody, determines by his buying or abstention from buying what should be produced, in what quantity and of what quality. The businessmen are forced by the instrumentality of profit and loss to obey the orders of the consumers, Only those enterprises can flourish that supply in the best possible and cheapest way those commodities and services which the buyers are most anxious to acquire. Those who fail to satisfy the public suffer losses and are finally forced to go out of business. In the precapitalistic ages the rich were the owners of large landed estates. They or their ancestors had acquired their property as gifts?feuds or fiefs?from the sovereign who?with their aid?had conquered the country and subjugated its inhabitants. These aristocratic landowners were real lords as they did not depend on the patronage of buyers. But the rich of a capitalistic industrial society are subject to the supremacy of the market. They acquire their wealth by serving the consumers better than other people do and they forfeit their wealth when other people satisfy the wishes of the consumers better or cheaper than they do. In the free market economy the owners of capital are forced to invest it in those lines in which it best serves the public. Thus ownership of capital goods is continually shifted into the hands of those who have best succeeded in serving the consumers. In the market economy private property is in this sense a public service imposing upon the owners the responsibility of employing it in the best interests of the sovereign consumers. This is what economists mean when they call the market economy a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. The Political Aspects of Freedom Representative government is the political corollary of the market economy. The same spiritual movement that created modern capitalism substituted elected officeholders for the authoritarian rule of absolute kings and hereditary aristocracies. It was this much-decried bourgeois liberalism that brought freedom of conscience, of thought, of speech, and of the press and put an end to the intolerant persecution of dissenters. A free country is one in which every

citizen is free to fashion his life according to his own plans. He is free to compete on the market for the most desirable jobs and on the political scene for the highest offices. He does not depend more on other people's favor than these others depend on his favor. If he wants to succeed on the market, he has to satisfy the consumers; if he wants to succeed in public affairs he has to satisfy the voters. This system has brought to the capitalistic countries of Western Europe, America,
and Australia an unprecedented increase in population figures and the highest standard of living ever known in history. The much talked-about common man has at his disposal amenities of which the richest men in precapitalistic ages did not even dream. He is in a position to enjoy the spiritual and intellectual achievements of science, poetry, and art that in earlier days were accessible only to a small elite of well-to-do people. And he is free to worship as his conscience tells him.

Coercion restricts rights and destroys individual agency. Blake, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, 01
(Michael Blake, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, Summer 2001, Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Summer, 2001), pp. 257-296, JSTOR)

People can be denied their autonomy by being starved, deeply impoverished, or subjected to oppressive and marginalizing norms, but they can also face a denial of autonomy that results from outright coercion. I will refrain from offering a complete theory of coercion in the present context;'4 I will only note that, as I have insisted upon throughout this exercise, whether an individual faces a denial of autonomy resulting from coercion cannot be read off simply from the number of options open to her. Coercion is not simply a matter of what options are available; it has to do with the reasons the set of options is as constrained as it is. Coercion is an intentional action, designed to replace the chosen option with the choice of another. Coercion, we might therefore say, expresses a relationship of domination, violating the autonomy of the individual by replacing that indi- vidual's chosen plans and pursuits
There is much more to be said in the above context, but I want now to turn to the issue of coercion.

Page 17 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

with those of another. Let us say, therefore, that coercive proposals violate the autonomy of those against whom they are employed; they act so as to replace our own agency with the agency of another. Coercion snowballsEvery increase in the states power brings us closer to tyranny Browne, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, 95 (Harry Browne, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, 1995, Why Government Doesn't Work, p.65-66) Each increase in coercion is easier to justify . If its right to force banks to report your
finances to the government, then its right to force you to justify the cash in your pocket at the airport. If its right to take property from the rich and give it to the poor, then its right to take your property for the salt marsh harvest mouse. As each government program fails, it

becomes necessary to move another step closer to complete control over our lives. As one thing leads to another as coercion leads to more coercion what can we
look forward to? Will it become necessary to force you to justify everything you do to any government agent who thinks you might be a threat to society? Will it become necessary to force your children to report your personal habits to their teachers or the police? Will it become necessary to force your neighbors to monitor your activities? Will it become necessary to force you to attend a reeducation program to learn how to be more sensitive, or how not to discriminate, or how to avoid being lured into taking drugs, or how to recognize suspicious behavior? Will it become necessary to prohibit some of your favorite foods and ban other pleasures, so you dont fall ill or have an accident putting a burden on Americas healthcare system? Some of these things such as getting children to snitch on their parents or ordering people into reeducation programs are already happening in America. The others have been proposed and are being considered seriously. History has shown that each was an important step in the evolution of the worlds worst tyrannies. We move step by step

further along the road to oppression because each step seems like such a small one. And because were told that each step will give us something alluring in return less crime, cheaper health care, safety from terrorists, an end to discrimination even if none of the previous steps delivered on its promise. And because the people who promote these steps are well-meaning reformers who would use force only to build a better world. There is no value to life in their framework coercion makes us into mere tools of the state. Hayek, Nobel Prize winner for Economics, 60
(F.A. Hayek, Nobel Prize winner for Economics, 1960, The Constitution of Liberty, p.20)

By coercion we mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another . Except in the sense of choosing the lesser evil in a situation forced on him by another, he is unable either to use his own intelligence or knowledge or to follow his own aims and beliefs . Coercion is evil precisely because it thus eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another. Free action, in which a person pursues his own aims by the
means indicated by his own knowledge, must be based on data which cannot be shaped at will by another. It presupposes the existence of a known sphere in which the circumstances cannot

Page 18 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

be so shaped by another person as to leave one only that choice prescribed by the other.

Utilitarianism doesnt trump the impact of coercionindividuals cant be reduced to units of value.
Machan, 95 Professor of philosophy, Auburn University, 1995 ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 129) (Tibor, PRIVATE RIGHTS AND PUBLIC

The essential point to note at this juncture is how the idea of the worth and rights of the individual simply cannot find a place in the standard utilitarian cost-benefit analysis favored by many economists. Benefits, according to this approach, are to be measured by what people prefer (or would prefer, if properly informed), while costs are reducible to what people would prefer to do without or avoid if they were properly informed. The kind of value (or worth) individuals have, however, is not just one benefit competing among other benefits...Consider the case where some people are injured or harmed by others. "Since the costs of injury are borne by its victims," Kelman contends, "while its benefits are escaped by its perpetrators, simple cost-benefit calculations may be less important than more abstract conceptions of justice, fairness, and human dignity. Developing this theme more fully, Kelman writes as follows: We would not condone a rape even if it could be demonstrated that the rapist derived enormous pleasure from his actions, while the victim suffered in only small ways. Behind the conception of "rights" is the notion that some concept of justice, fairness or human dignity demands that individuals ought to be able to perform certain acts, despite the harm of others, and ought to be protected against certain acts, despite the loss this causes to the would-be perpetrator. Thus we undertake no cost-benefit analysis of the effects of freedom of speech or trial by jury before allowing them to continue.

Every invasion of liberty must be rejected failure to do so leads to massive atrocities.

Harry Browne, former Libertarian presidential candidate, executive director of public policy at American Liberty Foundation, editor of Liberty Magazine, financial advisor and economist, 19 95, Why Government Doesnt Work)

The reformers of the Cambodian revolution claimed to be building a better world. They forced people into reeducation programs to make them better citizens . Then they used force to regulate every aspect of commercial life . Then they forced office workers and intellectuals to give up their jobs and harvest rice, to round out their education. When people resisted having their lives turned upside down, the reformers had to use more and more force. By the time they were done , they had killed a third of the countrys population , destroyed the lives of almost everyone still alive, and devastated a nation . It all began with using force for the best of intentions to create a better world. The Soviet leaders used coercion to provide economic security and to build a New Man a human being who would put his fellow man ahead of himself. At least 10 million people died to help build the New Man and the Workers Paradise.37 But human nature never changed and the workers lives were always Hell, not Paradise. In the 1930s many Germans gladly traded civil liberties for the economic revival and national pride Adolf Hitler promised them. But like every other grand dream to improve society by force, it ended in a nightmare of devastation and death.
Professor R. J. Rummel has calculated that 119 million people have been killed by their own governments in this century.38 Were these people criminals? No, they were people who simply didnt fit into the New Order people who preferred their own dreams to those of the reformers. Every time you allow government to use

force to make society better, you move another step closer to the nightmares of Cambodia, the

Page 19 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany.

Weve already moved so far that our own government can perform with impunity the outrages described in the preceding chapters. These examples arent cases of government gone wrong; they are examples of government period. They are what governments do just as chasing cats is what dogs do. They are the natural consequence of letting government use force to bring about a drug-free nation, to tax someone else to better your life, to guarantee your economic security, to assure that no one can mistreat you or hurt your feelings, and to cover up the

damage of all the failed government programs that came before. Government coercion is immoral because it kills freedom and virtue by eroding the basis of free market capitalism Doug Bandow (Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan) March 7, 1997: Freedom and Virtue are Inseparable. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6186.
For years the Left promised that socialism would eventually out-produce the market. That claim died with the Soviet Union. What remained of the Left then began to complain that capitalism generated too many material goods. Now similar attacks on capitalism are coming from the Right. The market, it is said, threatens family, human relationships, values and virtue. However, it is a mistake to treat freedom, which is the essence of capitalism, and virtue as mutually antagonistic. In fact liberty-- the right to exercise choice, free from coercive state regulation-- is a necessary precondition for virtue. And virtue is ultimately necessary for liberty to flourish. Virtue cannot exist without the freedom to make moral choices. Coerced acts of conformity with some moral norm, however good, do not represent virtue; rather, compliance with that moral norm must be voluntary. Virtue rejects a standard of intra-personal morality. As such it is an area that lies largely beyond the reach of state power. Of course societies can be more or less virtuous. But blaming moral shifts on legal changes mistakes correlation for causation. America's one-time cultural consensus eroded during an era of strict laws. Only cracks in this consensus, which provided the moral foundation of the laws, led to statutory changes. Government has proved that it is not a good teacher of virtue. The state tends to be effective at simple tasks, like jailing people. It is far less successful in shaping individual consciences. New laws would not make America a more virtuous nation. Even if there were fewer overt acts of immorality, there would be no change in peoples hearts and thus in society's moral core. Indeed attempting to forcibly make people virtuous would make society it self less virtuous: First individuals would lose the opportunity to exercise virtue. They would not face the same set of temptations and be forced to choose between good and evil. This approach might make their lives a bit simpler. But they would not be more virtuous. In this dilemma we see the paradox of Christianity: A God of love creates man and provides a means of redemption, but allows him to choose evil. Second, to vest government with primary responsibility for promoting virtue shortchanges other institutions like the family and church, sapping their vitality. Private social institutions find it easier to lean on the power of coercion than to lead by example, attempt to persuade and solve problems. Third making government a moral enforcer encourages abuse by whatever interest groups gain power. If one thing is certain, it is that man is sinful. That sin is magnified by coercive power. Those who possess power can of course, do good, but history suggests that they are far more likely to do harm. Indeed, as Americas traditional Judeo-Christian consensus crumbles we a more likely to see government promoting alternative moral views. This is possible only if the state is given the authority to coercively mold souls in the name of the community or family. Despite the best intentions of advocates of statecraft as soulcraft, government grows ever more likely to enshrine something other than traditional morality. The fact that government can do little to help does not mean that there is nothing it should do. Public officials should adopt as their maxim "First, do no harm." Although America's moral breakdown, most evident in the inner-city, has many causes, the welfare state has exacerbated the problem at every level, punishing marriage, work and thrift. Government has spent years attempting to expunge religious values from the public square; the public school monopoly discourages both good education and values instruction.

Page 20 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Coercion creates a slippery slope to more coercion Harry Browne, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President, Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, THE GREAT LIBERTARIAN OFFER, 2000, p. 18 Government grows, too, because the subsidy given to one group inspires others to demand the same benefits. And when government protects one company or industry from competition, others wonder why they shouldn't demand the same protection. That's why no government program ever stands still. No matter what the stated purpose or limit when implemented, it inevitably expands to cover more and more peopleand wider and wider areas. Everyone who comes to the government asking for favors has a plausible request. Once it's considered proper to use government force to solve one person's problem, force can be justified to solve anyone's problem. Over time, fewer and fewer requests seem out of bounds. And the grounds for saying "no" become more and more eroded. The pressure on politicians to use coercion to grant favors becomes overwhelming. The Motives of Public Servants But, in truth, very little pressure is needed. Lawmakers, bureaucrats, and judges all rejoice in a government that grows and grows and grows. Big government gives lawmakers the power to make or break companies and individuals. People must bow and scrape to obtain favorsor just to keep government from destroying them. Violations of liberty create a slippery slope to more governmental constraints. Tibor R. Machan, Research Fellow @ Hoover Institution, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Auburn University, 2002, Liberty and Hard Cases, p. [xvii xix] We are not unfamiliar with the hazards of the slippery slope in our own personal lives. If a man hits his child in some alleged emergency, the very act of doing so may render him more amenable to smacking the kid under more typical circumstances. Slapping someone who is hysterical may make it easier to slap someone who is only very upset or recalcitrant or annoying or just too slow fetching the beer from the refrigerator. Similarly, a minor breach of trust can beget more of the same, a little white lie here and there can beget lying as a routine, and so forth. Moral habits promote a principled course of action even in cases where bending or breaking the principle might not seem too harmful to other parties or to our own integrity. On the other hand, granting ourselves reasonable exceptions tends to weaken our moral habits; as we seek to rationalize past action, differences of kind tend to devolve into differences of degree. Each new exception provides the precedent for the next, until we lose our principles altogether and doing what is right becomes a matter of happenstance and mood rather than of loyalty to enduring values. The same is true of public action. When citizens of a country delegate to government, by means of democratic and judicial processes, the power to forge paternalistic public policies such as banning drug abuse, imposing censorship, restraining undesirable trade, and supporting desirable trade, the bureaucratic and police actions increasingly rely on the kind of violence and intrusiveness that no free citizenry ought to experience or foster. And the bureaucrats and the police tell themselves, no doubt, that what theyre doing is perfectly just and right. Consider, for starters, that when no one complains about a crimebecause it is not perpetrated against someone but rather involves breaking a paternalistic lawto even detect the crime requires methods that are usually invasive. Instead of charges being brought by wronged parties, phone tapping, snooping, anonymous reporting, and undercover work are among the dubious means that lead to prosecution. Thus the role of the police shifts from protection and peacekeeping to supervision, regimentation, and reprimand. No wonder, then, that officers of the law are often caught brutalizing suspects instead of merely apprehending them. Under a paternalistic regime, their goals have multiplied, and thus the means they see as necessary to achieving those goals multiply too. The same general danger of corrupting a free societys system of laws may arise when government is called on to deal with calamities. There is the perception, of course, that in such circumstances the superior powers of government are indispensable, given the immediateness of the danger. The immediate benefitsa life saved by a marineare evident. Yet the dangers of extensive involvement by legal authorities in the handling of nonjudicial problems are no less evident, if less immediate in impact. Government coercion causes more violations of liberty. Hazlitt, founding board member of the Mises Institute and Journalist for The Wall Street Journal, 07 (Henry, Can the State Reduce Poverty? http://www.mises.org/story/2526) From the beginning of history, sincere reformers as well as demagogues have sought to abolish or at least to alleviate poverty through state action. In most cases their proposed remedies have only served to make the problem worse. The most frequent and popular of these proposed remedies has

Page 21 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

been the simple one of seizing from the rich to give to the poor. This remedy has taken a thousand different forms, but they all come down to this. The wealth is to be "shared," to be "redistributed," to be "equalized." In fact, in the minds of many reformers it is not poverty that is the chief evil but inequality. All schemes for redistributing or equalizing incomes or wealth must undermine or destroy incentives at both ends of the economic scale. They must reduce or abolish the incentives of the unskilled or shiftless to improve their condition by their own efforts; and even the able and industrious will see little point in earning anything beyond what they are allowed to keep. These redistribution schemes must inevitably reduce the size of the pie to be redistributed. They can only level down. Their long-run effect must be to reduce production and lead toward national impoverishment. The problem we face is that the false remedies for poverty are almost infinite in number. An attempt at a thorough refutation of any single one of them would run to disproportionate length. But some of these false remedies are so widely regarded as real cures or mitigations of poverty that if I do not refer to them I may be accused of having undertaken a book on the remedies for poverty while ignoring some of the most obvious. Government coercion destroys the value to life and cannot be morally justified

Tibor Machan, PRIVATE RIGHTS & PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 68-9.

All governmental action that does not serve to repel or retaliate against coercion is antithetical to any respect for human dignity. While it is true that some people should give to others to assist them in reaching their goals, forcing individuals to do so plainly robs them of their dignity. There is nothing morally worthwhile in forced giving. Generally, for a society to respect human dignity, the special moral relations between people should be left undisturbed. Government should confine itself to making sure that this voluntarism is not abridged, no matter how tempting it might be to use its coercive powers to attain some worthy goal. Coercion destroys value to life Joseph Raz, philosopher, THE MORALITY OF FREEDOM, 1986, p. 307 One way to test the thesis of the primacy of action reasons is to think of a person who is entirely passive and is continuously led, cleaned, and pumped full with hash, so that he is perpetually content, and wants nothing but to stay in the same condition. Its a familiar imaginary horror. How do we rank the success of such a life? It is not the worst life one can have. It is simply not a life at all. It lacks activity, it lacks goals. To the extent that one is tempted to judge it more harshly than that and to regard it as a negative life this is because of the wasted potentiality. It is a life which could have been and was not. We can isolate this feature by imagining that the human being concerned is mentally and physically effected in a way which rules out the possibility of a life with any kind of meaningful pursuit in it. Now it is just not really a life at all. This does not preclude one from saying that it is better than human life. It is simply sufficiently unlike human life in the respects that matter that we regard it as only a degenerate case of human life. But clearly not being alive can be better than that life. Coercion ensures extinction. Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law, Purdue University, Spring, 1994, ARIZONA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW, p. 23-4
This, then, is an altogether different kind of understanding. Rather than rescue humankind by freeing individuals from fear of death, this perspective recommends educating people to the truth of an incontestable relationship between death and

By surrendering ourselves to States and to traditional views of self-determination, we encourage not immortality but premature and predictable extinction. It is a relationship that can, and must, be more widely understood. There are great ironies involved. Although the corrosive calculus of geopolitics has now made possible the deliberate killing of all life, populations all over the planet turn increasingly to States for security. It is the dreadful ingenuity of States that makes possible death in the billions, but it is in the expressions of that ingenuity that people seek safety. Indeed, as the threat of nuclear annihilation looms even after the Cold War, the citizens of conflicting States reaffirm their segmented loyalties, moved by the persistent unreason that is, after all, the most indelible badge of modern
geopolitics. humankind.

Coercion is the root cause of military conflict Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, PhD, former pharmaceutical research scientist, former Assistant Professor of Surgery, HEALING OUR WORLD: THE OTHER PIECE OF THE PUZZLE, 1993, p. http://www.ruwart.com/Healing/ruwart_all.html. Humankind is poised on the brink of an evolutionary leap. In the last few decades, we have become increasingly aware of the source of our inner peace and enrichment. Depending on our personal background, we express this great discovery differently. The practical, down-to-earth individuals among

Page 22 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

us "take responsibility for our lives" as described in Wayne W. Dyer's Your Erroneous Zones. Those of us with a metaphysical outlook "create our own reality" as Shirley MacLaine did in Out on a Limb. The spiritual among us know that "the kingdom of God is within" and follow The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck). Sometimes we simply "find ourselves" through the power of love as Richard Bach did in The Bridge Across Forever. Ultimately, our inner harmony and abundance depend on how we react to our outer world. The creation of peace and plenty in our outer world, however, frequently seems hopelessly beyond our control. In the past century, we've supported widespread social reform. Nevertheless, people are still starving in a world capable of feeding all. In our own country, homelessness and poverty are on the rise. Violence is no longer limited to overseas wars: our streets, even our schools, are no longer safe. The environment that nurtures us is ravaged and raped. When we acknowledge how our reactions contribute to our inner state, we gain control. Our helplessness dissolves when we stop blaming others for feelings we create. In our outer world, the same rules apply. Today, as a society, as a nation, as a collective consciousness, "we" once again feel helpless, blaming selfish others for the world's woes. Our nation's laws, reflecting a composite of our individual beliefs, attempt to control selfish others at gunpoint, if necessary. Striving for a better world by focusing on others instead of ourselves totally misses the mark. When others resist the choices we have made for them, conflicts escalate and voraciously consume resources. A warring world is a poor one. Attempting to control others, even for their own good, has other undesirable effects. People who are able to create intimacy in their personal relationships know that you can't hurry love. Trying to control or manipulate those close to us creates resentment and anger. Attempting to control others in our city, state, nation, and world is just as destructive to the universal love we want the world to manifest. Forcing people to be more "unselfish" creates animosity instead of good will. Trying to control selfish others is a cure worse than the disease. We reap as we sow. In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and the international cartels. We are blithely unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them. Like a stone thrown in a quiet pond, our desire to control our neighbors ripples outward, affecting the political course of our community, state, nation, and world. Yet we know not what we do. We attempt to bend our neighbors to our will, sincere in our belief that we are benevolently protecting the world from their folly and shortsightedness. We seek control to create peace and prosperity, not realizing that this is the very means by which war and poverty are propagated. In fighting for our dream without awareness, we become the instruments of its destruction. If we could only see the pattern! In seeking to control others, we behave as we once did as children, exchanging our dime for five pennies, all the while believing that we were enriching ourselves. When a concerned adult tried to enlighten us, we first refused to believe the truth. Once awareness dawned, we could no longer be fooled, nor was laborious deliberation necessary for every transaction. Once we understood how to count money, we automatically knew if we benefited from such a trade. Similarly, when the fact and folly of controlling others first come to our attention, we're surprised and full of denial. I certainly was! When we care about the state of our world, however, we don't stop there. I trust you are concerned enough to persevere and to consider seriously the shift in consciousness this book proposes. Once we have the courage to accept responsibility for our part of the problem, we automatically become part of the solution, independent of what others do. We honor their non-aggressive choices (even if they are self-ish) and stop trying to control them. In doing so, we dismantle their most effective means of controlling us. Others only ignite the flames of war and poverty. We feed the flames or starve them. Not understanding their nature, we've fanned the sparks instead of smothering them. Not understanding our contribution to the raging inferno, we despair that a world full of selfish others could ever experience universal har-mony and abundance. Nothing could be further from the truth! Widespread peace and plenty can be created within our lifetime. When we understand how to stop fueling the flames of war and poverty, we can manifest our dream.

Coercion causes tyranny. Tibor Machan, philosophy professor, Auburn, PRIVATE RIGHTS AND PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 19 95, p. 86-7
As Bondy notes, in totalitarian states, where the government controls the printing presses and publishing organizations, anyone wishing to state a personal opinion must gain official sanction. (Even under Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reformsbegun in 1987, prior to the breakup of the Soviet statethe openness and restructuring involved were permitted or instituted by government, rather than being understood as a basic human right that limits the scope and power of the government. Consider also that General Augusto Pinochet's Chile had had a relatively "free"

Page 23 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

marketthat is, a government policy of abstention from heavy-handed economic regulation. Yet its critics will quite rightly refuse to regard it as having been a free country. Moreover in countries where broadcasting is government administered, there is no right to telecast one's views or ideas on the airways, only a permission to do so if it suits the state authorities. In contrast, if the right to property is respected, individuals do not have to seek political permission to act, even if they still must earn the opportunity to do so via the free marketplace and in face of natural obstacles. The right to property is the right to work for, acquire, and hold goods and valuables; it includes the rights of production, trade, and bequest, as well as the right to undertake innumerable actions vis-a-vis the world of ownable items not even conceived of yet. The right to pursue happiness or individual excellence in life, then, requires full support of the right to property. Private property rights are neither favored nor legally protected in our era and have not been for a long time. Both cultural and legal developments in the last one hundred years have undermined the protection of property rights The state often acts in a paternalistic fashion toward the citizen's ownership and management of property. It is increasingly willing to usurp mutually agreed-upon contracts. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, the history of the United States demonstrates that the significant protection of private property rights, despite much compromise and confusion, has a propensity to increase the productivity as well as the self-responsibility of the members of a human community. It contributes to their self-perception as moral agents who cannot expect others to live for them and it fosters their concern for and development toward doing reasonably well in their lives. In short, the right to private property is a required feature of a human community that enhances human flourishing. Global democratic consolidation is necessary to prevent many scenarios for war and extinction Larry Diamond, Hoover Institution senior fellow, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, December 1995, A Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives, http://wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built. Each use of coercive force paves the road for massive atrocities Harry Browne, former Libertarian presidential candidate, executive director of public policy at American Liberty Foundation, editor of Liberty Magazine, financial advisor and economist, WHY GOVERNMENT DOESNT WORK, 1995, p. 66-7. The reformers of the Cambodian revolution claimed to be building a better world. They forced people into reeducation programs to make them better citizens. Then they used force to regulate every aspect

Page 24 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

of commercial life. Then they forced office workers and intellectuals to give up their jobs and harvest rice, to round out their education. When people resisted having their lives turned upside down, the reformers had to use more and more force. By the time they were done, they had killed a third of the countrys population, destroyed the lives of almost everyone still alive, and devastated a nation. It all began with using force for the best of intentionsto create a better world. The Soviet leaders used coercion to provide economic security and to build a New Mana human being who would put his fellow man ahead of himself. At least 10 million people died to help build the New Man and the Workers Paradise. But human nature never changedand the workers lives were always Hell, not Paradise. In the 1930s many Germans gladly traded civil liberties for the economic revival and national pride Adolf Hitler promised them. But like every other grand dream to improve society by force, it ended in a nightmare of devastation and death. Professor R.J. Rummel has calculated that 119 million people have been killed by their own governments in this century. Were these people criminals? No, they were people who simply didnt fit into the New Orderpeople who preferred their own dreams to those of the reformers. Every time you allow government to use force to make society better, you move another step closer to the nightmares of Cambodia, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. Weve already moved so far that our own government can perform with impunity the outrages described in the preceding chapters. These examples arent cases of government gone wrong; they are examples of government period. They are what governments dojust as chasing cats is what dogs do. Government coercion creates evil Mann 03. Frederick Mann, entrepreneur, author of The Economic Rape of America, and founder of the Free World Order. Why you must recognize and understand Coercion, p1. 2003. http://www.buildfreedom.com/power/powerx/1.html "Lao Tzu believed that when people do not have a sense of power they become resentful and uncooperative. Individuals who do not feel personal power feel fear. They fear the unknown because they do not identify with the world outside of themselves; thus their psychic integration is severely damaged and they are a danger to their society. Tyrants do not feel power, they feel frustration and impotency. They wield force, but it is a form of aggression, not authority. On closer inspection, it becomes apparent that individuals who dominate others are, in fact, enslaved by insecurity and are slowly and mysteriously hurt by their own actions. Lao Tzu attributed most of the world's ills to the fact that people do not feel powerful and independent." Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous German philosopher, wrote that "will to power" is the essence of human nature. In a book compiled from his notes after his death, 'The Will To Power,' is written: "My idea is that every specific body strives to be master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: Thus they conspire together for power." .. To feel that we are worthwhile individuals, to know that we exist, we have to express our power - feel that we are in control. This imperative to express our power and experience control is central to human behavior. Every human does something to express his or her power in the world. This power can be expressed creatively or destructively. Humans first attempt to express their power creatively. If such attempts fail repeatedly, they experience themselves as powerless. They may feel helpless and hopeless, and become depressed. What they experience is that they cannot make a positive difference in their own lives or in the world. A cognitive breakdown occurs between their actions and the results they produce. Mentally and intellectually they cease to understand the connections between their behavior and the consequences of their behavior. Then they express their power destructively. Government coercion must be morally rejected Dr. Edward Younkins, business professor, Wheeling Jesuit, CIVIL SOCIETY: THE REALM OF FREEDOM, June 10, 2000, p. http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000610-11.htm Recently (and ironically), government projects and programs have been started to restore civil society through state subsidization or coercive mandates. Such coercion cannot create true voluntary associations. Statists who support such projects believe only in the power of political society they don't realize that the subsidized or mandated activity can be performed voluntarily through the private interaction of individuals and associations. They also don't understand that to propose that an activity not be performed coercively, is not to oppose the activity, but simply its coercion. If civil society is to be revived, we must substitute voluntary cooperation for coercion and

Page 25 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

replace mandates with the rule of law. According to the Cato Handbook for Congress, Congress should: before trying to institute a government program to solve a problem, investigate whether there is some other government program that is causing the problem ... and, if such a program is identified, begin to reform or eliminate it; ask by what legal authority in the Constitution Congress undertakes an action ...; recognize that when government undertakes a program, it displaces the voluntary efforts of others and makes voluntary association in civil society appear redundant, with significant negative effects; and begin systematically to abolish or phase out those government programs that do what could be accomplished by voluntary associations in civil society ... recognizing that accomplishment through free association is morally superior to coercive mandates, and almost always generates more efficient outcomes. Every time taxes are raised, another regulation is passed, or another government program is adopted, we are acknowledging the inability of individuals to govern themselves. It follows that there is a moral imperative for us to reclaim our right to live in a civil society, rather than to have bureaucrats and politicians solve our problems and run our lives. Coercion must be rejected in every instance Frederick Mann, Why YOU MUST RECOGNIZE AND UNDERSTAND COERCION, 2000, p. http://quebecoislibre.org/000610-11.htm In Six Myths About Libertarianism, Murray N. Rothbard writes: "If a person is forced by violence or the threat thereof to perform a certain action, then it can no longer be a moral choice on his part. The morality of an action can stem only from its being freely adopted; an action can scarcely be called moral if someone is compelled to perform it at gunpoint. Compelling moral actions or outlawing immoral actions, therefore, cannot be said to foster the spread of morality or virtue. On the contrary, coercion atrophies morality for it takes away from the individual the freedom to be either moral or immoral, and therefore forcibly deprives people of the chance to be moral. Paradoxically, then, a compulsory morality robs us of the very opportunity to be moral. Coercion violates fundament human rights Ridgway Foley, ESSAY ON CARING, April 1985, p. www.libertyhaven.com/politicsandcurrente vents/politicalpartiesoractivism/essayoncaring.html The Dividing Line A remarkable duality pervades the concept of caring and its current implementation. Force represents the dividing line. Application or refrain from coercion separates the wrongful intrusion into the sanctity of the life of another from the permissible compassionate endeavor. The law ought not impede attempts to aid others or to solve problems where those enterprises occur without compulsion. This should be true where the majority decries the problem as ridiculous or the solution as ill-advised; after all, the crowd often proves ineluctably wrong and, in any event, no human being possesses either the ability or the moral privilege to substitute his judgment for that of another choosing sentient being. Conversely, no one should employ the legal monopoly of force to compel adherence to, participation in, or compliance with an artifice designed to better another, no matter how well intentioned or meritorious the plan. No individual should be permitted to thrust a decision or shunt responsibility for the consequences of his choice upon another, unwilling human being. Disregard of this salient principle necessarily denies the dignity of that other individual, since moral choice and accountability constitute an essential element in the human condition. Those who purport to care, then, must submit to a test of means and motive. The law (rules and orders created and enforced by mankind) should not address the means employed by those who promote compassion as a political or economic discipline except to assure that no individual or entity compels a dissenter to assent to, support or participate in a proposal disagreeable to the latter for any reason.All too often, those who preach caring, compassion and concern rest their case upon the root of envy: Loathe the rich and trust the poor; take from the evil producer and give to the high-principled but helpless victim of circumstance and oppression. Such caring persons really do not care at all about others: The creators must be plundered, the users must be pandered, by force and violence, by false premises and promises, in order to salve the promoter's inordinate ego and to effect his flawed view of mankind and the world. In these, the vast majority of instances, one can always count upon the concerned to care - -for themselves !

Page 26 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Property Rights Good**

Property rights are key to all rights. John Hospers, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, THE LIBERTARIAN ALTERNATIVE, Tibor Machan, ed., 1974, p. 8. Depriving people of property is depriving them of the means by which they live-the freedom of the individual citizen to do what he wishes with his own life and to plan for the future. Indeed, only if property rights are respected is there any point to planning for the future and working to achieve one's goals. Property rights are what makes long-range planning possible - the kind of planning which is a distinctively human endeavor, as opposed to the day-by-day activity of the lion who hunts, who depends on the supply of game tomorrow but has no real insurance against starvation in a day or a week. Without the right to property, the right to life itself amounts to little: how can you sustain your life if you cannot plan ahead? and how can you plan ahead if the fruits of your labor can at any moment be confiscated by government? Property rights critical to moral agency Tibor Machan, philosophy professor, Auburn, PRIVATE RIGHTS AND PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 19 95, p. 9-10 If one is on a desert island all by oneself, the issue of property rights is of no significance, because there is no one else who could threaten one's authority over what one is going to do and how one will set out to manage the natural world that surrounds one. But if there is somebody elseif, for example Robinson Crusoe is met by Fridayboth now have the choice to do good, bad, or mediocre deeds, and either may have an impact on the other. They are moral agents who may get in each other's way with their morally wrong choices and actions. In his choice of actions, for instance, Friday might help himself in a morally significant fashion from which Crusoe ought not to benefit without Friday's permission. There should be some way to tell what Robinson Crusoe does and what Friday does and to let both of them have a say whether and when they want to cooperate. This, in brief, spells out one of the moral functions of private property rights: Such rights identify what Robert Nozick called "moral space" around personswithin which, if adequately protected, they can be sovereign agents We can appreciate, then, that from the point of view of morality everyone needs to know his or her proper scope of personal authority and responsibility. One needs to know that some valued item, skill, or liquid asset is in one's own jurisdiction to use before one can be prudent, creative, courageous, charitable, or generous. If one does not know that some particular area of human concern is under one's own or other people's proper authority, then one cannot know if it would be courageous, foolhardy, or silly to protect it, whether it would be generous or reckless to share it, and so on. It follows that private property rights are, in the first place, a social precondition to the possibility of an extensive, personally guided, and morally significant life. If one is to be generous to the starving human beings in Somalia but has nothing of one's own from which to be generous, generosity will not be possible So there is, in effect, a necessary connection between a practical moral code or set of guiding moral principles and the institution of private property rights .26 Property rights are key to prevent Nazism. Dr. Nathanial Branden, psychotherapist and author, INDIVIDUALISM AND FREE SOCIETY , January 1995, p. http://www.fff.org/freedom/0195d.asp The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism or totalitarianism or collectivism or communism or socialism or nazism or fascism or the welfare state. Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism the belief that the individual exists to serve others is translated into political reality. Although this issue has not been
traditionally discussed in the terms in which I am discussing it here, the moral-political concept that forbids the initiation of force, and stands as the guardian and protector of the individual's life, freedom, and property, is the concept of rights. If life

on earth is the standard, an individual has a right to live and pursue values as survival requires; a right to think and act on his or her judgment the right of liberty; a right to work for the achievement of his or her values and to keep the results the right of property; a right to live for his or her sake, to choose and work for personal goals the right to the pursuit of happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. We must be free to use that which we have produced, or

Page 27 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

we do not possess the right of liberty. We must be free to make the products of our work serve our chosen goals, or we do not possess the right to the pursuit of happiness. And since we are not ghosts who exist in some nonmaterial manner we must be free to keep and consume the products of our work or we do not possess the right of life. In a society where human beings are not free to own privately the material means of production, their position is that of slaves whose lives are at the absolute mercy of their rulers. It is relevant here to remember the statement of Trotsky: "Who does not obey shall not eat."

Page 28 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**Rights Come First** Placing survival over individual autonomy replicates authoritarian regimes of control, subjugating individual rights to the values held by those in power Schroeder, Prof. Law, Duke, 86 (Christopher H. Schroeder, Prof. Law, Duke,1986, Rights Against Risks, 86 Colum. L. Rev. 495) expanding the idea of preservation to include bodily integrity on the basis of quality of life considerations has already pointed the way to a more realistic
Actually, statement of those individual characteristics worth protecting. The same considerations of quality of life counsel recognizing some freedom of action and initiative within the definition of the morally relevant aspects of the individual. Doing so is consistent with a long political and philosophical heritage. 90 Deeply ingrained in practically all theories of the rights tradition is the vision of a person as capable of forming and entitled to pursue some individual life plan. 91 Given this vision, placing survival or bodily integrity absolutely above all

other ends would be tantamount to saying that the life plan that one ought to adopt is that of prolonging life at all costs. That idea is unacceptably authoritarian and regimented. It would be extremely anomalous for a theory supposedly centered on the autonomy of the individual to result in a conception of justice that constrained all individuals to a monolithic result . Individual human beings want more from their lives than simple [*520] bodily integrity, and the conception of
an individual, of what defines and constitutes a person, as so limited is peculiarly impoverished. Individuals are capable of formulating and pursuing life plans, of forming bonds of love, commitment, and friendship on which they subsequently act, of conceiving images of self- and community-improvement. Some of these may directly advance interests in human survival, as when dedicated doctors and scientists pursue solutions to cancer or develop chemical pesticides with a view to assisting agricultural self-sufficiency in developing countries. Some may dramatically advance the "quality of life," rather than survival itself, as when Guttenberg's press made literature more widely available or when Henry Ford pioneered the

mass production of the automobile. However, even individual initiatives of much less demonstrable impact on the lives of others constitute a vital element that makes human life distinctively human. A just society ought to understand and
value this element both in the concrete results it sometimes produces and in the freedom and integrity that are acknowledged when individual liberty to conceive and act upon initiative is respected.

Violation of freedom negates the value of human existence and represents the greatest threat to human survival Rand, Philosopher, 89 (Ayn Rand, Objectivist Philosopher, 07-1989, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, p. 145) A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort , or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment, a society that sets up a conflict between its ethics and the requirements of mans nature is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all values of human coexistence, has no possible justification, and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to mans survival. Life on desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable than existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

Page 29 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Violating rights in the name of survival causes social paralysis and destroys the value to life. Callahan, institute of Society and Ethics, 73 (Daniel Callahan, institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of Survival, pp. 91-93)
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native

Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting
that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance

In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even
and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies.

There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a
For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival."

legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival

can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for
survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to lifethen how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it

if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic
more strongly,

victories.

It is impossible for policymakers to know future consequences allowing more rights violations will justify worse consequences in the future Journal of Contemporary Health Law & Policy, 01 (Journal of Contemporary Health Law & Policy, Winter 2001, 18 J. Contemp. Health L. & Poly 95, p. 117) The utilitarian principle justifies intentional, harmful acts against other humans to achieve a hoped-for benefit to a greater number of people. It is the wrong approach to public policy decisions. Its most notable proponents have been responsible

Page 30 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Experience has taught us time and again that public servants, even when crafting policies that appear wholly beneficent, can cause great harm (the so-called "law of unintended consequences"). Humans lack the wisdom and foresight to completely understand the future ramifications of many actions. A father, for example, may
for much of the misery and strife of the last century. believe that it is an entirely good thing to help his daughter with homework every day because they are spending time together and he is showing sincere interest in her life and schooling. By "helping" with homework, however, his daughter may be denied the mental struggle of searching for solutions on her own. She may not develop the mental skills to solve tough math problems, for example, or to quickly find key concepts in reading selections. If even "good"

actions can produce undesirable results, how much worse is the case when evil is tolerated in the name of some conjectural, future outcome? Rights outweigh all critical to human dignitye future George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 405
Why make so much of individual personal and political rights? The answer, as I have said, is that respect for rights is the best way of honoring human dignity. Why make so much of human dignity? I do not find much to say. I am not even sure that much should be said. Suppose we carry on at length about why governments should treat people in certain ways (by actions and abstentions), and in these ways unconditionally and as a matter of course, and should do so because people deserve and are entitled to such treatment, rather than because governments may find it prudent to treat people in these ways in the spirit of extending revocable privileges. I am afraid that we may jeopardize human dignity by laboring to defend it. What sort of attack would merit an answer? Is a long and elaborate theory needed to establish the point that people should not be treated by the state as if they were masses, or obstacles or instruments to higher purposes, or subjects for experiments, or pieces in a game, or wayward children in need of protection against themselves, or patients in need of perpetual care, or beasts in need of the stick? With what right does anyone maintain that people may be regarded or used in these nonhuman or subhuman ways? With what truth? Unabused and undegraded, people have always shown that they deserve better. They deserve guaranteed rights. When their rights are respected, all that their dignity, their human status, requires is achieved. People are enabled to lead lives that are free, modest, and decentprovided, of course, socioeconomic circumstances are not hopeless. To tie dignity to rights is therefore to say that governments have the absolute duty to treat people (by actions and abstentions) in certain ways, and in certain ways only. The state's characteristic domination and insolence are to be curbed for the sake of rights. Public and formal respect for rights registers and strengthens awareness of three constitutive facts of being human: every person is a creature capable of feeling pain, and is a free agent capable of having a free being, of living a life that is one's own and not somebody else's idea of how a life should be lived, and is a moral agent capable of acknowledging that what one claims for oneself as a right one can claim only as an equal to everyone else (and relatedly that what one wants done to oneself one should do to others). Respect for rights recognizes these capacities and thus honors human dignity.

Policymakers must protect individual rights George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 2
The background assumption is that most people in a society of rights are disposed to be law-abiding and that government's mere existence sustains their disposition. But because some persons inevitably transgress against their fellow citizens, government can never lose the status of protector; in particular, protector of life and property, the usual objects of transgression. If, then, rights are rights against the state, the theory of rights does not ignore the obvious fact that the state exists to prevent, deter, or punish crime or mayhem. (I prefer to see crime not as a denial of the victim's rights but, instead, as legally culpable immorality; nevertheless, it is sometimes sensible to speak of individuals violating one another's rights.) Government exists to preserve individuals. The point is that it must do this work, and its other work, in a way that does not violate rights, including the rights of transgressors and those accused of transgression. If the Bill of Rights is the core, its silences and deliberate omissions required that it be supplemented over time. Freedom of speech, press,

Page 31 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

religion, and association; due-process rights for suspects, defendants, and the legally guilty; and respect for a person's freedom from arbitrary invasions of security and privacyall go far in protecting the dignity (or integrity) of individuals. But their dignity needs moreabove all, three further rights: first, the right to vote and take part in politics; second, the right to be spared from utter degradation or to be saved from material misery; and third, the right to equal protection of the laws (in the language of the Fourteenth Amendment). The two last-named rights do not call for mere governmental abstention, as do the rights of speech, press, religion, association, security, and privacy. Nor do they call for only procedural justice, as do some other main rights in the Bill of Rights. Rather, the right to be free of degradation and misery Answers To a minimal samaritanism as morally obligatory on society and looks to government to carry it out. It is a right to be given something, to be enabled to begin to live a life. Samaritanism is obligatory on society, and obligatory samaritanism would be the foundation of a right to life which was expanded beyond its present constitutional interpretation in the United States. I believe that this right, more than any other, stands in need of expansion through positive governmental action, despite all the serious risks involved in charging governments with the task of fostering life. And the equal protection of the laws may necessitate governmental action against, say, official or social racial discrimination. Naturally, in saying that the state, which must always be kept under suspicion, must also be entrusted not only with the fundamental task of preserving individuals against transgressors but also with the positive function of promoting some of the rights that are indispensable to human dignity, one admits that there will be an inevitable ambivalence toward the state. It is an enemy, the worst enemy, but it is not the only enemy and it is not only an enemy. My emphasis, however, is on the antagonism that government shows to rights by its initiatives rather than by its neglect. Throughout this book I rarely refer to rights that need government's positive contribution. The latter rights, no matter how fundamental, cannot be the norm in a society devoted to individual rights. Different individuals may use or need the several rights variably, but when government refuses to respect rights, it not only makes people suffer, it injures everyone's human dignity.

The calculation of utilitarianism is the foundation of totalitarianism George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 11
I do not mean to take seriously the idea that utilitarianism is a satisfactory replacement for the theory of rights. The well-being (or mere preferences) of the majority cannot override the rightful claims of individuals. In a time when the theory of rights is global it is noteworthy that some moral philosophers disparage the theory of rights. The political experience of this century should be enough to make them hesitate: it is not clear that, say, some version of utilitarianism could not justify totalitarian evil. It also could be fairly easy for some utilitarians to justify any war and any dictatorship, and very easy to justify any kind of ruthless-ness even in societies that pay some attention to rights. There is no end to the immoral permissions that one or another type of utilitarianism grants. Everything is permitted, if the calculation is right. No, an advocate of rights cannot take utilitarianism seriously as a competing general theory of political morality, nor any other competing general theory. Rather, particular principles or considerations must be given a place. A theory of rights may simply leave many decisions undetermined or have to admit that rights may have to be overridden (but never for the sake of Social well-being or mere policy preference). Also, kinds of rights may sometimes conflict, and it is not always possible to end that conflict either by an elaboration of the theory of rights or by an appeal to some other

Every alternative to rights leads to tyranny George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 5
At the same time, there are other theories that seem to affirm human dignity yet give rights only a lesser or probationary or instrumental role. Examples are utilitarianism, recent communitarianism, recent republicanism, and radical egalitarianism. The first and last 1 will return to shortly; my response to the others appears here and there in this volume. (All I wish to say now is that unless rights come first they are not rights. They will tend to be sacrificed to some purpose deemed higher than the equal dignity of every individual. There will be little if any concept of the integrity or inviolability of each individual. The group or the majority or the good or the sacred or the vague future will be preferred. The beneficiaries will be victimized along with the victims because no one is being treated as a person who

Page 32 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

is irreplaceable and beyond value. To make rights anything but primary, even though in the name of human dignity, is to injure human dignity.

Collective safety is no justification for rights violationsleads to slavery, genocide, and wars. Rand 40, Objectivist Philosopher,
(Ayn Rand, Objectivist Philosopher, 1940, To All Innocent Columnists, The Journals of Ayn Rand, p. 351)

They preach "Democracy" and then make a little addition "Economic Democracy" or a "Broader Democracy" or a " True Democracy," and demand that we turn all property over to the Government; "all property" means also "all rights"; let everybody hold all rights together and nobody have any right of any kind individually. Is that Democracy or is it Totalitarianism? You know of a
prominent woman commentator who wants us all to die for Democracyand then defines " true" Democracy as State Socialism [probably a reference to Dorothy Thompson ]. You have heard Secretary [Harold] Ickes define a " true" freedom of the press as the freedom to express the views of the majority. You have read in a highly respectable national monthly the claim that the Bill of Rights, as taught in our schools, is "selfish"; that a " true" Bill of Rights means not demanding any rights for yourself, but your giving these rights to "others." God help us, fellow-Americans, are we blind? Do you see what this means? Do you see the implications? And this is the picture wherever

you look. They "oppose" Totalitarianism and they "defend" Democracyby preaching their own version of Totalitarianism, some form of "collective good," "collective rights," "collective will," etc. And the one thing which is never said, never preached, never upheld in our public life, the one thing all these "defenders of Democracy" hate, denounce and tear down subtly, gradually, systematicallyis the principle of Individual Rights, Individual Freedom, Individual Value. That is the principle against
which the present great world conspiracy is directed. That is the heart of the whole world question.

That is the only opposite of Totalitarianism and our only defense against it. Drop thatand what difference will it make what name you give to the resulting society? It will be Totalitarianismand all Totalitarianisms are alike, all come to the same methods, the same slavery, the same bloodshed, the same horrors, no matter what noble slogan they start under, as witness Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
Sacrificing rights to preserve life produces totalitarianism. Christopher H. Schroeder, Professor of Law, Duke University; Visiting Professor of Law, UCLA 1985-86, 1986, Columbia Law Review, Rights Against Risks, 86 Colum. L. Rev. 495 Actually, expanding the idea of preservation to include bodily integrity on the basis of quality of life considerations has already pointed the way to a more realistic statement of those individual characteristics worth protecting. The same considerations of quality of life counsel recognizing some freedom of action and initiative within the definition of the morally relevant aspects of the individual. Doing so is consistent with a long political and philosophical heritage. 90 Deeply ingrained in practically all theories of the rights tradition is the vision of a person as capable of forming and entitled to pursue some individual life plan. 91 Given this vision, placing survival or bodily integrity absolutely above all other ends would be tantamount to saying that the life plan that one ought to adopt is that of prolonging life at all costs. That idea is unacceptably authoritarian and regimented. It would be extremely anomalous for a theory supposedly centered on the autonomy of the individual to result in a conception of justice that constrained all individuals to a monolithic result. Individual human beings want more from their lives than simple [*520] bodily integrity, and the conception of an individual, of what defines and constitutes a person, as so limited is peculiarly impoverished. Individuals are capable of formulating and pursuing life plans, of forming bonds of love, commitment, and friendship on which they subsequently act, of conceiving images of self- and community-improvement. Some of these may directly advance interests in human survival, as when dedicated doctors and scientists pursue solutions to cancer or develop chemical pesticides with a view to assisting agricultural self-sufficiency in developing countries. Some may dramatically advance the "quality of life," rather than survival itself, as when Guttenberg's press made literature more widely available or when Henry Ford pioneered the mass

Page 33 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

production of the automobile. However, even individual initiatives of much less demonstrable impact on the lives of others constitute a vital element that makes human life distinctively human. A just society ought to understand and value this element both in the concrete results it sometimes produces and in the freedom and integrity that are acknowledged when individual liberty to conceive and act upon initiative is respected.

Err on the side of rights its the biggest consequence in the long term Machan, Professor of Philosophy, 03 Tibor Machan, prof. emeritus of philosophy at Auburn University, 2003 Passion for Liberty honesty is the best policy, even if at times it does not achieve the desired good results; so is respect for every individual's rights to life, liberty, and property. All in all, this is what will ensure the best consequencesin the long run and as a rule. Therefore, one need not be very concerned about the most recent estimate of the consequences of banning or not banning guns, breaking up or not breaking up Microsoft, or any other public policy, for that matter. It is enough to know that violating the rights of individuals to bear arms is a bad idea, and that history and analysis support our understanding of principle. To violate rights has always produced greater damage than good, so let's not do it, even when we are terribly tempted to do so, Let's not do it precisely because to do so would violate the fundamental requirements of human nature. It is those requirements that should be our guide, not some recent empirical data that have no
All in all, then, I support the principled or rights-based approach. In normal contexts, staying power (according to their very own theoretical terms). Finally, you will ask, isn't this being dogmatic? Haven't we learned not to bank too much on what we've learned so far, when we also know that learning can always be improved, modified, even revised? Isn't progress in the sciences and technology proof that

We must go with what we know but be open to change provided that the change is warranted. Simply because some additional gun controls or regulations might save lives (some lives, perhaps at the expense of other lives) and simply because breaking up Microsoft might improve the satisfaction of consumers (some consumers, perhaps at the expense of the satisfaction of other consumers) are no reasons to violate basic rights. Only if and when there are solid, demonstrable reasons to do so should we throw out the old principles and bring on the new principles. Any
past knowledge always gets overthrown a bit later? As in science and engineering, so in morality and politics:

such reasons would have to speak to the same level of fundamentally and relevance as that incor porated by the theory of individual rights itself. Those defending consequentialism, like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, have argued
the opposite thesis: Unless one can prove, beyond a doubt, that violating rights in a particular instance is necessarily wrong in the eyes of a "rational and fair man," the state may go ahead and "accept the natural outcome of dominant opinion" and violate those rights.1 Such is now the leading jurisprudence

Rights absolute cant infringe on one persons rights to increase well-being of others. Gewirth, prof of philosophy @ U Chicago. 1994.
Alan. Are There Any Absolute Rights? Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics. Joram Graf Haber. Pgs 137-138 Ought Abrams to torture his mother to death in order to prevent the threatened nuclear catastrophe? Might he not merely pretend to torture his mother, so that she could then be safely hidden while the hunt for the gang members continued? Entirely apart from the fact that the gang could easily pierce this deception, the main objection to the very raising of such question s is the moral one that they seem to hold open the possibility of acquiescing and participating in an unspeakably evil project. To inflict such extreme harm on one' s mother would be an ultimate act of betrayal; in performing or even contemplating the performance of such an action the son would lose all self-respect and would regard his life as no longer worth living.' A mother' s right not to be tortured to death by her own son is beyond any compromise. It is absolute . This absoluteness may be analyzed in several different interrelated dimensions. all stemming from the supreme principle of morality. The principle requires respect for the

Page 34 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

rights of all persons to the necessary conditions of human action, and this includes respect for the persons themselves as having the rational capacity to reflect on their purposes and to control their behaviour in the light of such reflection. The principle hence prohibits using any person merely as a means to the well-being of other persons. For a son to torture his mother to death even 10 protect the lives of others would be an extreme violation of this principle and hence of these rights, as would any attempt by others to force such an action . For this reason , the concept appropriate to it is not merely 'wrong' but such others as 'despicable', 'dishonorable", 'base', 'monstrous'. In the scale of moral modalities , such concepts function as the contrary extremes of concepts like the supererogatory , What is supererogatory is not merely good or right but goes beyond these in various ways; it includes saintly and heroic actions whose moral merit surpasses what is strictly required of agents, In parallel fashion, what is base, dishonourabte. or despicable is not merely bad or wrong but goes beyond these in moral demerit since it subverts even the minimal worth or dignity both of its agent and of its recipient and hence, the basic presupposition s of morality itself, Just as the supererogatory is superlatively good, so the despicable is superlatively evil and diabolic, and its moral wrongness is so rotten that a morally decent person will not even consider doing it. This is but another way of saying that the rights it would violate must remain absolute.

Rights and basic liberties are a prerequisite of rational decisionmaking. Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003. Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, No. 3, Pg 16. Project MUSE.
In order to advance the reconstruction of the Hierarchy Argument, we must now answer the following question: How does this highest-order interest in rationality and its preconditions justify the lexical priority of the basic liberties over other primary goods, as called for by the Priority of Liberty? In short, it justifies such priority because the basic liberties are necessary conditions for the exercise of rationality, which is why parties in the Original Position give first priority to preserving their liberty in these matters (pp. 13132). If the parties were to sacrifice the basic liberties for the sake of other primary goods (the means that enable them to advance their other desires and ends [p. 476]), they would be sacrificing their highest-order interest in rationality and its preconditions, and thereby failing to express their nature as autonomous beings (p. 493). A brief examination of the basic liberties enumerated by Rawls will indicate why they are necessary conditions for the exercise of rationality (p. 53). The freedoms of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience, and freedom of thought are essential to the creation and revision of plans of life: without secure rights to explore ideas and beliefs with others (whether in person or through various media) and consider these at our leisure, we would be unable to make informed decisions about our conception of the good. Freedom of the person (including psychological and bodily integrity), as well as the right to personal property and immunity from arbitrary arrest and seizure, are necessary to create a stable and safe personal space for purposes of reflection and communication, without which rationality would be compromised if not crippled. Even small restrictions on these basic liberties would threaten our highest order interest , however slightly, and such a threat is disallowed given the absolute priority of this interest over other concerns. Note also that lexical priority can be justified here for all of the basic liberties, not merely a subset of them (as was the case with the strains-of-commitment interpretation of the Equal Liberty of Conscience Argument).1

Right to health outweighs violation of right to life. McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984 HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and Rights. Pgs 127-128.
The right to health, like the right to bodily integrity, is related to but not whol1y based on the right to life. Ill health and mutilation of the body need not threaten life. Deliberately to harm

Page 35 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

the health of persons is to violate their personhood, impairing capacities, causing needless suffering, overriding wills. So too with violation of bodily integrity, as with compulsory sterilization, barbarous forms of punishment such as chopping off hands, blinding, removing the tongue. In a real sense, although not in the sense suggested in Locke's labor argument for private property nor in the sense claimed by many feminists in their defense of abortion from a woman's right to control (and mutilate?) her body, our body is ours to care for and maintain as the vehicle of our personhood. Although it is true that we can lose an organ, a leg, an eye, and still be the same person, our body appertains to us as persons. The negative aspect of the case for the rights to health and bodily integrity is evidently strong. How can another have the right to injure, infect, disease a person? So to act is to violate a right. A very powerful moral justification would be necessary for such an act not to constitute a grave end illegitimate violation of a right.

Page 36 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**AT: Positive Rights Good**

Government protection of positive rights justifies war. Frank van Dun, Senior Lecturer of Philosophy of Law at the University of Maastricht, JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES, Fall 2001, p. http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_4/15_4_1.pdf. Even in the richest states, budgetary limitations often lead to sharp confrontations between pressure groups and vested interests in various social, economic, and cultural domains. Using the term human rights to describe ones interests does not change this fact of real-world limits. Rather, it creates the risk of inflating political rhetoric and passion, now that the flag of human rights flies over almost the whole arena of government policy. Each policy option can be interpreted at one and the same time as both a measure to further some human right and as an indication of the neglect or even violation of any number of other human rights. Therefore, there is at all times unlimited room for weighing various rights and for setting and revising priorities. The political and administrative bodies to which this weighing of rights has been entrusted or that have succeeded in monopolising it have ample opportunities for expanding their power and influence. Nothing remains of the old idea that a right is worthy of respect in all circumstances except, perhaps, the most extreme emergency. The human rights of the UD are not and cannot be absolute, even in the most normal of circumstancesunless anything short of Utopia should count as an emergency. By their very nature, they are susceptible to continuous weighing, negotiation, and qualification. They are a politicians delight, for every human right translates into a right to more government intervention on its behalf. This is no less true for the ghosts of natural rights that linger in the first half of the UD than for the economic, social, and cultural rights in the rest of it. Of course, we should not confuse the ghost and the real thing. For example , Article 2 of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen clearly states what a persons natural rights are: liberty, property, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and resistance to oppression. In the UD, on the other hand, a person is not informed that his life, liberty, security of person, and property are his fundamental rights. He is told only that he has the right to life, liberty, and security of person (Art. 3) and property (Art. 17). He should not expect more. For it is obviously inconsistent to claim that everyone is entitled to the full realisation of the economic, social, and cultural rights and at the same time to claim that any persons fundamental rights are his life, liberty, and property. The administration of the former requires the concentration of massive coercive powers of taxation and regulation in the hands of the state, and so must presuppose that a persons life, liberty, and property are not his rights. However, this inconsistency evaporates once we realise that the UDs rights to life, liberty, property do not specify to whose life, liberty, or property a person has a right. It rules out the possibility that he has an exclusive right to his own life, liberty, or property, but it does not rule out that some or all others have an equal, or perhaps more pressing, claim on those things in order to enable them, say, to enjoy the arts or a paid holiday. Thus, a persons life, liberty, and property are thrown upon the enormous heap of desirable scarce resources to which all people are said to have a right. As such, they, too, end up in the scales with which political authorities, administrators, and experts are supposed to weigh the ingredients for their favoured policy-mix. Here we catch our first glimpse of the shadow of Hobbes behind the contemporary notion of human rights: the person who believes he has a right to everything is likely to find out that there is no thing that is his right. A Hobbesian Predicament The following thought experiment will bring out the Hobbesian character of the UDs conception of human rights. Imagine two people, the only survivors of a shipwreck, who find refuge on a small deserted island. They have with them nothing but their human rights, in particular their right to work and all that it entails according to Articles 23, 24, and 25 of the UD. One can imagine what will happen if they sit there insisting on their right of being employed by the other at a just and favourable wage, or to receive an unemployment compensation high enough to allow them an existence worthy of their dignity. One can also imagine what will happen if, instead of just sitting there, they attempt to enforce their human rights against one another: their own version of Hobbess war of all against all. Finally, one can easily imagine what would happen if one of them won that war: Hobbess solution for the incompatibility of their rights would emerge. The winner could then arrange for himself a nice unemployment compensation (e.g., a tax on an-others labour) to match his new-found dignity as a ruler, and keep the other man quiet by leaving him as much as is consistent with the organisation and the resources of their state. Indeed, starvation, universal war, and the Leviathan State are the only possible outcomes under a regime of human rightsand only the latter outcome is compatible with survival. Imagining a two-person situation makes this conclusion clear, but its validity does not depend

Page 37 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

on the numbers. Large numbers only serve to obscure the logic of the situation. the burden of taxation and regulation just below the threshold of revolt. Limiting government protection to property rights is key to prevent atrocities That last line of the last chapter no doubt scandalizes many readers, as does the conception of politics it evinces. Surely there is more to morality than property rights, and more to social life than exchanging property! they might be tempted to respond; And surely there is more to community than the collective safeguarding of that property! What a cold and heartless indeed, positively counter- utopian conception of human life is embodied by such a view! They would, of course, be absolutely right to think this. Where they go wrong is in assuming that Nozick would think, or is required by his position to think, any differently in assuming that Nozicks political philosophy is intended to be a complete social philosophy. They go wrong also in assimilating morality to justice, social life to politics, and community to government. For justice is not the whole of morality; not all of social life is politics; and genuine human community definitely is not the same thing as government action. Justice the securing of which is the chief end of political action is, however important, but one virtue among others. Sometimes what is called justice is not justice at all, but a mask for something decidedly unvirtuous, such as envy. One suspects that the demand for equality is a case in point; certainly one suspects this when one considers that equality as an ideal is rarely argued for by it proponents, and is almost never argued for very well (Nozick 1974. chapter 8). There are, in any case, virtues that are as important as justice, and some that are more important. Temperance, prudence. fortitude, faith, hope, and love are cases in point, and only a fool could believe that the practice of these virtues will be guaranteed if only we hit upon the right government program. Government itself, however high-flown the rhetoric often spouted in its defense, is, it must always be remembered, nothing more than brute force, the getting of people to do things or to refrain from doing things by the threat of violence. Sometimes, as when the defense of individual rights is involved, such force is necessary; it remains force nonetheless. And when it involves the imposition of redistributive taxation or paternalistic regulation, it involves nothing more than some people forcing other people innocent people who have violated no one elses rights to do things against their will, to submit to the will of those doing the forcing. Whether or not one thinks such arm-twisting is morally justified, it is dishonest, indeed perverse, to talk smugly as if it is the quintessence of community. Nor can politics which in a non-libertarian society amounts to little more than the struggle to be the ones who get to force the others, even if for their own good plausibly be regarded as a paradigmatically social activity, at least not if social is meant to connote an ideal of high-minded cooperation. A conception of human life that sees all questions of morality, and indeed everything of value, as necessarily entailing a political program backed by the police power of the state and the threat of litigation, is one that can only be described, charitably, as deficient; less charitably, as warped. We need, in Nozicks view, to learn to see through the political realm (1974, x). We need to get beyond the tendency a very modern tendency that would have surprised earlier generations reflexively to think of all problems as having a political solution, of all progress as dependent on government action. We need in particular to stop thinking in utopian terms or rather, to stop thinking of utopia in political terms. The utopias of the past have usually been implemented in a political fashion, and they have universally failed, often catastrophically think the French Revolution, Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago. They have also involved the imposition of one groups vision of utopia on everyone (indeed, this is part of the reason why they have failed). If utopian thinking is to be realistic and to have a future, it must avoid these errors.

Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 89-90.

Page 38 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**AT: Util Protects Rights** Current price-tag thinking is insufficient- we have to make the tough decisions that incorporate individual rights instead of trying to spare laypeople from difficult decisionmaking
Hlne Hermansson 07, Division of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Rights at Risk: Ethical Issues in Risk Management Stockholm 2007 p 5-7 As choices like these seem to become more common, i.e., choices between risk alternatives presented in terms of probability estimates, it is not surprising if people in general feel more and more insecure despite the fact that we lead longer and healthier lives now than we did a couple of centuries ago. The solution, however, is not to spare lay people from making risk decisions or letting experts make the decisions for them. In this thesis it is argued that the risk-exposed should be included in the decision procedure. Moreover, this procedure should be open to other aspects than those that a narrow technical framing allows for. Respecting a variety of aspects may not make risk decisions easier to make, but as these decisions are in fact seldom easily made, being honest about that may relieve some of the feelings of anxiety and distrust among the general public. Background and aim of thesis Risk management is frequently described as a practice in crisis. Critics point to investigations analysing several countries risk expenditures which have shown large variations in the cost per statistical life saved in different social sectors. The differences are said to be the result of arbitrary decisions. Furthermore, it is argued that if societal resources were used in a more effective and rational way, these differences could be levelled out and more lives be saved for the same amount of money. Therefore, demands for a consistent risk management have repeatedly been called for in the risk literature (See e.g. Morone & Woodhouse, 1986; Morrall, 1986; Viscousi, 1996; Breyer, 1999; Sjberg 1999; Sunstein, 2002). In technical discussions about risk it has been maintained that risks should be managed in accordance with scientific data in order to avoid the irrational fears of the public, whose focus is on sensational risks, while the real, but more ordinary risks, go unnoticed. Risk management should be a rational, neutral, and scientific area beyond the influence of emotions, ideologies and values. One such approach is the Standard Model that is discussed in this thesis (see especially articles I and II). According to this model a risk is defined as the probability of a negative event multiplied by the damage resulting from it, for instance expected fatalities. The number representing the risk is weighed against the possible benefit that could be gained from accepting it. If total benefit exceeds total cost (risk), then the risk can be accepted. In this thesis I argue that scientific and technological reasoning is not enough for analysing or managing risks. Even though the Standard Model contributes to a systematic way to make risk decisions, it is too narrow a perspective on risk management. Such a narrow perspective may allow for risk exposure that violates the rights of the individual. While I agree that consistency in risk decisions is valuable and worth striving for, I question the standard approach to how this should be done and maintain that a new and wider perspective on how to understand consistency in risk management needs to be developed. Above all, it is argued that the current price-tag thinking (i.e., that consistency in risk management is exclusively about costs for different kinds of risk reductions) is insufficient.

Utilitarianism doesnt trump the impact of coercionindividuals cant be reduced to units of value.
Machan, 95 Professor of philosophy, Auburn University, 1995 ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 129) (Tibor, PRIVATE RIGHTS AND PUBLIC

The essential point to note at this juncture is how the idea of the worth and rights of the individual simply cannot find a place in the standard utilitarian cost-benefit analysis favored by many economists. Benefits, according to this approach, are to be measured by what people prefer (or would prefer, if properly informed), while costs are reducible to what people would prefer to do without or avoid if they were properly informed. The kind of value (or worth) individuals have, however, is not just one benefit

Page 39 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

competing among other benefits...Consider the case where some people are injured or harmed by others. "Since the costs of injury are borne by its victims," Kelman contends, "while its benefits are escaped by its perpetrators, simple cost-benefit calculations may be less important than more abstract conceptions of justice, fairness, and human dignity. Developing this theme more fully, Kelman writes as follows: We would not condone a rape even if it could be demonstrated that the rapist derived enormous pleasure from his actions, while the victim suffered in only small ways . Behind the conception of "rights" is the notion that some concept of justice, fairness or human dignity demands that individuals ought to be able to perform certain acts, despite the harm of others, and ought to be protected against certain acts, despite the loss this causes to the would-be perpetrator. Thus we undertake no cost-benefit analysis of the effects of freedom of speech or trial by jury before allowing them to continue.

The sacrifice of innocence degrades humanity-- it is an absolute wrong.

Anscombe, 93 Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics, edited by Joram Graf Haber, p. 51-52. Common morality is outraged by the consequentialist position that, as long as human beings can remain alive, the lesser of two evils is always to be chosen. Its defenders maintain, on the contrary, that there are minimum conditions for a life worthy of a human being, and that nobody may purchase anything- not even the lives of a whole community- by sacrificing those conditions . A community that surrenders its members at the whims of tyrants ceases to be anything properly called by that name; and individuals willing to accept benefits at the price of crimes committed upon other individuals degrade their humanity. Common morality allows a certain room for compliance with tyrannical external force, when resistance has become impossible; but there is a line that must be drawn beyond which compliance is excluded, and the example of rabbinic teaching is a guide drawing it.

Util fails to protect moral rights it silences rights claims when not grounded in law.
Erin Byrnes, JD U Arizona, 1999, Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Unmasking White Privelege to Expose the Fallacy of White Innocense, 41 Ariz. L. Rev. 535

of rights as being cognizable only when they are legally recognized. 236 To the utilitarian, there is no such thing as a moral right because it is not socially recognized. 237 The utilitarian rejection of moral rights can be fatal to affirmative action. Rights in utilitarian rhetoric are synonymous with the idea of a valid claim to act. 238 Put differently, one can be said to hold a valid claim when, and only when, that claim is grounded in a legally or socially recognized right. This
Utilitarianism conceives
normative theory of rights further posits that the exercise of rights is not dependent upon a duty incumbent upon others to acknowledge or respect that right. 239

Instead of conceiving of rights as corresponding with a duty, the utilitarian thinks of rights in terms of "immunity rights ," which have a corresponding concept of a "disability." 240 This too is a foreboding concept because affirmative action programs often involve
This is clearly problematic when applied to calls for affirmative action. affirmative guarantees, versus a simple right to be free from discrimination. An example of an immunity right is the right to free speech. The right to free speech exists independently of an obligation upon others not to interfere with an individual's right to exercise free speech. 241 The corresponding disability operates upon Congress. The disability prohibits Congress from enacting certain laws abridging the individual's right to free speech, but does not extend so far as to require the passage of legislation which would affirmatively protect or guarantee the immunity right. 242 The immunity right, then, is one that merely involves a freedom from outside interference, a sort of negative right, as opposed to being a right that is affirmatively protected through the imposition of an obligation upon others to honor the right. The distinction made between moral and legal rights, encompassing the distinction between a disability and a duty, is central to the utilitarian argument.

Utilitarianism squarely rejects the recognition of moral rights because moral rights must be understood in terms of a corresponding beneficial obligation . 243 A moral conception of rights

dictates that a right is held by an individual "if and only if one is supposed to benefit from another person's compliance with a coercive...rule." 244 Utilitarianism
must necessarily reject a conception of rights grounded in morality because the utilitarian doctrine is diametrically opposed to the notion that rights correspond with duties . [*563] Furthermore, utilitarianism renounces moral rights precisely because they exist independent of social recognition or enforcement. 245 Moral rights "are independent of particular circumstances and do not depend on any special conditions," 246 like legal affirmation. Thus, moral rights cannot be accepted by the utilitarian because they lack the normative grounding fundamental to utilitarian theory. Utilitarians, therefore, assume that there is a clear

Page 40 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
the central tenet of

delineation between moral rights and the pursuit for overall human welfare ,

utilitarian doctrine. Utilitarianism fundamentally fails to protect individual rights greatest good claims simply conflict.
Erin Byrnes, JD U Arizona, 1999, Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Unmasking White Privelege to Expose the Fallacy of White Innocense, 41 Ariz. L. Rev. 535
Moral rights are objectionable not only because they lack social recognition but also because they necessarily imply a correlation between rights and duties. Again,

utilitarianism's specific rejection of the tie between rights and duties renders recognition of white privilege nearly impossible. Without this recognition, there can be no meaningful solution. 247 If accepted,
moral rights would provide the grounds for the appraisal of law and other social institutions, a system of appraisal antithetical to utilitarianism's rubric of assessment. Moral rights carry with them the expectation that institutions will be erected with an eye towards respect and furtherance of such rights. 248 Such a proposition would

Utilitarianism, however, requires that institutions and rights be evaluated solely with respect to the promotion of human welfare, welfare being the satisfaction of overall citizen desires. 249 The assumption, implicit in the foregoing argument, is that moral rights neither fit perfectly nor
certainly require more than just striving towards color-blindness were it applied to affirmative action. converge with legal rights. 250 This may not necessarily be the case. David Lyons' "theory of moral rights exclusion" discusses the way in which utilitarians conceive of moral rights working at odds with the utilitarian goal. 251 Lyons' theory describes the way in which a moral right, at some point, gains enough currency to warrant individual exercise of that right. According to Lyons, when a moral right has reached this point, it has achieved the "argumentative threshold" and gains normative force. 252 The potential for this occurrence is precisely what leads to the utilitarian rejection of moral rights. Rejection is predicated on the fact that once the

Under a system which recognized moral rights, but still organized itself according to the utilitarian goal of achieving human welfare (which is happiness), individual rights would purportedly run headlong into the pursuit of welfare. 254 Though the pursuit of welfare would be deemed morally relevant and would justify a course of action on welfare's behalf , in a scenario where that course of action constituted a mere "minimal increment of utility," it would be incapable of overcoming the argumentative threshold of rights. 255 Thus, the argument is that the recognition of moral rights is diametrically opposed to utilitarianism because in a moral rights regime, rights act as a limitation upon the utilitarian goal of fulfilling as many individual desires as possible.
argumentative threshold is reached, a presumption is created against interference upon the individual exercise [*564] of the right. 253

Utilitarianism reduces individuals to their mere utility value, making them expendable
Christopher H. Schroeder, Prof. Law, Duke,1986, Rights Against Risks, 86 Colum. L. Rev. 495 The anxiety to preserve some fundamental place for the individual that cannot be overrun by larger social considerations underlies what H.L.A. Hart has aptly termed the "distinctively modern criticism of utilitarianism," 58 the criticism that, despite its famous slogan, "everyone [is] to count for one ," 59 utilitarianism ultimately denies each individual a primary place in its system of values . Various versions of utilitarianism evaluate actions by the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the net of pleasure over pain, or the satisfaction of desires. 60 Whatever the specific formulation, the goal of maximizing some measure of utility obscures and diminishes the status of each individual. It reduces the individual to a conduit, a reference point that registers the appropriate "utiles," but does not count for anything independent of his monitoring function. 61 It also produces moral requirements that can trample an individual, if necessary, to maximize utility, since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken into account, the individual is expendable. Counting pleasure and pain equally across individuals is a laudable proposal, but counting only pleasure and pain permits the grossest inequities among individuals and the [*509] trampling of the few in furtherance of the utility of the many . In sum, utilitarianism makes the status of any individual radically contingent. The individual's status will be preserved only so long as that status contributes to increasing total utility. Otherwise, the individual can be discarded.

Calculation of human life leads to no value to life and the zero point of the holocaust
Michael Dillon, Prof. Politics U-Lancaster, 04-1999, Political Theory, vol. 27, no. 2, p. 165 Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily

Page 41 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust . However liberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life . Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure." But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being.

Page 42 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**AT: Rimal**

Mutual coercion wont solve - they lack the knowledge and incentive to protect the environment and will perpetuate tyrannical coercion
Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court [Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor] Hardin's solution would be reasonable if it could be assumed that the majority is aware of threats to the commons and knows the measures needed to prevent its destruction. But this is the very knowledge which Hardin asserts individuals lack. Individual "rationality," or self-interest, Hardin says, is what leads to the destruction of the commons. How self- interested individuals are to be transformed into a public-spirited, wise majority is a problem Hardin does not address. The knowledge required to use the commons wisely will not result automatically from the majority's power to impose its will on the minority. Hardin also ignores the possibility that the majority might act un- justly; that is, coerce the minority for its own immediate pleasure rather than for the preservation of the commons and the well-being of future generations. That mutual coercion might degenerate into majority tyranny is a possibility that Hardin does not acknowledge, nor does his prescription provide a solution.46

An authoritarian government would fail to conserve resources

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court [Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor] Heilbroner's argument leads to a similar predicament. As pessimistic as he is in Inquiry Into the Human Prospect, he does see hope that the psychological need for authority-the "trait of obedience"-will be powerful enough to force men to acquiesce to authoritarian controls before it is too late.47 Heilbroner doubts that men will consent to the authority of reason or engage in discussion about the need for govern- ment. He predicates his only hope for survival on a government which presupposes the unwillingness if not the incapacity of men to exercise reason. For Heilbroner the Hobbesian fear of violent death at the hands of one's fellow man is the fear of extinction from environmental de- struction. In both cases salvation is sought in the coercive power of the Leviathan. Ironically, it was the unleashing of the passion for material abundance, legitimized by Hobbesian natural right, amplified by Locke, combined with the rejection of the classical commitment to reason and proper limits that caused the ecological crisis. One is left wondering what endowed the authoritarian power with the wisdom to rule which everyone else lacks. Indeed, none of the prescriptions for Leviathan includes measures to insure its wisdom or political skill. Surely, it takes more than brute force to make wise use of scarce resources, balance population with resources, and decide on appropriate levels and uses of technology. It will require skill to persuade modern men that the industrial capacities of the society ought not be developed without regard to the supply of natural resources, and to persuade them to exercise restraint when no immediately apparent reasons exist.

Their authors contradict themselves

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court [Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor] Ophuls' new position still traps him between competing political traditions. He wishes to affirm the basic materialism of Enlightenment thought, which attempts to explain the human situation in terms of biological survival and man's relationship to physical nature. At the same time he hopes for the revival of classical politics while yet refusing to affirm the classical faith in an objective good that can guide man in the selection of appropriate ends for his life.51 Like Rousseau and many contemporary thinkers, Ophuls wants the best of the classical and mod- ern worlds, irrespective of

Page 43 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

the wide epistemological gulf separating clas- sical Greek thought from the Enlightenment.

Page 44 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**AT: Coercion Bad**

Illegitimate resource acquisition justifies redistribution Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 109.

Nozick's theory cannot protect existing holdings from redistribution. But we still need to know how
Because most initial acquisition was in fact illegitimate, acquisition could have arisen legiamately. If we cannot answer that question, then we should not only postpone the implementation of Nozick's principle of transfer until historical titles are ascertained or rectified, we should reject it entirely. If there is no way that people can appropriate unowned resources for themselves without denying other people's claim to equal consideration, then Nozick's right of transfer never starts. Libertarians concede that extinction outweighs Murray Rothbard, libertarian, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY: THE LIBERTARIAN MANIFESTO, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263. accessed 4/20/06. Many libertarians are uncomfortable with foreign policy matters and prefer to spend their energies either on fundamental questions of libertarian theory or on such "domestic" concerns as the free market or privatizing postal service or garbage disposal. Yet an attack on war or a warlike foreign policy is of crucial importance to libertarians. There are two important reasons. One has become a cliche, but is all too true nevertheless: the overriding importance of preventing a nuclear holocaust. To all the long-standing reasons, moral and economic, against an interventionist foreign policy has now been added the imminent, ever-present threat of world destruction. If the world should be destroyed, all the other problems and all the other ismssocialism, capitalism, liberalism, or libertarianismwould be of no importance whatsoever. Redistribution is not an inherent affront to human dignity. As long as you believe helping others is good, redistribution doesnt threaten dignity Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p. 122-3. Finally, Nozick might argue that welfare redistribution denies people's dignity , and this dignity is crucial to treating people as equals (e.g. Nozick 1974: 334). Indeed Nozick often writes as if the idea that other people have claims on the fruits of my talents is an assault on my dignity. But this is implausible. One problem is that, Nozick often ties dignity to selfdetermination, so that it will be liberal regimes, not libertarian ones, which best promote each person's dignity. In any event, dignity is predicated on, or a byproduct of, other moral beliefs. We only feel something to be an attack on our dignity if we are already convinced that it is wrong. Redistribution will feel like an assault on dignity only if we believe it is morally wrong. If we believe instead that redistribution is a required part of treating people as equals, then it will serve to promote, rather than attack, people's sense of equal dignity. The only way their alternative can capture this is if their alternative is allowed to imagine a world in which individuals all become charitable givers. This is abusive private actor fiat. If the neg can imagine this they can just imagine world peace and solve all of our case impacts ANARCHO-CAPITALISM WOULD GIVE RISE TO REGIMES OF DOMINATION AND OPPRESSION, THIS POSES THE SINGLE GREATEST THREAT TO HUMAN EXISTENCE Noam Chomsky, philosopher, CHOMSKY ON ANARCHO-CAPITALISM,2004, p. P. http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/chomsky-on-ac.txt.

Page 45 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of "free contract" between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else. Nozick's concept of dignity requires access to resources Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p. 150. But, we have seen, the notion of dignity and agency that Nozick relies on, based on the idea of acting on one's conception of oneself, requires rights over resources as well as one's person. Having independent access to resources is important for our purposes, and hence our purposive freedom, but that argues for liberal equality not libertarianism.

Since initial acquisition was unjust, there are no legitimate entitlements

Jonathan Wolff, philosopher, ROBERT NOZICK, 1991, p. 141.
Second, initial appropriation remains undefended by Nozick, and this may well be because it is indefensible on libertarian grounds Allowing people virtually unlimited appropriation of the world will importantly restrict what others can do, thus undermining their liberty and self-ownership. Thus Nozick's concept of ownership itself generates conflicts, and so The project of allowing no restrictions upon ownership itself falls into incoherence. Taxation redistributes freedom rather than limiting it Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p, 147. As soon as we ask that question, Flew's equation of capitalism with freedom is undermined. For it is the owners of the resource who are made free to dispose of it, while non-owners are deprived of that freedom. Suppose that a large estate you would have inherited (in the absence of an inheritance tax) now becomes a public park, or a low-income housing project (as a result of the tax). The inheritance tax does not eliminate the freedom to use the property, rather it redistributes that freedom. If you inherit the estate, then you are free to dispose of it as you see fit, but if I use your backyard for my picnic or garden without your permission, then I am breaking the law, and the government will intervene and coercively deprive me of the freedom to continue. On the other hand, my freedom to use and enjoy the property is increased when the welfare state taxes your inheritance to provide me with affordable housing, or a public park. So the free market legally restrains my freedom, while the welfare state increases it.

Taxes don't violate rights

John Christman, Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Spring 1986, p.165. Also, as Kearl has pointed out, persons who gain entitlements through embedded labor may enter into a market, the function of which serves to reduce inefficiencies, reduce externalities, and lower negotiation costs which all increase the net social product produced from those entitlements without demanding extra labor from individual traders Thus, taxation which redistributes that extra product would amount to a limitation of the ownership rights of the traders over the commodities in question but not constitute an encroachment on the rights anyone has to her or his labor (since the product redistributed is from the increased efficiencies of the market mechanism, not increased labor. Violations of liberty dont justify rejecting welfare. Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 193. Naturally any opposition to the power of governments will meet with a certain sympathy from observers of the contemporary scene, and Nozick emphasizes the connection between his view and the fight against legal regulation of sexual behavior, drug use, and individual life styles. It is easy to develop an aversion to state power by looking at how actual states wield it. Their activities often include murder, torture, political imprisonment, censorship, conscription for aggressive war, and overthrowing the

Page 46 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

governments of other countries-not to mention tapping the phones, reading the mail, or regulating the sexual behavior of their own citizens. The objection to these abuses, however, is not that state power exists, but that it is used to do evil rather than good. Opposition to these evils cannot be translated into an ot jection to welfare, public education, or the graduated income tax. Welfare enhances self determination. Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 122. Libertarians claim that liberal welfare programmes, by limiting property-rights, unduly limit people's self-determination. Hence the removal of welfare redistribution programmes (Nozick), or their limitation to an absolute minimum (Fried), would be an improvement in terms of self-determination. But that is a weak objection. Redistributive programmes do restrict the self-determination of the well off to a limited degree. But they also give real control over their lives to people who previously lacked it. Liberal redistribution does not sacrifice self-determination for some other goal. Rather, it aims at a fairer distribution of the means required for self-determination. Libertarianism, by contrast, allows undeserved inequalities in that distribution-its concern with self-determination does not extend to a concern for ensuring the fair distribution of the conditions required for selfdetermination. In fact, it harms those who most need help in securing those conditions. If each person is to be treated as an end in herself, as Nozick says repeatedly, then I see no reason for preferring ;a libertarian regime to a liberal redistributive one. Redistribution is justified on utilitarian grounds Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 50. Utilitarianism has no problem in justifying a substantial amount of compulsory redistribution from the rich to the poor. We all recognize that $1,000 means far less to people earning $100,00 than it does to people trying to support a family on $6,000. Therefore in normal circumstances we increase the total happiness when we take from those with a lot and give to those with little. Therefore that is what we ought to do. For the utilitarian it is as simple as that. The result will not absolute equality of wealth. There may be some who need relatively little to be happier, and others whose expensive tastes require more to achieve the same level of happiness. If resources are adequate the utilitarian will give each enough to make him happy, and that will mean giving some more than others. Utilitarianism justifies the welfare state Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 19 81, p. 50-1. None of the arguments Nozick uses against Rawls is decisive when invoked against a utilitarian position. Utilitarianism gives a clear and plausible defense not merely of progressive taxation, welfare payments, and other methods of redistribution, but also of the general right of the state to perform useful functions beyond the protection of its citizens from force and fraud. Utilitarianism also provides an argument in defense of the claim behind Williams's argument for equality-that society should, so far as its resources allow, provide for the most important needs of its members. Extinction outweighs Murray Rothbard, libertarian, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY: THE LIBERTARIAN MANIFESTO, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263. accessed 4/20/06. Many libertarians are uncomfortable with foreign policy matters and prefer to spend their energies either on fundamental questions of libertarian theory or on such "domestic" concerns as the free market or privatizing postal service or garbage disposal. Yet an attack on war or a warlike foreign policy is of crucial importance to libertarians. There are two important reasons. One has become a cliche, but is all too true nevertheless: the overriding importance of preventing a nuclear holocaust. To all the long-standing reasons, moral and economic, against an interventionist foreign policy has now been added the imminent, ever-present threat of world destruction. If the world should be destroyed, all the other problems and all the other ismssocialism, capitalism, liberalism, or libertarianismwould be of no importance whatsoever.

Page 47 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Excess liberty creates a moral vacuum Robert Nisbet, Professor of Sociology, Columbia, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p. 20. For the conservative, individual freedom lies in the interstices of social and moral authority. Only because of the restraining and guiding effects of such authority does it become possible for human beings to sustain so liberal a political government as that which the Founding Fathers designed in this country and which flourished in England from the late seventeenth century on. Remove the social bonds, as the more zealous and uncompromising of libertarian individualists have proposed ever since William Godwin, and you emerge with, not a free but a chaotic people, not creative but impotent individuals. Human nature, Balzac correctly wrote, cannot endure a moral vacuum. Libertarianism would undermine the moral basis of the liberal state Walter Berns, Professor of Government, Georgetown, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p. 32-3. I think what I have said above is sufficient to illustrate my point: we were founded on liberal principles, but we used the public authority in nonliberal ways. We did so partly out of habit, I suppose, and partly because there were men--Horace Mann, the central figure in American public schooling, is a good example-who reflected on our situation and who knew that a liberal state could not be perpetuated with simply self-interested citizens. Men had to be taught to be public-spirited, to care for others, to be at least somewhat altruistic. In the course of time, and partly as the result of Supreme Court decisions affecting public education, public support of private education, and, of course, the censorship of obscenity, we have ceased to use the public authority in these ways. We can now be said to be living off the fat we built up in the past. I shudder to think of what would happen if we moved all the way from liberalism to libertarianism. Blanket statements about coercion are false, must evaluate coercion on a case by case basis Stein 98 [Herbert, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was on the board of contributors of The Wall Street Journal. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Nixon and President Ford. In the 1970s, he was a professor of economics at the University of Virginia, What I think: Essays on Economics, Politics, and Life. 1998 P. 7] Today's concern is mainly about coercion by the state. We have many government regulations today, mainly related to health and the environment, that we did not have fifty years ago. We have fewer regulations about international trade, agriculture, transportation, and banking than we did then. I don't know whether there is more regulation now than there was. More important, it is essential to have some feeling about the coerciveness of government coercion. It is one thing to be prevented from producing an automobile that emits more than a specified amount of carbon dioxide by a regulation enacted pursuant to a democratic legislative process, applied objectively and subject to judicial review. It is quite a different thing to be thrown into the Lubyanka prison and shot for malting a critical remark about the dictator. I agree that much of current government regulation is unnecessary and inefficient. I admire the people who diligently analyze all regulation and point out the follies that they find. They are engaged in the constant tidying up needed for a good society, but they are not carrying on a revolution

Turn: Autonomy bad Gaylin and Jennings, 1996, William, psychoanalytic medicine professor at Columbia, president of Hastings Center and Bruce, director of Center for Humans and Nature, The Perversion of Autonomy: the proper uses of coercion and constraints in a liberal society. Pages 5-6. New York, NY, The Free Press, 1996)
The dark side of the culture of autonomy is becoming increasingly apparent: something akin to decadence is setting in. Individualism, privacy, and rights claims are sometimes so overblown that they become caricatures of themselves. The individualistic philosophy that has been the backbone of political liberalism and that protects the person from the power of the state has become hyperextended into a kind of social liberalism that sees power, and nothing but power, everywhere, and that casts the same acids of suspicion ; mistrust on the family and civil associations that political liberals have traditionally reserved for the government. Extending the claims of autonomy as America has been doing recently is dangerous for two reasons. First, it invites a politically; socially reactionary

Page 48 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

backlash that could threaten civil liberties across the board, and not just the exaggerated ones. Equally dangerous, more subtle and insidious, is the possibility that it will come to undermine the very social and psychic infrastructure upon which social order, and hence the conditions for autonomy itself, rests. The social infrastructure to which we refer consists primarily of the family and the various civic institutions through which individuals live as parents, friends, and neighbors; as church, synagogue, or mosque members; as volunteers, professionals, and citizens. The psychic infrastructure endangered by the culture of autonomy is those processes of childrearing, socialization, and moral development that create the motivational basis for responsible conduct in the social emotions of shame, guilt, pride, and conscience. Maintaining these foundations of social order requires respect for authority as well as respect for freedom; it requires institutional power and restraint as well as selfexpression and independence.

Page 49 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**AT: I Solve Future Coercion**

Coercion snowballs Each increase becomes easier to justify. The only reason why we do not realize it is because the government uses the ploy of Altruism to take it step by step. As each program fails, it becomes necessary to move another step closer to more coercion. We are on a road to oppression. Linear every increase in coercive power decreases human dignity. Rothbard, 70 [Murray, academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and distinguished professor at UNLV, Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism and the Division of Labor, http://www.mises.org/fipandol/fipsec1.asp]
Individual human beings are not born or fashioned with fully formed knowledge, values, goals, or personalities; they must each form their own values and goals, develop their personalities, and learn about themselves and the world around them. Every man must have freedom , must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices , for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human. In a sense, even the most frozen and totalitarian civilizations and societies have allowed at least a modicum of scope for individual choice and development. Even the most monolithic of despotisms have had to allow at least a bit of "space" for freedom of choice, if only within the interstices of societal rules. The freer the society, of course, the less has been the interference with

individual actions, and the greater the scope for the development of each individual. The freer the society, then, the greater will be the variety and the diversity among men, for the more fully developed will be every man's uniquely individual personality. On the other hand, the more despotic the society, the more restrictions on the freedom of the individual , the more uniformity there will be among men and the less the diversity, and the less developed will be the unique personality of each and every man. In a profound sense, then, a despotic society prevents its members from being fully human. Steps toward state power are steps toward tyranny Browne 95, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, 95 (Harry Browne, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, 1995, Why Government Doesn't Work, p.65-66) Each increase in coercion is easier to justify . If its right to force banks to report your
finances to the government, then its right to force you to justify the cash in your pocket at the airport. If its right to take property from the rich and give it to the poor, then its right to take your property for the salt marsh harvest mouse. As each government program fails, it becomes necessary to move another step closer to complete control over our lives. As one thing leads to another as coercion leads to more coercion what can we look forward to? Will it become necessary to force you to justify everything you do to any government agent who thinks you might be a threat to society? Will it become necessary to force your children to report your personal habits to their teachers or the police? Will it become necessary to force your neighbors to monitor your

Page 50 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

activities? Will it become necessary to force you to attend a reeducation program to learn how to be more sensitive, or how not to discriminate, or how to avoid being lured into taking drugs, or how to recognize suspicious behavior? Will it become necessary to prohibit some of your favorite foods and ban other pleasures, so you dont fall ill or have an accident putting a burden on Americas health-care system? Some of these things such as getting children to snitch on their parents or ordering people into reeducation programs are already happening in America. The others have been proposed and are being considered seriously. History has shown that each was an important step in the evolution of the worlds worst tyrannies. We move step by step further along the road to

oppression because each step seems like such a small one. And because were told that each step will give us something alluring in return less crime, cheaper health care, safety from terrorists, an end to discrimination even if none of the previous steps delivered on its promise. And because the people who promote these steps are well-meaning reformers who would use force only to build a better world.
Coercion isnt justified to prevent coercion this mindset leads to war
Murray

Rothbard, Academic Vice President of the Ludwig Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies, THE ETHICS

OF LIBERTY, 1982, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/fifteen.asp DOA 5/20/06. EACH STATE HAS AN assumed monopoly of force over a given territorial area, the areas varying in size in accordance with different historical conditions. Foreign policy, or foreign relations , may be defined as the relationship between any particular State, A, and other States, B, C, D, and the inhabitants living under those States. In the ideal moral world, no States would exist, and hence, of course, no foreign policy could exist. Given the existence of States, however, are there, any moral principles

that libertarianism can direct as criteria for foreign policy? The answer is broadly the same as in the libertarian moral criteria directed toward the domestic policy of States, namely to reduce the degree of coercion exercised by States over individual persons as much as possible. Before considering inter-State
actions, let us return for a moment to the pure libertarian stateless world where individuals and their hired private protection agencies strictly confine their use of violence to the defense of person and property against violence . Suppose that, in this world, Jones finds that he or his property is being aggressed against by Smith. It is legitimate, as we have seen, for Jones to repel this invasion by the use of defensive violence. But, now we must ask: is it within the right of Jones

to commit aggressive violence against innocent third parties in the course of his legitimate defense against Smith? Clearly the answer must be No. For the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent men is absolute; it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It is wrong, and criminal, to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or is starving, or is defending oneself against a third mans attack. We may understand and sympathize with the
motives in many of these cases and extreme situations. We (or, rather, the victim or his heirs) may later mitigate the guilt if the criminal comes to trial for punishment, but we cannot evade the judgment that this aggression is still a criminal act, and one which the victim has every right to repel, by violence if necessary. In short, A aggresses against B because C is threatening, or aggressing against, A. We may understand Cs higher culpability in this whole procedure, but we still label this aggression by A as a criminal act which B has every right to repel by violence. To be more concrete , if Jones finds that his

property is being stolen by Smith, Jones has the right to repel him and try to catch him, but Jones has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more) a criminal aggressor as Smith is. The same criteria hold if Smith and Jones each have men on his side, i.e., if war breaks out between Smith and
his henchmen and Jones and his bodyguards. If Smith and a group of henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Joness cause. But Jones and his men have no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of their just war: to steal others property in order to finance their pursuit, to conscript others into their posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of their struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones and his men should do any of these things, they become criminals as fully as Smith, and they too become subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality. In fact if Smiths crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to catch him, or should kill innocent people in the pursuit, then Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft. Suppose that Jones, in the course of his "just war" against the ravages of Smith, should kill some innocent people; and suppose that he should declaim, in defense of this murder, that he was simply acting on the slogan, give me liberty or give me death. The absurdity of this defense should be evident at once, for the issue is not whether Jones was willing to risk death personally in his defensive

struggle against Smith; the issue is whether he was willing to kill other innocent people in pursuit of his legitimate end. For Jones was in truth acting on the completely indefensible slogan: Give me liberty or give them deathsurely a far less noble battle cry. War, then, even a just defensive war, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals themselves. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion. It has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons

Page 51 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is only a difference of degree rather than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one. But a particularly libertarian reply is that
while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even conventional aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification. This is why the old cliche no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner. Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. Indeed, of all the aspects of liberty, such disarmament becomes the highest political good that can be pursued in the modern world. For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny so mass murder

indeed murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itselfis the worst crime that any man could possibly commit. And that crime is now all too possible. Human dignity outweighs Utilitarianism fails to protect rights

Loren Lomasky, philosophy professor, University of Minnesota, PERSONS, RIGHTS, AND THE MORAL COMMUNITY, 1987, p. 18. It might prove to be the case that by violating the rights of one person, five equally grave rights violations will be averted. If so, then a utilitarianism of rights will endorse the one rights-violation act while a side constraint account will reject it. But how can this rejection be presented as anything other than a single-minded fanaticism that devours its indebted beneficiary in the case of preserving it? You maintain that the protection of rights is of great, even transcendent value. Very well then more upholding of rights is better then less. If one violation is necessary to prevent many others your own principles ought to lead you to prefer the former. Yet you obstinately resist. How is this criticism to be countered? The problem that has been identified is that rights may prove to be inconvient. They set up barriers which neither private individuals nor governmental bodies may breach at their pleasure. To be sure, that may often be advantageous in a morally unproblematic way. Human beings are notoriously susceptible to temptations to pursue their narrow self-interest at the expense of the well-being others. Were sympathy and beneficences the strongest and most universally shared emotions, it might be feasible to do without barriers of any kind moral rules, rights, legally enforceable obligationsand rely instead on the promptings of individuals hearts to secure a decently livable life for all. Unfortunately, the animal we are is much more recognizable in the Hobbesian caricatures than in this idyllic alternative. So incursions must be prevented if we are to attain a tolerably decent measure of sociability. By recognizing each individual as a bearer of rights all are afforded some protection against the predations that would otherwise ensue. Even when arguments for overriding rights are couched in the most high-minded terms, faced with referenced to the general welfare or the need for mental sacrifice in a just cause one may suspect that the rhetoric is meant to yield the most for power or personal attainment History is a textbook for cynics. Having read from it, we may be prompted to insist on undeviating respect for rights, no matter how beckoning are inducements to the contrary, because we have no confidence in peoples ability to discriminate accurately and dispassionately between incursions that will maximize public good and those that will debase it. If we are to err either on the side of too much flexibility or excess dignity, betterfar better the later.
Non-absolute rights fails to protect freedom. Tibor Machan, Philosophy Professor, Auburn,INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR RIGHTS, 1989, pp. 119-21.

Page 52 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

all Gewirth and others do is invite some other set of principles we will have to turn to when we need to make principled decisions about
By not treating basic human rights as basic, what people are free or not free to do. Or, more likely, they leave the matter to the discretion of those who sit as judges in the courts. Indeed, the current legal climate, in which any strong political interest group can secure the protection of some alleged right to well-being to be provided with medical care, child-care facilities, a museum, the preservation of an historical building, a subsidy, or the imposition of a tariff upon a foreign import business suggests what can be expected of a welfare state, a system that embraces both the limited right to liberty and the limited right to welfare. The resulting situation is a kind of Hobbesian war of special interests against all other special interests, each demanding the protection of its alleged liberty or welfare rights. Gewirth, like Gregory Viastos before him, seems to forget that rights are basic principles of political life and that making them inherently unstable deprives them of their essential character. To make rights nonabsolute within the legal context is to open a Pandoras box of bureaucratic arbitrariness producing the very situation that the moral-political principles we know as human rights were explicitly designed to render impermissible. Instead of treating human rights as contextually deontological, as principles rather than piecemeal rules of thumb, Gewirth and Dworkin are inviting the elitism that utilitarianism requires that is, certain leaders whose value-judgments must be imposed on the rest whenever they find it intuitively certain or in some other fashion warranted to override basic human, individual rights. There is a snowballing effect arising from this kind of utilitarian thinking. Such thinking ought to be avoided and alternatives to solving the problems for which the violations of rights seemed to be justified should be sought.

Page 53 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**AT: Im not excessively coercive**

Every justification for coercion, no matter how legitimate, conditions us to accept further limitations on our liberty. Machan 02, Research Fellow @ Hoover Institution, Prof. Emeritus Dep.
Philosophy at Auburn U, (TIbor R. Machan, Research Fellow @ Hoover Institution, Prof. Emeritus Dep. Philosophy at Auburn U, 2002, Liberty and Hard Cases, pp. xvii-xix)

We are not unfamiliar with the hazards of the slippery slope in our own personal lives. If a man hits his child in some alleged emergency, the very act of doing so may render him more amenable to smacking the kid under more typical circumstances . Slapping someone who is hysterical may make it easier to slap someone who is only very upset or recalcitrant or annoying or just too slow fetching the beer from the refrigerator. Similarly, a minor breach of trust can beget more of the same, a little white lie here and there can beget lying as a routine, and so forth.

Moral habits promote a principled course of action even in cases where bending or breaking the principle might not seem too harmful to other parties or to our own integrity. On the other hand, granting ourselves reasonable exceptions tends to weaken our moral habits; as we seek to rationalize past action, differences of kind tend to devolve into differences of degree. Each new exception provides the precedent for the next, until we lose our principles altogether and doing what is right becomes a matter of happenstance and mood rather than of loyalty to enduring values. The same is true of public action . When citizens of a country delegate to government , by means of democratic and judicial processes, the power to forge paternalistic public policies such as banning drug abuse,
imposing censorship, restraining undesirable trade, and supporting desirable trade, the bureaucratic and police actions increasingly rely on the kind of violence and intrusiveness that no free citizenry ought to experience or foster. And the bureaucrats and the police tell themselves, no doubt, that what theyre doing is perfectly just and right. Consider, for starters, that when no one complains about a crimebecause it is not perpetrated against someone but rather involves breaking a paternalistic lawto even detect the crime requires methods that are usually invasive. Instead of charges being brought by wronged parties, phone tapping, snooping, anonymous reporting, and undercover work are among the dubious means that lead to prosecution. Thus the role of the police shifts from protection and peacekeeping to supervision, regimentation, and reprimand. No wonder, then, that officers of the law are often caught brutalizing suspects instead of merely apprehending them. Under a paternalistic regime, their goals have multiplied, and thus the means they see as necessary to achieving those goals multiply too. The same general

danger of corrupting a free societys system of laws may arise when government is called on to deal with calamities. There is the perception , of course, that in such circumstances the superior powers of government are indispensable, given the immediateness of the danger. Coercive efforts fail and snowball into massive atrocities every invasion of liberty must be forcefully rejected.
Harry Browne, former Libertarian presidential candidate, executive director of public policy at American Liberty Foundation, editor of Liberty Magazine, financial advisor and economist, 19 95, Why Government Doesnt Work, p. 66-7

Their better world never materializes because it depends upon coercion to succeed. And coercion never improves society. So government is always promising to do something thats impossible such as coercing people to stop taking drugs or abandon their prejudices. When the coercion doesnt work, the politicians must impose harsher and harsher measures

Page 54 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

in order to show theyre serious about the problem and, inevitably, we come to the abuses we saw in the preceding chapter such as property seizures and no-knock invasions of your home . These arent legal mistakes in need of reform. They are the inevitable result of asking government to use coercion to create a better world. Each increase in coercion is easier to justify . If its right to force
banks to report your finances to the government, then its right to force you to justify the cash in your pocket at the airport. If its right to take property from the rich to give to the poor, then its right to take your property for the salt marsh harvest mouse. As each government program fails, it becomes necessary to move another step closer to complete control over our lives . As one thing leads to another as coercion leads to more coercion what can Will it become necessary to force you to justifywe look forward to? everything you do to any government agent who thinks you might be a threat to Will it become necessary to force your children to report your society? Will it become necessary topersonal habits to their teachers or the police? Will it become necessary toforce your neighbors to monitor your activities? force you to attend a reeducation program to learn how to be more sensitive, or how not to discriminate, or how to avoid being lured into taking drugs, or how Will it become necessary to prohibit some to recognize suspicious behavior? of your favorite foods and ban other pleasures, so you dont fall ill or have an accident putting a burden on Americas health-care system? Some of these things such as getting children to snitch on their parents or ordering people into reeducation programs already are happening in America. The others have been proposed and are being considered seriously. History has shown that each was an important step in the evolution of the worlds worst tyrannies. Uncompromising stance on libertarian principles is key. Edward Romar, Lecturer in Management U. Mass. Boston College of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Noble Markets: The Noble/Slave Ethic in Hayeks Free Market Capitalism, 85:57-66, 2009, Springer Like Nietzsche, Hayek, though acutely aware of the importance of ethics in a world based upon maximum freedom, did not develop a complete ethical theory to support the functioning of free market capitalism.

Like Nietzsche, Hayek does not claim to know the meaning of morality or, in Nietzsches case, good and evil.3 Beyond support for the principles needed to anchor the functioning of free markets and the institutions needed to support them, Hayek left it to individual actors to develop their own moral principles, so long as these did not contradict those needed to support free markets. It was not his intention to prescribe a detailed ethical system to support free market capitalism because to do so would violate his principle of freedom and curtail the creativity of markets. Yet, the world described by Hayek is one where individuals have substantial power to control their destiny and seek their own level, a world where talent and risk dominate, a world governed by self interest, a world where individuals have few
responsibilities to others, and a world driven by competition where reward goes to the successful. He described a world open to Nietzschean ethics. In The Road to Serfdom (1994) and The Fatal Conceit (1988)

Hayek presents a powerful and eloquent attack on twentieth century totalitarianism. In The Road to Serfdom he argues that the socialist experiment must inevitably lead to totalitarianism and the complete elimination of individual liberty and freedom. In the name of principles of social justice, society installs a system of centralized social and economic planning, substitutes collective decisions for individual ones, and requires each person to adopt an identical and complete set of social values . Furthermore, to achieve its objectives, the socialist state must determine in great

Page 55 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

detail the allocation of resources and insure that each individual performs precisely his/her assigned role. Planned economies must substitute collectivist thought, values and behavior and eliminate any room for individualism. Hayek labels this weltanschauung the fatal conceit. It is fatal because it cannot achieve its objectives and it is conceit because it overestimates the role of human rationality and mans ability to control social and economic processes. He sees constructivist continental European philosophic thought, primarily Cartesian rationalism, as the source of this error (Hayek, 1948, pp. 910; 1973, pp. 912). This philosophic tradition argues that man can understand the world completely and , therefore, social and economic processes can be understood completely and molded to fit human will. Hayek considers this a foolish, self-serving and arrogant position.4 Certainly, humans have a powerful intellect and reasoning skills. Human reason, though
powerful, has its limitations and cannot completely understand with any certainty how human institutions and social processes evolved and how they operate. He views the evolution and development of human institutions, be they money, markets, or ethics as spontaneous, self-generating orders. Systems, if you will, evolving gradually, accidentally, on the basis of incremental change; not as a result of human design. He labels this between instinct and reason. Humans can understand to some extent how human society evolved from clan based societies into modern, complex ones based upon individualism and abstract rules,

We can tweak the social and moral systems but cannot engineer them. Man can modify social processes and their underlying ethical foundations; but, in the final analysis, we must accept them as is.5 Since social process and institutions obey their own set of evolutionary principles which man cannot know completely, it is best for these to evolve on their own, without much human interference. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law,
but we cannot know the processes or mechanisms of this evolution in sufficient detail to bend them to our will .

Legislation and Liberty (3 vols., 1973, 1976, 1979) Hayek develops his ideas about the proper

The fundamental principle of social organization must be based upon the principle of liberty, which may be defined as that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society6 (Hayek, 1960, p. 11). Hayeks conception of the free, just and moral society is not one where there is a
principles of economic and political organizations and their underlying ethical foundations.

complete absence of coercion but where coercion is limited to those situations where it is required to prevent a reduction in the liberty of others. Society may use coercion to protect private property and to secure individual rights and conditions which allow each person the maximum amount of personal freedom to make choices of their own. This is accomplished through a limited set of abstract rules that apply equally to all which protect private or several property, enforce contracts, and prevent fraud and deception (Hayek, 1960, pp. 140, 141, 143, 155). While Hayek is concerned with just and moral principles of economic,

he views attempts to achieve distributive justice as the root cause of the immorality brought about by planned economies. In order to achieve the desired goals, human behavior must be planned in minute detail, thereby eliminating freedom of choice. Achieving collectivist goals mean that there can be no individual ones. Organizing to control every outcome means there cannot be individual choice. Social control
political and social organization,

means there will be little individual control and it is all doomed because humans cannot understand completely the mechanisms

The only solution must be the free market and the minimal organizational principles required for it to operate efficiently. Since these are few and well known, it will be easier to succeed and
needed to reach their objectives.

Page 56 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

create a just and moral society. Allow the market free reign and the just and moral society will follow according to its own principles .
Allowing any realm of government control quickly snowballs to totalitarian collectivism. Jack Douglas, Prof. Emeritus Soc. UC San Diego, The Myth of the Welfare State, 19 91, p. 40, Google Print

The logic of totalitarian collectivism is simple , brutal, and entirely consistent. Once a people has decided--whether actively or, more commonly, by default, by not actively stopping them--to allow politicians to decide by legislation, and without severe constraints of custom, moral principle and constitutional law, what is right and wrong in such basic realms of life as economic property rights, then there is no longer any logical constraint upon their exercise of power in all other realms of life . As classical
liberals saw, even in the vastly more simple and self-contained society of the eighteenth century,

without inviolate property rights no other rights can long be sustained. The government that controls our property rights must ultimately control our right to the pursuit of happiness, our right to free speech and to the publication
of that speech, our right to take a spouse or have children, our right to work and choose an occupation,

our right to life itself--for all things of life are ultimately dependent upon material goods and, thus, upon the controls of those goods we call property rights. The government that has the right to legislate gas prices in Texas, or income redistribution nationwide, has every logical right to dictate research standards in physics, hiring standards in sociology, wage rates for black teenagers in New York, parental care standards for all parents, the right to bear children, the right to redefine life, and--the right to everything. When the American people, tempted by the ancient enabling
myth of the welfare state, used the power of their votes to give the politicians and, by inaction, the courts the power to legislate away and rule away our ancient economic rights--our freedoms from unconstrained government control of our property for the common welfare--they unknowingly gave them power to legislate away and rule away all our ancient rights. Almost a hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt, one of the first heroes of the rationalistic state planning of American progressivism proclaimed, "Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it." The insidious implications of that "to whatever degree" for the counterrevolution against the System of Natural Liberty became clear only

but for almost a century now the American state has been pursuing that relentless logic of totalitarian collectivism at an accelerating rate .
slowly,

Page 57 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**AT: Rawls**

Rawls conception of rights flawed fails to explain why small incursions on liberty would threaten citizenship. Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003. Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, No. 3, Pg 5. Project MUSE.
Up to this point, Rawls has said nothing about the priority of the basic liberties; rather, he has focused exclusively on their equal provision. Only at the end of his main presentation of the Self-Respect Argument does he briefly discuss the Priority of Liberty: When it is the position of equal citizenship that answers to the need for status, the precedence of the equal liberties becomes all the more necessary. Having chosen a conception of justice that seeks to eliminate the significance of relative economic and social advantages as supports for mens selfconfidence, it is essential that the priority of liberty be firmly maintained (p. 478).These two sentences provide a good illustration of what I earlier called the Inference Fallacy: Rawls tries to derive the lexical priority of the basic liberties from the central importance of an interest they supportin this case, an interest in securing self-respect for all citizens. Without question, the Self-Respect Argument makes a strong case for assigning the basic liberties a high priority: otherwise, economic and social inequalities might reemerge as the primary determinants of status and therefore of self-respect. It does not explain, however, why lexical priority is needed. Why, for example, would very small restrictions on the basic liberties threaten the social basis of self-respect, so long as they were equally applied to all citizens? Such restrictions would involve no subordination and, being very small, would be unlikely to jeopardize the central importance of equal citizenship as a determinant of status.

Rawls fails to provide warrants for the absolute preservation of basic liberties over other ends. Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003. Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, No. 3, Pgs 20-21. Project MUSE.
Although Rawls briefly discusses and defends the Priority of Liberty early in Political Liberalism (PL, pp. 41, 74, 76), his most sustained arguments for it are to be found late in the book, in the lecture entitled The Basic Liberties and Their Priority. All of these arguments are framed in terms of Justice as Fairness rather than liberal political conceptions of justice more generally, a point to which we will return below. The three arguments for the Priority of Liberty that we identified in Theory can also be found in Political Liberalism, and both their strengths and weaknesses carry over into the new context.18 At least two new arguments can be found, however, arguments that I will refer to as the Stability Argument and the Well-Ordered Society Argument, respectively. As I will now show, both of these arguments are further illustrations of the Inference Fallacy. The Stability Argument has a structure similar to that of the Self- Respect Argument. In it, Rawls notes the great advantage to everyones conception of the good of a . . . stable scheme of cooperation, and he goes on to assert that Justice as Fairness is the most stable conception of justice . . . and this is the case importantly because of the basic liberties and the priority assigned to them.Taking the second point first, Rawls never makes clear why the Priority of Liberty is necessary for stability, as opposed to strongly contributory to it. Very small restrictions on the basic liberties would seem unlikely to threaten it, and some types of restrictions (e.g., imposing fines for the advocacy of violent revolution or race hatred) might actually enhance it. Even if we assume, however, that the Priority of Liberty is necessary for stability, this fact is not enough to justify it: as highly valued as stability is, sacrificing the basic liberties that make it possible may be worthwhile if such a sacrifice is

Page 58 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

necessary to advance other highly valued ends. Pointing out the high priority of stability, in other words, is insufficient to justify the lexical priority of the basic liberties that support it only the lexical priority of stability would do so, yet Rawls provides no argument for why stability should be so highly valued.

Rawls conception of personal freedom cannot resolve utilitarian democratic ideals. Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003. Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, No. 3, Pgs 22-23. Project MUSE.
Rawls speculates that the narrower the differences between the liberal conceptions when correctly based on fundamental ideas in a democratic public culture . . . the narrower the range of liberal conceptions defining the focus of the consensus.25 By correctly based, Rawls appears to mean at least two things: first, that the conceptions should be built on the more central of these fundamental ideas; second, that these ideas should be interpreted in the right way (PL, pp. 16768). For example, Rawls asserts that his conception of the person as free and equal is central to the democratic ideal (PL, p. 167). This idea is in competition with other democratic ideas, however (e.g., the idea of the common good as it is understood by classical republicans), as well as with other interpretations of the same idea (e.g., the utilitarian understanding of equality as the equal consideration of each persons welfare). A necessary condition, then, for Justice as Fairness to be the focus of an overlapping consensus would be for adherents of all reasonable comprehensive doctrines to endorse this idea, along with the interpretation Rawls gives it, as more central to the democratic ideal than other fundamental ideas. If they were to accept not only this idea but also its companion idea of society as a fair system of cooperation, then the procedures of political constructivism (including the Original Position) would presumably lead them to select Justice as Fairness as their political conception of justice.

Page 59 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**AT: Egalitarianism / Equality / Distribution Good**

1. Distributive justice leads to global poverty

Carl Knight P.h.d International Studies 2008, 34, 713733, British International Studies Association A pluralistic approach to global poverty But Rawls masterpiece also presents some obvious obstacles to global poverty alleviation. A Theory of Justice explicitly states that the theory is only to be applied within a society . Furthermore,
in those few places where the book oers some tangential discussion of transdomestic justice, it is characterised as a question of the justice of the law of nations and of relations between states.16 Hence, in a discussion occasioned by his analysis of conscription and conscientious refusal, Rawls suggests that one may extend the interpretation of the original position and think of the parties as representatives of dierent nations who must choose together the fundamental principles to adjudicate conicting claims among states.17 He com- ments that this procedure is fair among nations, and that there would be no surprises in the outcome, since the principles chosen would . . . be familiar ones ensuring treaty compliance, describing the conditions for just wars, and granting rights of self-defence and self-determination

the latter being a right of a people to settle its own aairs without the intervention of foreign powers.18 This is, then, a thoroughly nationalist conception of justice: social justice applies only within a state or nation. Rawlss radical principles of distributive justice, such as the dierence principle, would only hold transdomestically where, improbably, states had signed treaties to this eect. Given that such wide ranging internationally redistributive treaties have never been signed, A Theory of Justice provided a rationale for the Western general publics impression that their duties to the global poor are, at most, those of charity. Rawls full expression of his views in this area came nearly three decades later in The Law of Peoples.19 Here Rawls again uses the notion of a transdomestic original position, arguing that it is an appropriate instrument for selecting laws to govern relations between both liberal societies and
decent non-liberal societies, especially those which are decent hierarchical societies, being non-aggressive, recognising their citizens human rights, assigning widely acknowledged additional rights and duties, and being backed by genuine and not unreasonable beliefs among judges and other ocials that the law embodies a common good idea of justice.20 This Society of Peoples would agree to be guided by eight principles constituting the basic charter of the Law of Peoples.21

2. Focusing exclusively on the poor stigmatizes the issueno solvency

Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Louisiana State, January 1999 Misfortune, welfare reform, and right-wing egalitarianism
Yet nobody in the welfare debate, as far as I know, invoked the Charles Murray of The Bell Curve rather than the Murray of Losing Ground. Moreover, while many right-wing arguments are neutral about questions of class distinctions, others actually seem to be grounded in a kind of relational egalitarianism. For example, conservatives sometimes argue that welfare stigmatizes recipients. As we have already heard Gingrich (1995, 71) say, "The welfare state reduces the poor from citizens to clients." This argument raises a serious issue for relational egalitarians : How can the poor be given material aid with- out others thinking less of them? The stigma of being on the

receiving end of welfare may create the very divisions in society that the relational egalitarian seeks to avoid. If government programs designed to help the poor stand in the way of citizens relating to each other non-hierarchically, maybe we should abolish such programs in the interest of a society in which citizens stand as equals.

3. Egalitarianism does not equate society Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
Egalitarianism forces persons who exceed the average, in the respect deemed by the theorist to be relevant, to surrender, insofar as possible, the amount by which they exceed that average to persons below it. On the face of it, therefore, egalitarianism is incompatible with common good, in empowering some people over others: roughly, the unproductive over the productive. The formers interests are held to merit the imposition of force over others, whereas the interests of the productive do not. Yet producers, as such, merely produce; they dont use force against

Page 60 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

others. Thus egalitarianism denies the central rule of rational human association. What could be thought to justify this apparent bias in favour of the unproductive, the needy, the sick, against the productive the healthy, the ingenious, the energetic? What are the latter supposed to have done to the former to have merited the egalitarians impositions? The answer cant be, Oh, nothing theyre just unlucky! or We dont like people like that! A rational social theory must appeal to commonvalues. By definition, those have not been respected when a measure is forced upon certain people against their own values.

4. Principles of justice cement the political sphereerode the possibility for real change William W. Sokoloff -- PhD Candidate @ Amherst. 2005 Between Justice and
Legality: Derrida on Decision, Political Research Quarterly, http://prq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/58/2/341
In Rawlss (1993: 157) universe, consensus is cemented into the political founding and overrides all other issues. 26 Anything that triggers political conflict is excluded from the public sphere: A liberal view removes from the political agenda the most divisive issues, serious contention about which must undermine the bases of social cooperation. Difficult issues may be interesting but, for Rawls, they are not the stuff of politics. They threaten consensus and must be excluded or contained in the private sphere. Politics is about tinkering, not controversy. The only truly political moment in Rawlss work, then, is laying the ground for justice as fairness in the original posi- tion. Once the principles of justice as fairness are established, however, the political sphere is essentially closed. Efforts to re-open the foundation are a threat to political stability. The range of acceptable political issues is framed by principles that are not up for debate. Hence, citizens are prevented from pursuing those modes of civic involvement that would open the political sphere to real contestation. Given the imperative of consensus, the regime must protect its political founding from interrogation. Narrowing the range of acceptable political issues exacts a high cost from citizens. Space for dissent is eliminated. The range of political possibilities is restricted to one (and only one) that will be fixed once and for all (Rawls 1993: 161). Once the principles of justice are instituted, only the support of the status quo is possible (Alejandro 1998: 144). For Rawls, all citizens affirm the same public conception of justice (1993: 39). Public discussion about alternative political possibilities is not necessary.31 Since a critical disposi- tion toward the founding moment of justice as fairness would risk destroying consensus, it is better to treat it as a monument before which one genuflects. Rawls, however, does not purge all conflict from his model of politics in the name of consensus. Some level of reasonable disagreement is permitted in his liberal utopia. It arises from the burdens of judgment. The causes of these burdens are formidable:

5. Inequality inevitablecapitalism Stuart White 2k, ReviewArticle: Social Rights and the Social Contract
Political Theory and the New Welfare Politics Cambridge University Press, B.J.Pol.S. 30, 50753
How Much Equality of Opportunity Does Fair Reciprocity Require? I have presented only a very intuitive account of the conditions of fair reciprocity; I have not formally presented a full conception of distributive justice and demonstrated how each condition follows from this conception, something one might attempt in a lengthier analysis. However, I do wish to examine one general philosophical issue that arises when we come to think about the conditions of fair reciprocity. Assume that distributive justice is centrally about some form of equal opportunity. The notion of equality of opportunity can, of course, be understood in a number of different ways. But assume, for the moment, that we understand it in the radical form defended in contemporary egalitarian theories of distributive justice.40 Equal opportunity in this sense requires, inter alia, that we seek to prevent or correct for inequalities in income attributable to differences in natural ability and for inequalities in capability due to handicaps that people suffer through no fault of their own. The question I wish to consider can then be put like this: How far must society satisfy the demands of equal opportunity before we can plausibly say that all of its members have

Page 61 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

obligations under the reciprocity principle? One view, which I shall call the full compliance view, is that the demands of equal opportunity must be satised in full for it to be true that all citizens have obligations to make productive contributions to the community under the reciprocity principle. The intuition is that people can have no obligation to contribute in a signicant way to a community that is not (in all other relevant respects) fully just at least if they are amongst those who are disadvantaged by their societys residual injustices. Reciprocity kicks in, as it were, only when the terms of social co-operation are fair, where fairness requires (inter alia) full satisfaction of the demands of equal opportunity. If equal opportunity is understood in our assumed sense, however, then this full compliance view effectively removes the ideal of fair reciprocity from the domain of real-world politics. For there is no chance that any advanced capitalist (or, for that matter, post-capitalist) society will in the near future satisfy equal opportunity, in our assumed sense, in full. And so, following the full compliance view, we should, if we are egalitarians in the assumed sense, simply abandon the idea that there can be anything like a universal civic obligation to make a productive contribution to the community.

Hierarchies are inevitable even after the redistribution of wealth Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
Egalitarians can only defend their view by reference to values that many or most people do not have. People below the mid-point of the proposed redistributional scale will, of course, have some reason to rejoice at their unearned egalitarian windfalls temporarily. Meanwhile, people from whom they are wrested have the opposite motivation, so common good is out the window from the start. Nor can equality relevantly be held to be an objective or an absolute value

a value in itself, that doesnt need to be held byanybody (except the theorist himself, of course). That is intuitional talk, which has already been dismissed. Do real people (as opposed to theorists) care about equality as such? No. They want better and more reliable food on the table, nicer tables to put it on, TVs, theatres, motorcars, books, medical services, churches, courses in Chinese history, and so on, indefi- nitely. Equality is
irrelevant to these values: how much of any or all of them anyone has is logically independent of how much anyone else has. People are rarely free of envy, to be sure. Most people would like to be better than others in some way and some will pay others to let them look down on them. But few will make themselves worse off in order to make some other people equally badly off. Values that can be improved by human activity are not independent in any other

way, though, for production is cooperative, requiring arrangements agreed to by a great many people work- ers, financiers, engineers, customers. Nobody can attain to wealth, insofar as the free market obtains, without others likewise benefiting. These are truisms, though I am aware that they will be seen by many readers as ideological even at the present time, when the absurdities of alternative views of economics have been so completely exposed.13

Equality is impossibleenvy Jon Mandle 2k Reviwed: Liberalism, Justice, and Markets: A Critique of

Liberal Equality by Colin M. Macleod The Philosophical Review, Vol. 109, No. 4 (Oct., 2000), pp. 601-604 Duke University Press. Jstor
Here, I can only illustrate one of Macleod's many distinct criticisms of Dworkin's use of idealized markets. Dworkin argues that the initial division of resources (prior to adjustments made in light of differences in individual ambition) should satisfy an "envy test": "No division of resources is an equal division if, once the division is complete, any [person] would prefer someone else's bundle of resources to his own bundle" (Dworkin 1981b, 285). And the mechanism he proposes to satisfy this test is a hypothetical auction in which individuals bid on resources using some counter (itself without value and equally distributed). This market-based solution values resources entirely in terms of the preferences that individuals express in the auction. Macleod recognizes that a great strength of Dworkin's auction is that it is sensitive to the opportunity costs to others of giving some re- source to a particular individual. As Macleod helpfully points out, "The resources a

Page 62 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

person can acquire are a function not only of the importance she attaches to them but also of the importance attached by others to them .... Phrased in the language of opportunity costs, the auction ensures that aggregate opportunity costs are equal" (26).

Distribution of benefits to equalize the impoverished is indefensible encourages envy and moral disorientation. Page 2007 Edward. Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2007, pgs 3-20.
Suppose, again, that the sufficiency level for all was 50. Whereas intrinsic egalitarianism seems, other things being equal, to favour outcome (3) and prioritarianism would favour allocation (1), sufficientarianism would favour outcome (2) since this would be the only outcome in which at least some people had enough. For the sufficientarian, the distribution of benefits and burdens to achieve equality or priority in such circumstances is indefensible. It would be analogous to the tragedy involved in a famine situation of giving food to those who cannot possibly survive at the cost of those that could survive if they received extra rations. In this sense, the ideal of sufficiency is related to the medical concept of triage according to which, when faced with more people requiring care than can be treated, resources are rationed so that the most needy receive attention first. However, because the category of most needy is defined in terms of the overarching aim that as many people as possible should survive a given emergency, triage protocols often lead to the very worst off being denied treatment for the sake of benefitting those who can be helped to survive. Frankfurts view is that all distributive claims arise in some way from an analysis of where people stand relative to the threshold of sufficiency, or as he puts it the threshold that separates lives that are good from lives that are not good (Frankfurt 1997, p. 6). Egalitarianism, by contrast, posits a relationship between the urgency of a persons claims and their comparative well-being without reference to the level at which they would have enough. Since allocating people enough to lead decent lives exhausts our duties of distribution, sufficientarians argue that egalitarianism recognizes duties that do not exist. In fact, in linking ethical duties to the comparative fortunes of people, egalitarianism encourages envy and thereby contributes to the moral disorientation and shallowness of our time (Frankfurt 1987, pp. 2223; Anderson 1999, pp. 287ff.).

Page 63 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Egalitarian and Prioritarian thinking flawed no standard baseline for equality guarantees never-ending redistribution. Page 2007 Edward. Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2007, pgs 3-20.
Although Frankfurt focuses his critique of rival distributive views on intrinsic egalitarianism, it can be readily extended to cover prioritarianism. While the priority view is grounded in the badness of absolute rather than comparative disadvantage, it is also inclined to divert resources to the worst off even if this would mean sacrificing substantial benefits to other, slightly better off, persons who could be helped to lead a decent life. Frankfurt argues that : It is

true that people in the lowest strata of society generally live in horrible conditions, but this association of low social position and dreadful quality of life is entirely contingent. There is no necessary connection between being at the bottom of society and being poor in the sense in which poverty is a serious and morally objectionable barrier to life. (Frankfurt 1997, p. 2) The problem

with prioritarianism, then, is not that it fetishizes comparative wellbeing but rather that it fetishizes absolute well-being with the result that it mandates constant interference in peoples lives to benefit the worst off. By doing so, prioritarianism is inclined to generate just as much envy and pity as its egalitarian rival and to mandate a range of redistributions that do not help their recipients to lead decent lives. Consider the following example. There are two groups in society, where one enjoys a considerably lower level of well-being than the other, where both groups enjoy a far better than decent life, and where the inequalities are undeserved. We can call these groups the very happy and the extremely happy. Egalitarians claim that, if we could do something about it, the very happy group should be compensated for their relative well-being deficit. This is because this theory regards undeserved inequality as bad even if everyone is at least very happy; that is, it makes no ethical difference that the inequality is between groups, or persons, who are very well off. Prioritarians, by contrast, regard the very happy in isolation of their relative happiness as they are only interested in absolute levels of well-being. Nonetheless, the very happy, as the worst off, deserve our attention even if their lives are so good they want for nothing. According to sufficientarians, however, the egalitarian and prioritarian claims are absurd. How can there be a duty to help the worst off, they ask, when they already lead lives of such a high standard?

Acceptance of egalitarianism dominates the political sphere and makes us powerless to the abuses of elites William W. Sokoloff -- PhD Candidate @ Amherst. 2005 Between Justice and
Legality: Derrida on Decision, Political Research Quarterly, http://prq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/58/2/341

If Rawlss appeal to the burdens of judgment seems disingenuous insofar as the founding moment of justice as fairness is somehow protected from them, his underlying notion of citizenship also leaves much to be desired. Even though he claims citizens learn and profit from conflict and argument (Rawls 1993: lvii), he methodically closes spaces for the types of dissent, conflict and argument that nurture democratic citizenship. If citizens with competing comprehensive doctrines happen to meet on the street in Rawlss liberal utopia, they nervously grimace at each other and then retreat to the private sphere, simply shrugging shoulders in silence during encounters. Both the immediate impact and the intergenerational effect of Rawlss neutralization of public dialogue will produce a society of inarticulate shoppers on Prozac: By taking Prozac, they may be able to alleviate their angst, which might be a disruptive force to the liberal order (Alejandro 1998: 13). Citizens will not only be unable to contest abuses of power but they will be incapable of negotiating encounters with others in substantive ways. Rawlss allergy to even mild modes of political conflict results in a de-politicization of politics under the banner of neutrality.35 He evacuates all political content from public discussion: We try to bypass religion and philosophys pro- foundest controversies so as to have some hope of uncover- ing a basis of a stable overlapping consensus (Rawls 1993: 152).36Much to his credit, Rawls acknowledges the great deal of indeterminacy of decision in the burdens of judgment but this indeterminacy is somehow

Page 64 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

absent from his image of political society. The indeterminacy of decision in Rawls is mitigated by his de-politicization of political foundations. The indeterminacy of politics is precisely what Rawls seeks to expel from the political horizon. Political liberalism purges politics from politics and encloses the political field under the terror of uniformity.37The value Rawls ascribes to pluralism is disingenuous. It is incompatible with the imperative of unanimity on basic principles.

Moral calls for egalitarianism are self defeating Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Louisiana State, January 1999 Misfortune, welfare reform, and right-wing
egalitarianism
How will democratic decision makers choose which welfare policy to endorse? They will speculate. The average voter, for example, will have no option other than guessing which policy has

the best long- term consequences, and the average elected representative is probably in no better position. In speculating about long-term consequences they may be inordinately swayed by any number of prejudices or pre- conceived ideas. When the truth
does not present itself clearly, it is easy to seize on the evidence that supports one's ideological presuppositions. The consequence of applying equality of fortune to the welfare debate is not usefully neutral in the sense that it avoids blind ideological presuppositions or commitments. It is tragically neutral in the sense that it provides democratic voters and their representatives with no reason to challenge their blind ideological commitments. For equality of fortune would focus the debate on the empirical question that did, in fact, command the lion's share of attention: Which policy is best for the poor? Answers to this question will be determined by prejudice and mood more than reasoned deliberation or real debate . If this consequence is inevitable, then the implications for the ideal of equality are dismal : it would appear impotent as a political ideal, for it requires democratic bodies to make decisions based on speculation

about economic effects over the course of decades or even generations.

Err on the side of combining political consequences with humanitarianism Thomas Weiss 99, Presidential Professor of Political Science @ CUNY
Graduate Center, "principles, politics, and humanitarian action"
Political actors have a newfound interest in principles, while humanitari- ans of all stripes are increasingly aware of the importance of politics. Yet, there remain two distinct approaches politics and humanitarianism as self-contained and antithetical realities or alternatively as overlapping spheres. Nostalgia for aspects of the Cold War or other bygone eras is perhaps understandable, but there never was a golden age when humanitarianism was insulated from politics. Much aid was an extension of the foreign policies of major donors, especially the superpowers. Nonetheless, it was easieq conceptually and practically, to compartmentalize humanitarianism and politics before the present decade. Then, a better guide to action was provided by an unflinching respect for traditional princi- ples, although they never were absolute ends but only intermediate means. In todays world, humanitarians must ask themselves how to weigh the political consequences of their action or inaction; and politicians must ask them- selves how to gauge the humanitarian costs of their action or inaction. The cal- culations are tortuous, and the mathematics far from exact. However, there is no longer any need to ask whether politics and humanitarian action intersect. The real question is how this intersection can be managed to ensure more humanized politics and more effective humanitarian action. To this end, humanitarians should be neither blindly principled nor blindly pragmatic.

Moral views of egalitarianism are self serving Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell

Page 65 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

2. Our subject concerns normative political theory, which I take to be part of morality. The subject is not depiction of a way of life, a formula for individual happiness, or a view of the mean- ing of life, but rather, rules for the (large) community, or better (as assumed henceforth), everybody. In the words of Aquinas, a moral theory imposes a uniformity. It proposes a set a single set, however complicated of rules, declaring that all should adhere to it. But this uniformity need not be egalitarian in the sense defined above. The one basic set of directives to which everyone ought to adhere, and by reference to which the conduct of anyone may be called to account, could be wildly inegalitarian (as with slave moralities.)
Universality sameness of rules for all is a defining feature of morals; egalitarianism is not.

Egalitarianism isnt democraticinevitable dilemma

Fabienne Peter Ph.D. in Economics 13 November 2006 The Political Egalitarians Dilemma Springer Link
The dilemma is the following. If, on the one hand, the substantive constraints on the deliberative process are kept to a minimum, only a weak criterion of political equality can be imposed on the deliberative process. This criterion may fail to ensure the effective equality of participants in the deliberative process, which undermines the legitimacy of the outcomes of such a process. If, on the other hand, political equality is interpreted comprehensively, many substantive judgments will be packed into the conditions imposed on the deliberative process. They will be treated as exempt from deliberative evaluation. The stronger the criterion of political equality, the more emphasis is placed not just on general political resources, but on peoples abilities to make effective use of these resources, the narrower the scope for democratic scrutiny. This, again, jeopardizes democratic legitimacy. Thus, a strong criterion of political equality, which focuses on peoples possibilities to participate in the deliberative process as effectively equals, will fail to ensure democratic legitimacy because it will exempt too many value judgments from deliberative democratic scrutiny. A weak criterion of political equality will fail to ensure democratic legitimacy because many will not have been able to participate in the deliberative process as effectively equals. In other words, the political egalitarians dilemma reveals a clash between the attempt to ensure equal possibilities to participate in the democratic process and the requirement of subjecting substantive judgments to deliberative evaluation.

Forced attempts at equality perpetuate inequality Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell The conclusion stands, then, that egalitarians propose measures incompatible with Common Good, conceived in liberal terms. Appeals to equity that are not simply question-begging fail;
appeals to moral intuitions are useless; appeal to the arbitrariness of nature is irrelevant; appeals to marginal utility are of questionable basic relevance, and exactly wrong insofar as they are relevant. Society, I conclude, should make no interference in the free actions of individuals in using their resources as they see best, by their own lights, within the constraints of a no-harmto-others rule. There is no socially acceptable case for forced equality .

Egalitarianism hurts the poor Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
Further reflection on this leads to an important further point against egalitarianism : that it is essentially certain to be counterproductive as well to defeat the very values whose equalization is required by the theory. Forced transfers from rich to poor, from capitalists to proletarians, will worsen the lot of the poor even as it decreases the wealth of the rich. Not only

is egalitarianism biased, but the particular people against whom it is biased are the

Page 66 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

productive the source of what the people it is biased in favour of hope to receive in consequence. It is not too much to say, even, that egalitarianism is a conspiracy against those it claims to be trying to help. There is a reason for this, whose incomprehension by philosophers even to this day should be a matter of astonishment. A free economy is one in which no one forcibly intervenes against the property rights of any other all are free to use their resources as they judge best, including engaging in commercial exchanges. In such a system, the only ways to achieve wealth are by means which improve the situations of others. Successful businesspeople become so by organizing or financially supporting the production of things that other people want, and want more than the existing alternatives since those people, having no obligation to buy, would not otherwise buy them. The only other possibilities are fairly uninteresting: gift, and the discovery or original acquisition of valuable things. But gift, as such, is pure transfer and does not create wealth, except in the form of good will . We may praise occasional acts of charity, but if everyone were only charitable and unproductive , all, including the poor and sick, would quickly die. And as to acquisition, if we would attain to wealth, those items must be harnessed to human use nature does not afford a free lunch any more than our fellows. Even someone who acquired a natural beauty spot, say, and keeps it natural, will be able to make a decent living thereby only if he is able to charge others for the right to enjoy that spot. And so on.

No such thing as a utilitarian defense of egalitarianism Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
An immensely popular argument, thought to provide a clear utilitarian defense for egalitarianism, appeals to a principle of diminishing marginal utility . The idea is that the

marginal return from possession of some measurable good decreases as a function of the amount one already has money being the most familiar and obvious case in point. From this it is inferred that general utility will be promoted by transferring such goods from those above the midpoint to those below, where the marginal util- ity of unit increments is much greater. Two major flaws destroy this argument. The first is fundamental:general (aggregate) utility simply isnt a common value, and therefore cannot be appealed to. Individuals are not necessarily concerned to promote the aggregate sum of good. They are mostly concerned to promote the goods of certain particular persons themselves, friends, countrymen, whatever and not the sum of utility, even if that sum could be objectively deter- mined. It is therefore inadmissible to appeal to it. Only if the
particular individual addressed can be shown that what matters to himwill be forwarded if the aggregate of utility grows some- times plausible, to be sure is he rationally interested in its growth. That special case apart, utilitarian arguments are dismissed. Second, and more important for present purposes, the argu- ment suffers from myopia: it focuses only on the consumptionutil- ity of money. But all good things come from somewhere: namely, human effort and know-how. Allocation of those requires invest- ment. But the poor, obviously, do not invest the better-off do that. A well-invested dollar yields goods and services in the

future greatly exceeding the stock of consumption goods one could buy with the same money. The marginal utility of dollars in the upper incomes is therefore greater, not less, than the
marginal utility of dollars for the poor.

Utilitarian calculus not egalitarian doesnt act on the principle of intrinsic equality. Page 2007

Page 67 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Edward. Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2007, pgs 3-20.
Perhaps the simplest theory of the pattern of justice is that benefits and burdens should be distributed across some population so that inequality is minimized. We might call this view intrinsic egalitarianism as it holds that inequality is bad or unjust (I use these terms interchangeably) in itself and not because of its consequences. As Temkin has put it, the essence of intrinsic equality is that it is bad for some to be worse off than others through no fault of their own (Temkin 2003, p. 62). It is worth contrasting intrinsic equality with some closely associated views. Utilitarians hold that acts and social policies should be evaluated only in terms of their consequences and that these consequences ought to promote the maximum amount of welfare possible. Depending on the circumstances the utilitarian may prefer an equal distribution of well-being because this coincides with the desire to maximize welfare. The reason for this is that it is generally easier to help the worse off than othersone only has to give them a little for their welfare level to improve a lot. In this sense, utilitarians are accidental, rather than intrinsic, egalitarians.

In-egalitarianism solves benefits trickle down

Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial, Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell In short, successful investment enhances the lot of others in society. When people are employed, this enhances their real incomes, more than any other opportunities they may have had.
And when they spend their money, it is because they judge that expenditure to contribute maximally to their well-being. Thus, if we wrest the gains from investment or well-paid work from the investors and workers in question, we take from the productive and transfer to the unproductive. This takes money that would have produced more and ensures that it will be used in less productive ways. A large society that undertakes this kind of activity extensively decrees poverty for itself, in comparison with what it could have done instead in a freed-up market. And it is the poor, above all, who benefit, relatively speaking, from commercial activity activ- ity that, if unimpeded, continually drives down prices, continually finds new employment for available labour, and continually real- locates resources in the way that does most good for most people, as indicated by the actual choices and preferences of

those people.11

The goal of the judge should not be to make sure each person is equal rather ensure each person is sufficient
Yuko Hashimoto --ph.d. Japanese. Associate Professor of Economics. June 2005 What Matters is Absolute Poverty, Not Relative Poverty http://www.cdams.kobe-u.ac.jp/archive/dp05-10.pdf Therefore, sufficientarianism is an alternative to economic egalitarianism. Sufficientarianism presents the idea of sufficiency as an alternative to the idea of economic equality. The essence of sufficientarianism is to show that the idea of economic equality has no intrinsic value. According to sufficientarianism, when people consider what is important for their own lives, the amount of goods owned by other people becomes irrelevant. Instead, comparison with the amount of goods owned by others prevents people from seeking what they consider valuable for themselves. It is unnecessary to attach moral significance to economic egalitarianism. While Frankfurt enumerates some reasons for the failure of economic egalitarianism, he indicates that egalitarians do not actually defend the idea of equality, as indicated by the priority view. In other words, egalitarians objections are not based on their moral aversion to a person holding a smaller amount of goods as

Page 68 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

compared to other people. In reality, their objection is to the fact that the person owns only a remarkably small amount of goods. This naturally gives rise to the following questions. What does sufficiency imply? What is the standard of sufficiency? Although Frankfurt does not define the meaning of sufficiency in concrete terms, it does not imply that sufficientarianism is pointless. Indeed, the meaning of sufficiency can be defined in various ways. However, the essence of sufficientarianism is to seek what one finds valuable in his/her life and not compare the amount of goods one owns with that of others; this is crucial to judge sufficiency.

Everything is relativethe goal should not be to carve everyone into the same statuerather ensure each person is sufficientthis is distinct from economic egalitarianism Yuko Hashimoto --ph.d. Japanese. Associate Professor of Economics. June 2005 What Matters is
Absolute Poverty, Not Relative Poverty http://www.cdams.kobe-u.ac.jp/archive/dp05-10.pdf Irrespective of the definition of sufficiency selected, sufficientarianism cannot justify distribution to those whose circumstances are above the standard of sufficiency. Therefore, it does not lead to the implausible conclusion that goods should be distributed to millionaires in a society that comprises only billionaires and millionaires. Sufficientarianism, which rejects economic egalitarianism and simultaneously requires distribution to those below the standard of sufficiency, is consistent with moderate libertarianism or classical liberalism, which rejects distribution aimed at reducing income disparity and admits the necessity of distribution that guarantees a minimum standard of living. Indeed, the interpretation of sufficientarianism that I present in this paper might conflict with the original intention of sufficientarians. As we have seen, I support sufficientarianism. Despite differences between sufficientarianism and the priority view, I re-emphasize the fact that they have a common crucial viewpoint regarding egalitarianism. They share the belief that being worse off than others does not have moral significance in terms of the ethics of distribution. While the idea of equality that emphasizes relativity with others is set as a default position in the argument on distribution, both theories demand criticism of the above assumption. Egalitarians often confuse equality with priority or sufficiency; however, it is important to bear in mind that the apparent plausibility of egalitarianism is derived from its humanitarian appeal. The point I wish to emphasize is that absolute poverty, and not relative poverty, is important. Next, before turning to an examination of the connection between sufficientarianism and libertarianism, I shall consider the necessity of highlighting the abuse of egalitarianism.

Egalitarianism fosters never-ending comparison and obligation a sufficientarian framework should take precedence. Page 2007 Edward. Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2007, pgs 3-20.
In contrast to egalitarians and prioritarians, some theorists, such as Harry Frankfurt, hold that benefits and burdens should be distributed in line with the doctrine of sufficiency. This states that as many people as possible should have enough (of the currency of justice adopted) to pursue the aims and aspirations they care about over a whole life; and that this aim has lexical priority over other ideals of justice (Frankfurt 1987, pp. 2143; 1997, pp. 314). Attaining what we really care about, for Frankfurt, requires a certain level of well-being, but once this level is reached there is no further relationship between how well-off a person is and whether they discover and fulfil what it is that they really care about. Frankfurt holds that, above the level of sufficiency, it is neither reasonable to seek a higher standard of living nor expect, as amatter of justice, any additional allocation of some currency of justice to further improve their prospects. It is important to add that having enough is not the same as living a tolerable life in the sense that one does not regret ones existence. Rather it means a person leads a life that contains no substantial dissatisfaction. According to Frankfurt, the flaw in intrinsic egalitarianism lies in supposing that it is morally important whether one

Page 69 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

person has less than another regardless of how much either of them has (Frankfurt 1987, p. 34). What matters, Frankfurt argues, is not that everyone should have the same but that each should have enough. If everyone had enough it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others (Frankfurt 1987, p. 21; original emphasis). This does not mean, however, that egalitarian and prioritarian concerns will always frustrate sufficiency since each and every person should be helped to the threshold of sufficiency if possible, and those who can be helped to lead a decent life are often among the worst off in a population. But the aim of reducing inequality, or of improving the position of the worst off, has no intrinsic value for sufficientarians.

Moderate sufficentarianism offers a pluralist approach to justice which maximizes contextual equality Page 2007 Edward. Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2007, pgs 3-20.
One way of responding to the problems raised by these two examples would be to construct a pluralist approach to distributive justice. Pluralism, in this context, means that we would appeal to contrasting ideals in different contexts (Daniels 1996, p. 208). There are three possibilities, which I can only sketch here. First, the ideals could apply in different distributive circumstances. For example, we might give lexical priority to sufficiency when at least some can be brought up to the threshold, but appeal to equality or priority when all are above, or all below, the threshold (Crisp 2003, pp. 758ff.). Second, sufficiency might be allocated non-lexical priority over other values so that large gains in these values will sometimes outweigh lesser gains in sufficiency. Arneson has usefully labeled this moderate sufficientarianism (Arneson 2006, p. 28). The strength of this view is that it can explain why we should opt for (2) over (1) since it offers tremendous gains in both equality and priority with no adverse impact on sufficiency. Similarly, though more controversially, moderate sufficientarians have at least some reason to opt for (4) over (3) since great benefits arise, in terms of equality and priority, if we ignore the sufficiency of the few for the prize of giving major benefits to the many. Third, we might subsume one ideal under another while attributing some degree of intrinsic value to the subsumed ideal. Sufficientarians generally view inequality as regrettable because of its consequences, such as the way in which it inhibits economic growth, undermines political processes, or is a malign influence on cultural life. Yet, there is a more subtle way that inequality matters. This is that some people might fail to reach the standards of a decent life if they are continually faced with the discomfiture that many others are far better off. Similarly, some people might fall below the threshold of sufficiency if they begin to enjoy life less as a result of identifying with the resentment of others who are worse off (Marmor 2003, pp. 127ff).

Page 70 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

*****PRIVATIZATION***** **Privatization Good / Government Bad** So-called welfare rights restrict freedom, rationalize the coercive transfer of wealth, and destroy charitable feelings, turning the case.
Kelley, Ph.D., Princeton University, 98 (David Kelley, Ph.D, Princeton University, philosopher, author, founder and senior fellow of the Atlas Society, 98, A Life of Ones Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State, p 151) We have examined the nature of welfare rights, their history, and the philosophical case for them. We have examined the arguments for believing in such rights and seen how the many issues they raise play out in the concrete reality of welfare programs. The conclusion can no longer be resisted: the

concept of welfare rights is invalid. There is no warrant for claiming rights to food, shelter, and medical care, to income maintenance, child support, and retirement pensions, at taxpayer expense . Such rights cannot be justified by appeal to freedom, to benevolence, or to community. They do not expand but curtail freedom that of program clients as well as of taxpayers. They make charity compulsory, undermining any genuine benevolence donors might have toward the poor. They replace the voluntary bonds of a society of contract with the coercive power of the state, undermining genuine community . The concept does not provide a valid rationale for the welfare state; it provides a mere rationalization for the coercive transfer of wealth . If we want a system based on genuine rights, one that promotes genuine human welfare, we should privatize or simply terminate the government programs. In place of "social insurance," the market can provide real and affordable insurance to protect against the risk of illness, accidents, disability, and unemployment. And for retirement, as we saw in the last chapter, private savings instruments provide a much better return than most people can expect from Social Security. At the very least, people should be allowed to opt out
of the social insurance programs, forgoing the benefits to which they would otherwise be entitled in exchange for exemption from payroll taxes. A number of plans have been put forward to allow opting out without harming the interests of current retirees.

Health care policies are coercive. Bissell, The Objectivist Center, No Date
(Andrew Bissell, The Objectivist Center, No Date, Health http://www.objectivistcenter.org/ct-1297-Right_To_Health_Care.aspx) Care Is it a right?

First, it is very important not to conflate the right to life with a right to health care . The right to life is central to the Objectivist ethics and politics, and health care is certainly essential to maintaining ones life. However, as Rand puts it: A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by ones own effort. ("Mans Rights", The Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 113-114) In this sense, an apt comparison can be drawn to the right of free speech; your right to speak your mind does not create some obligation on the part of others to support that expression, financially or otherwise. Ayn Rand unmasks the fallacy at the root of the right to health care and all other such economic rights: A single question would make the issue clear: At whose expense? ("Mans Rights", The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 113) Health care doesnt simply grow on

trees; if it is to be made a right for some, the means to provide that right must be confiscated from others. Health care exists because of the efforts of doctors, nurses, medical technicians, and even the engineers who design and build lifesaving machines. There are really only a few ways, then, that it can be provided . These
medical personnel can offer their services as part of a mutual exchange of benefit for benefit, in a system of free, market exchange. Or, they can be forced to provide these services at the point of a

Page 71 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

the government can arrogate to itself the title of the sole health care provider, funding its operations through forced taxation. The problems with forcing doctors to treat patients are obviousfirst, of course, it requires wanton violation of their rights, and represents government enforcement of the principle that a doctors life is not his own, but instead belongs to the state or the community. And no one will want to enter the medical profession when the reward for years of careful
gun, as in the movie John Q. Or, schooling and study is not fair remuneration, but rather, patients who feel entitled to ones efforts, and a government that enslaves the very minds upon which patients lives depend.

Free health care means slavery.

Brown, Staff Writer, 04 (John Brown, Staff Writer, The Daily Beacon, Senior in Political Science, 9/28/04, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1229567/posts) A "right" is the ability and autonomy to perform a sovereign action. In a free society founded on the ideal of liberty, an individual has an absolute ability to perform such an action - so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of another individual. Health care is not speech: In order for you to exercise a theoretical "right" to health care, you must infringe on someone else's rights. If you have a "right" to health care, then it means you

must also have the right to coerce doctors into treating you, to coerce drug companies into producing medicine and to coerce other citizens into footing your medical bill. This is Orwellian. "Freedom" for you cannot result in slavery for others . Thus the concept of a "right" to health care is an oxymoron: It involves tak[es] away the rights of other individuals.
Surely, though, we can agree that doctors, the pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies earn excessive profits, you say. Well, that depends on what your definition of "excessive" is. Doctors literally hold the lives of their patients in their hands. How much is someone who saves lives everyday worth? The same is true of pharmaceutical companies. While it has become fashionable to condemn their profits, the fact is that these profits fund medical research, which leads to more medicines being produced, and, consequently, more lives saved. Insurance companies spread the cost of health care

among many people who might not otherwise be able to afford it, and thus make health care readily available for many. The state is dehumanizing because of bureaucracy and the ability to make war. Stephens, software engineer, 04 (Robert L. Stephens, software engineer, 6/2/04, http://robertlstephens.com/essays/essay_frame.php?essayroot=stephensrobert-l/&essayfile=002BadInfluence.html) Dehumanization, of a sort, is yet one more inevitable consequence of the sheer size and structure of the modern state. There is simply no way for the agents of an organization claiming
to "serve" hundreds of thousands (or hundreds of millions!) of people to know anything about the vast majority of those individuals beyond some disembodied entries on a tax return, or an arbitrary accounting convenience like a Social Security number. To borrow a phrase often used by critics of large private enterprises, the modern state is "beyond human scale."

Another, more insidious, form of dehumanization is inseparable from the political process that is the very essence of the state. To see this, let's first consider the most extreme act of the state: war. In order to break down people's natural resistance to the killing of other human beings, states have historically made dehumanization of the enemy one of the major components of their war propaganda. With the enemy reduced to less-than-human status, it's easier to justify the use
of lethal force against him.

Page 72 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The government is inherently dehumanizing because it seeks to control people. Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law School, 06
(Steven R. Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law School, Criminal Law, Fall 06, Dartmouth Law Journal, Dehumanization and Recreation: A Lacanian Interpretation of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, pp. 120-121, http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=steven_morrison) At this point, we have discussed how the law denies a persons humanity . However, it creates something new in its place, since "[a]t each instant of its intervention, this law creates something new. Every situation is transformed by its intervention." The re-creation of an individual depends on what will best eliminate discordant ideas, since "[a] discordant statement [is] unknown in law." This may be seen as Lacans way of saying `that the law as a

master will do what it must to preserve its power, that is, to preserve "the existing relations of production and the moral and social order ." Therefore, if society views minorities as criminal,
then the PSG will shape itself to fulfill that prophesy. If judges are seen as abusive of their discretion in judging, then the FSG will create judges that are "mere automatons, permitted only to apply a mathematical formula." lf the Sentencing Commission becomes sympathetic toward the idea of downward departures and the rigid strictures of PROTECT, then Congress will create a Commission that becomes a mere tool for a tough-on-crime policy of sentence increases. The master wants uniformity, predictability, and severity, and will censor and recreate

others in its drive to achieve these goals. Government is stripping doctors rights through coercive action Jonathan, M.D. Rosman, 2002 psychiatrist in private practice in Pasadena, is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, It's My Life! A Doctor Has a Right to His Own Life, February 20 2002 http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2? page=NewsArticle&id=5316&news_iv_ctrl=1021] -=Max Rispoli=th

Every doctor, like individuals in other jobs, has a right to work for himself and for his own enjoyment, and to make a ton of money at it if he can. As individuals, doctors have a right to offer their patients treatment according to their best judgment, and to charge such fees as they judge their expertise to be worth. Conversely, patients have the right to accept or reject our advice and services, and to shop around for the best deals they can get. Having the right to your life does not guarantee health or medical treatment at the doctors' expense, but it does guarantee that every individual has the freedom to seek whatever treatment he wishes, according to his own judgment and his own means. Individual rights means the freedom to act within one's means; it does not mean an entitlement to the goods and services provided by others. However,
not only have American doctors been stripped of their professional freedom by all the various oversight agencies (which include licensing boards, the Health Care Financing Administration, managed care companies, peer review committees and more), but--more important--they have also been morally disarmed. Our intellectuals have taught doctors that need comes before ability, and that healthy and rich doctors have a duty to support sick and poor patients. They have taught doctors that the consumers of medical services (patients) are morally superior to the providers of medical services (doctors), just because the consumers are in need. Bureaucrats have eagerly latched on to this altruistic idea, and have erected a maze of welfare laws and regulations to satisfy the needs of the poor and the sick, and to "protect" them from "greedy" doctors. Thanks to these controls, it has become very difficult for doctors to think or to act freely on their own judgment. And it is the best doctors, the most dedicated and those least ready to relinquish their independent judgment, who have been the first to leave the practice of medicine when doctors' rights were trampled on. Who will ultimately be left if this trend continues? To quote Dr. Hendricks in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, "Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in

Page 73 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it-and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't." To save American medicine, American doctors need to be saved from altruism. To accomplish this, doctors must vigorously challenge the invalid notion of a "right" to health care. Nobody has a right to an antibiotic made by someone else, just as he does not have a right to someone else's car. Nobody has a right to have his gallbladder removed, just as he does not have a right to have his toilet fixed by a plumber . No one has a right to demand that a doctor treat

him, but doctors do have rights, just as do auto workers and plumbers, to practice their profession (or trade) free from coercion. The welfare state is flawed it looks only at the outcomes rather than the process which is immoral because looking at outcomes only assumes that the poor have been cheated not that they have tried and failed Walter E. Williams (John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University) January 15, 1996. THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE
MARKETS: MORALITY VS. EFFICIENCY. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n2-3-3.html Justice: Process vs. Results At the heart of most interventionist policy is a vision of justice. Most often this vision evaluates the presence of justice by looking at results. Social justice has considerable appeal and as such is used as justification for interventionist statism. There are several criticisms of the concept of social justice that Hayek has answered well, but defenders of personal liberty must make a greater effort to demystify the term and show that justice or fairness cannot be determined by examining results. The results people often turn to in order to determine the presence or absence of justice are educational and occupational status, income, life expectancy, and other socioeconomic factors. But justice or fairness cannot be determined by results. It is a process question. Consider, for example, that three individuals play a regular game of poker. The typical game outcome is: individual A wins 75 percent of the time, while individuals B and C win 15 percent and 10 percent of the time, respectively. By knowing the game's result, nothing unambiguous can be said about whether there has been "poker justice.'' Individual A's disproportionate winnings are consistent with his being an astute player, clever cheater, or just plain lucky. The only way one can determine whether there has been poker justice is to examine the game's process. Process questions would include: Did the players play voluntarily? Were the poker rules neutral and unbiasedly applied? Was the game played without cheating? If the process were just, affirmative answers would be given to those three questions and there would be poker justice irrespective of the outcome. Thus, justice is really a process issue. The most popular justification for the interventionist state is to create or ensure fairness and justice in the distribution of income. Considerable confusion, obfuscation, and demagoguery regarding the sources of income provide statists with copious quantities of ammunition to justify their redistributionist agenda. Income is not distributed. In a free society, income is earned. People serving one another through the provision of goods and services generate income. We serve our fellow man in myriad ways. We bag his groceries, teach his children, entertain him, and heal his wounds. By doing so, we receive "certificates of performance.'' In the United States, we call these certificates dollars. Elsewhere they are called pesos, francs, marks, yen, and pounds. Those certificates stand as evidence (proof) of our service. The more valuable our service to our fellow man (as he determines), the greater the number of certificates of performance we receive and hence the greater our claim on goods and services. That free-market process promotes a moral discipline that says: Unless we are able and willing to serve our fellow man, we shall have no claim on what he produces. Contrast that moral discipline to the immorality of the welfare state. In effect the welfare state says: You do not have to serve your fellow man; through intimidation, threats, and coercion, we will take what he produces and give it to you. The vision that sees income as being "distributed'' implies a different scenario for the sources of income never made explicit. The vision that sees income as being distributed differs little from asserting that out there is a dealer of dollars. It naturally leads to the conclusion that if some people have fewer dollars than others, the dollar dealer is unfair; he is a racist, sexist, or a multi-nationalist. Therefore, justice and fairness require a re-dealing (income redistribution) of dollars. That way the ill-gotten gains of the few are returned to their "rightful'' owners. That vision is the essence of the results-oriented view of justice underpinning the welfare state. People who criticize the existing distribution of income as being unfair

Page 74 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

and demand government redistribution are really criticizing the process whereby income is earned. Their bottom line is that millions of individual decision makers did not do the right thing. Consider the wealth of billionaire Bill Gates, the founder of MicroSoft. Gates earned billions because millions of individuals voluntarily spent their money on what they wanted--his products. For someone to say that Gates's income is unfair is the same as saying that the decisions of millions of consumers are wrong. To argue that Gates's income should be forcibly taken and given to others is to say that somehow third parties have a right to preempt voluntary decisions made by millions of traders. When sources of income are viewed more realistically, we reach the conclusion that low income, for the most part, is a result of people not having sufficient capacity to serve their fellow man well rather than being victims of an unfair process. Low-income people simply do not have the skills to produce and do things their fellow man highly values. Seldom do we find poor highly productive individuals or nations. Those who have low incomes tend to have low skills and education and hence low productive capacity. Our challenge is to make those people (nations) more productive. Another explanation of low income is that the rules of the game have been rigged. That is, people do have an ability to provide goods and services valued by their fellow man but are restricted from doing so. Among those rules are minimum wage laws, occupational and business licensure laws and regulations, and government-sponsored monopolies. Hence, another argument for free-market capitalism is that it is good for low-income, lowskilled people.

Capitalism is the best system to foster freedom, which is a moral necessity David Boaz (executive vice president to the Cato Institute) 1997: Editorial: Pro-Choice.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-19n4-2.html Kristol and Wolfson are struggling, not just against the principles on which America was founded, but against the modern world. It is capitalism that has given us moderns so many choices. Capitalism is the economic system of free people; it is what happens when you let people alone. The virtues that capitalism rewards--prudence, discipline, initiative, self-reliance, new ideas--and the affluence it creates tend to push people in the direction of confidence in their own abilities, skepticism about organized authority, and a desire to manage their own affairs in all realms of life. That's why capitalism is not in the long run compatible with political repression or governmental restrictions on freedom. Freedom is also necessary for the development of strong moral character. Surely Kristol and Wolfson don't want to undermine the bourgeois virtues, but the effect of restricting choice is to eliminate the incentive and the opportunity for people to make good choices and develop good habits. People do not develop prudence, self-reliance, thrift, and temperance when their choices are imposed by force. Welfare-state liberals undermine moral character when they subsidize indulgence in destructive choices. Big-government conservatives undermine character when they deny people the right to shape their own characters through their choices.

Limited government is key to prevent tyranny, which killed more people than both World Wars combined the plan provides positive rights, or entitlements that causally fail to protect the right to life Erich Weede (Professor of Sociology at the University of Bonn) Winter 2008: Human Rights, Limited

Government, and Capitalism. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj28n1/cj28n1-3.pdf Negative rights serve to protect the individual, his liberty, and his property from coercion and violence. Negative rights prevent others from undertaking some types of actions, but they do not oblige others to help one. In order to safeguard negative rights government has to be limited. The link between negative rights and limited government was already well understood long before the term human rights gained currency. In the late 17th century, Locke ([1690] 2003: 161, 189) wrote: The supreme power cannot take from any man part of his property without his own consent: for the preservation of property being the end of government . . . wherever the power, that is put in any hands for the government of the people, and the preservation of their properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them into arbitrary and irregular commands of those that have it; there it presently becomes tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many. The right to life certainly is a fundamental human right. It is a negative right since it only requires that others do not kill one. In this context, one should recall that about 169 million people have been killed by states or their governments in the 20th century (Rummel 1994). Communists and National Socialists established the most murderous regimes. Among the victims of communism, there are tens of millions

Page 75 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

of deaths from starvation after the coerced collectivization of agriculture in Stalins Soviet Union or Maos China. Although the 20th century suffered two world wars and other bloody wars, fewer people died on the battlefield or because of bombing campaigns than have been murdered or starved to death by their own governments. Whoever wants to protect human rights should therefore first of all focus on the necessity of protecting people from the state and its abuses of power. Positive Rights Positive rights or entitlements commit the state and its officials to undertake certain types of action for example, to guarantee certain minimal standards of material well-being. The American Bill of Rights (1789) is limited to negative or protective rights, while the United Nations General Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000) encompass both protective rights and entitlements.1 The trend from short lists of negative rights to long lists of negative and positive rights has been accompanied by a rapid and sustained increase in public spending in the West (Tanzi and Schuknecht 2000). Classical liberals, in contrast to people called liberals in 20th century America and social democrats in Europe, demanded the primacy of individual liberty and thereby of protective rights and limited government. Providing people with entitlements forces the state to curtail the negative rights and liberties of individuals. In order to fund entitlements the state has to tax (i.e., to take coercively from) some people in order to provide for others. Entitlements have to rest on coercion and redistribution that is, on a greater restriction of negative rights or individual liberty than would otherwise be necessary. As the balance of achievements and victims of communism demonstrates, the attempt to provide entitlements did not prevent tens of millions of deaths from starvation. Actually, the attempt to provide more than negative rights resulted in something less: the lack of respect of negative and positive rights. As I shall argue, this association between the attempt to guarantee entitlements by a monopoly of coercion and central planning is causally related to the repeated failure to protect even the right to life.

Free markets are inherently non-violent because they rely on voluntary associations whereas governments force and compel, leading to violence. Branden, psychotherapist, author, teacher, 95 (Nathaniel, psychotherapist, author, teacher, January 1995, Individualism and the Free Society, Part 2, http://www.fff.org/freedom/0195d.asp)
Whatever the differences in their specific programs, all the enemies of the free market economy-communists, socialists, fascists, welfare statists- are unanimous in their belief that

they have a right to dispose of the lives, property, and future of others, that private ownership of the means of production is a selfish evil , that the more a person has achieved, the greater is his or her
debt to those who have not achieved it, that men and women can be compelled to go on producing under any terms or conditions their rulers decree, that freedom is a luxury that may have been permissible in a primitive economy, but for the running of giant industries, electronic factories, and complex sciences, nothing less than slave labor will do. Whether they propose to take over the economy outright, in the manner of communists and socialists, or to maintain the pretense of private property while dictating prices, wages, production, and distribution, in the manner of fascists and welfare statists, it is the gun, it is the rule of physical force that they consider "kind," they

Since the moral justification offered for the rule of force is humankind's need of the things that persons of ability produce, it follows (in the collectivist's system of thought) that the greater an individual's productive ability, the greater are the penalties he or she must endure, in the form of controls, regulations, expropriations. Consider, for example, the principle of the progressive income tax: those who produce the most are penalized accordingly; those who
who consider the free market "cruel." produce nothing receive a subsidy, in the form of relief payments. Or consider the enthusiastic advocacy of socialized medicine. What is the justification offered for placing the practice of medicine under government control? The importance of the services that physicians perform-the urgency of their patients' need. Physicians are to be penalized precisely because they have so great a contribution to make to human welfare; thus is virtue turned into a liability. In denying human beings freedom of thought and action, statists and collectivist systems are anti-self-esteem by their very nature. Self-confident, self-respecting men and women are unlikely to accept the premise that they exist for the sake of others

A free society cannot be maintained without an ethics of rational

self-interest.

Neither can it be maintained except by men and women who have achieved a healthy level of self-esteem. And a healthy level of self-esteem cannot be maintained without a willingness to assert-and, if necessary, fight for-our right to exist. It is on this point that issues of psychology, ethics, and politics converge. If I may allow myself a brief aside, one might imagine that psychologists, social scientists, and philosophers who speak enthusiastically and reverently about freedom, selfresponsibility, autonomy, the beauty of self-regulating systems, and the power of synergy (the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of the parts taken separately) would naturally be champions of noncoercion. More often than not, as I have already indicated, just the opposite is true. They tend to be among the most It should be recognized that a defining feature of a synergistic society is that participation in it is voluntary. If people do not choose to engage in a given cooperative activity, the implication is that they do not perceive that activity to be helpful , either for themselves or for others. Efforts to vociferous in crying for the coercive apparatus of government to further their particular ideals. To quote Waterman once again:

Page 76 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

promote social cooperation within a synergistic society may appropriately include such techniques as education, persuasion, and negotiation. However, the use of political force to compel cooperation represents the abandonment of the synergistic ideal. A free society cannot automatically guarantee the mental or emotional well-being of all its members. Freedom from

external coercion is not a sufficient condition of our optimal fulfillment, but it is a necessary one. The great virtue of capitalism-laissez-faire capitalism, as contrasted not only with the more extreme forms of statism but also with the mixed economy we have today-is that it is the one system whose defining principle is precisely this barring of physical coercion from human relationships . No other political system pays even
lip service to this principle

Turn aff/neg creates dependence which decreases incentives to work tanks the economy Jrg Guido Hlsmann (professor of economics at the University of Angers in France) 2008: The
Political Economy of Moral Hazard A central occupation of economists is to analyze the nature, causes, and effects of incentives the circumstances that are held to motivate human action. Economists agree on the positive role that "good" incentives play to increase production. They also agree that "perverse" incentives have an opposite impact. One of these perverse incentives is called moral hazard, the subject of our present essay. Moral hazard is the incentive of a person A to use more resources than he otherwise would have used, because he knows, or believes he knows, that someone else B will provide some or all of these resources. The important point is that this occurs against B's will and that B is unable to sanction this expropriation immediately. The mere incentive to rely on resources provided by others is not per se problematic. For example, the announcement of a future inheritance might prompt the prospective heir to spend more in the present than he would otherwise have spent. In such cases we would not speak of moral hazard. A genuine moral-hazard problem appears however if A has the possibility to use B's resources against B's will and if he knows this. Laymen would call A's incentives a "temptation to steal" or a "temptation to act irresponsibly." Economists, ever weary of moralizing, have espoused the technocratic expression "moral hazard." Thus the essential feature of moral hazard is that it incites some people A to expropriate other people B. The B-people in turn, if they realize the presence of such a moral hazard, have an incentive to react against this possible expropriation. They make other choices than those that they would consider to be best if there were no moral hazard. Many economists have therefore concluded that moral hazard entails market failures; it brings about a different allocation of resources than the one that would exist in the absence of moral hazard. Conventional economic theory explains moral hazard as a consequence of the fact that market participants are unequally well informed about economic reality. In other words, moral hazard results from "asymmetries of information" and the theory of moral hazard is therefore considered to be a part of the economics of information.

Taking wealth forcefully kills charitable desires. Rothbard, economist, Austrian School, 04 (Murray Rothbard, economist, Austrian School, 04, Welfare and the Images of Charity, p 465)
The mistake, they say, is to convert moral pressure into compulsion to force people to do what everyone agrees it would be morally desirable for them to do. Murray Rothbards view is typical. He recognizes that charity is a good thing, but writes, [I]t makes all the difference in the world whether the aid is given voluntarily or is stolen by force. [I]t is hardly charity to take wealth by force and hand it over to someone else. Indeed this is the direct opposite of charity, which can only be an unbought, voluntary act of grace. Compulsory confiscation can only deaden charitable desires completely, as the wealthier grumble that there is no point in giving to charity when the state has already taken on the task. This is another illustration of the truth that men can become more moral only through rational persuasion, not through violence,

Page 77 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

which will, in fact, have the opposite effect}

The alternative results in beneficial forms of capitalism. Only altruism results in the dangerous forms of capitalism that their authors assume. More, founder of Extropy Institute, 86
(Max More, founder of Extropy Institute, 1986, THE IMPORTANCE OF SELFISHNESS, THE DANGERS OF ALTRUISM, http://www.thedegree.org/philn004.pdf) Finally, it would be fitting to consider the matter of competition in the context of the pursuit of rational self-interest. Many people say that capitalism is an entirely competitive economic system. They say that competition , while it serves a number of useful purposes, breeds

hostility, violence, and unhappiness. The first assertion is false and the second may or may not be true depending on how it is interpreted. Objectivists are principled moral agents, not materialists and can therefore happily join in by condemning the rat race. The first point to note is that capitalism is both cooperative and competitive. Firms compete within a market but firms also cooperate every time they buy and sell raw materials, semifinished goods, etc., from each other. Individuals within a firm must cooperate to get their jobs done. Every time anyone buys anything on the free market, cooperation is occurring; both parties get together to make a mutually beneficial exchange. On the other hand, in a socialist economy you are told what to produce and have little or no choice as to what you consume. Where competition exists in a free market it promotes progress and benefits everyone. In a socialist system, competition is for positions of coercive power. Within a free market or mixed economy such as ours more than one type of competition is possible. One can compete in a friendly, relaxed way , always bearing in mind ones values and rational
self-interest. Or one can madly, obsessively, irrationally compete for ends set by other people whether society, the company, the government, or parents. This second type of competition is truly a rat race, a scrambling for advancement where ones self-interest and values are lost sight of. It is

not competition between those pursuing their rational self-interest that is bad. It is competition between those trying to fulfill their irrational whims (perhaps for wealth or
fame), or to conform to standards set by others. It is common for people to wear themselves down developing heart disease, ulcers, and hypertension, to become heavy drinkers, insomniacs, or pillpoppers, with no regard for their happiness. Capitalism does not demand this , and though it does not prevent it (only force, with all its consequences, can do that), it does function better without it. Studies have shown that most successful managers in business are generally pleasant, non-compulsive individuals who are a pleasure to work for . It is altruism which promotes overly strenuous (and misguided) effort since the individual does not

matter only the good of the company/government/ society/ones parents matters. The rationally self-interested person has a great deal of self-esteem. The altruist lacks self-esteem. And it is lack of self-esteem that leads to neurotic, inappropriately competitive behaviour since the esteem of other people must be earned at all cost to fill the gap. (See Brandens The Psychology of Self-Esteem for the importance of this factor.) If one
has no self-worth one must compete hard to prove oneself to others. Rational people do not need to win, since that implies that you cant be happy without defeating someone. There is no need to win. To play the game of life according to ones values, in pursuit of ones happiness, ones self-interest, is all that matters.

Capitalism solves war economic interdependencies Erich Weede (Professor of Sociology at the University of Bonn) Winter 2008: Human Rights, Limited
Government, and Capitalism. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj28n1/cj28n1-3.pdf Capitalist development contributes not only to prosperity but also to reducing the risk of war. From a human rights perspective, the avoidance of war is a paramount concern because the fog of war has

Page 78 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

frequently been used as a cover for human rights abuses and war crimes (Apodaca 2001; HarrelsonStephens and Callaway 2001; Richards, Gelleny, and Sacko 2001).8 Econometric studies (Gartzke 2005, 2007; Russett and Oneal 2001; Weede 2005) are compatible with the following causal relationships between economic freedom, prosperity, and peace: Whether assessed by financial market openness, trade, or property rights, economic freedom contributes to peace. The more trade there is between two states or the more they are economically interdependent, the less likely military conflict between them becomes. In addition to this direct effect of economic freedom on the avoidance of war, there is an indirect effect via prosperity and democracy that is well documented (Lipset 1994; Russett and Oneal 2001; Weede 2005). The freer an economy is, the more prosperous it is likely to be. The more prosperous a country is, the more likely it is to be a democracy.9 Military conflict between democracies is extremely unlikely. Economic freedom and free tradethat is, the global expansion of capitalism and the corresponding catch-up opportunities for poor countriesconstitute the beginning of the causal chain leading to democracy and peace, at least to peace among prosperous or capitalist democracies. Economic freedom and free trade also exert a direct pacifying impact. Therefore, it is preferable to call this set of pacifying conditions the capitalist (or market-liberal) peace rather than the democratic peace.

Economically free countries are less likely to go to war put away your democracy add-ons because the alt. solves better Erik Gartzke (Associate Professor of Political Science PhD, University of Iowa) 2005: Future Depends
on Capitalizing on Capitalist Peace With terrorism achieving "global reach" and conflict raging in Africa and the Middle East, you may have missed a startling fact - we are living in remarkably peaceable times. For six decades, developed nations have not fought each other. France and the United States may chafe, but the resulting conflict pitted french fries against "freedom fries," rather than French soldiers against U.S. "freedom fighters." Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac had a nasty spat over the EU, but the English aren't going to storm Calais any time soon. The present peace is unusual. Historically, powerful nations are the most war prone. The conventional wisdom is that democracy fosters peace but this claim fails scrutiny. It is based on statistical studies that show democracies typically don't fight other democracies. Yet, the same studies show that democratic nations go to war about as much as other nations overall. And more recent research makes clear that only the affluent democracies are less likely to fight each other. Poor democracies behave much like non-democracies when it comes to war and lesser forms of conflict. A more powerful explanation is emerging from newer, and older, empirical research - the "capitalist peace." As predicted by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Norman Angell and others, nations with high levels of economic freedom not only fight each other less, they go to war less often, period. Economic freedom is a measure of the depth of free market institutions or, put another way, of capitalism. The "democratic peace" is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom. Democracy and economic freedom typically co-exist. Thus, if economic freedom causes peace, then statistically democracy will also appear to cause peace. When democracy and economic freedom are both included in a statistical model, the results reveal that economic freedom is considerably more potent in encouraging peace than democracy, 50 times more potent, in fact, according to my own research. Economic freedom is highly statistically significant (at the one-per-cent level). Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels. But, why would free markets cause peace? Capitalism is not only an immense generator of prosperity; it is also a revolutionary source of economic, social and political change. Wealth no longer arises primarily through land or control of natural resources.

The free market is a moral necessity Walter E. Williams (John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University) January 15, 1996. THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE
MARKETS: MORALITY VS. EFFICIENCY. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n2-3-3.html Conclusion

Page 79 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The struggle to extend and preserve free markets must have as its primary focus the moral argument. State interventionists stand naked before well-thought-out moral arguments for private ownership of property, voluntary exchange, and the parity of markets. People readily understand moral arguments on a private basis--for example, one person does not have the right to use force against another to serve his own purposes. However, people often see government redistribution as an acceptable use of force. In a democratic welfare state that coercion is given an aura of legitimacy. The challenge is to convince people that a majority vote does not establish morality and that free markets are morally superior to other forms of human organization.

Government coercion destroys freedom the free market system is the highest moral ground and will solve all other problems James A. Dorn (vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute and
professor of economics at Towson University in Maryland) 2005: Why Freedom Matters.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/dorn-080105.pdf
The future of civilization depends on preserving and spreading freedom. As a moral principle, freedom means we ought to respect private property rights, broadly understood as the rights to life, liberty, and property. As a practical matter, when private property rights are protected by law, individuals will be free to trade for mutual gain and be held responsible for their behavior. Social and economic coordinationor what F. A. Hayek called spontaneous orderemerges from the voluntary decisions of millions of free people under limited government and the rule of law. Those nations that have failed to adopt freedom as a first principle have also failed to realize the benefits of freedom. They have ignored the great liberal idea, as articulated in The Law by Frdric Bastiat in the mid-nineteenth century, that the solution of the social problem lies in liberty. By social problem Bastiat meant the problem of coordination that confronts every societythat is, the problem of satisfying peoples wants for goods and services without central planning. The beauty of the market system, based on private property rights and freedom of contract, is that it allows individuals to continuously adjust to new information about wants, resources, and technology, and to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges. Economic freedom increases the range of choices and thus the wealth of nations. Those countries with greater economic freedom have higher standards of living than those with less freedom (figure 1). Moreover, countries that have liberalized more quicklyas measured by the index of economic freedomhave tended to grow faster than countries that have failed to liberalize or that have liberalized more slowly (figure 2). Economists James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, the authors of the Fraser Institutes annual Economic Freedom of the World, find that long term differences in economic freedom explain approximately two-thirds of the variation in cross-country per capita GDP. It is no secret that countries that have opened to the forces of international trade and have restrained the growth of government have prospered, while those countries that have limited the scope of the market have stagnated. Hong Kongs consistent adherence to market-liberal principles has resulted in long-run prosperity and the worlds freest economy since 1970. In its 2005 Index of Economic Freedom , the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal once again ranked Hong Kong number one. On hearing the good news, Financial Secretary Henry Tang remarked,I am pleased virtues we have been upholding to keep Hong Kong flourishing as a free market economy have once again been reaffirmed by the international community. Those virtues include credibility and reliability, prudence and thrift, entrepreneurial alertness, personal responsibility, respect for others, and tolerance. They are fostered by private property rights, the rule of law, freedom of contract, open trade, low tax rates, and limited government . Nations that have not followed the virtues of Hong Kong have not reaped the long-run benefits of economic freedom. North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iraq, and Haiti are but a few examples. The lesson is that the virtues of the market require constant practice if they are to survive and flourish. Government policy must be market-friendly and transparent; it cannot be muddled. Markets discount future effects of current policy changes. If those changes are in the direction of greater economic freedom, they will be immediately rewarded and wealth created. Illiberal trade policies, higher tax rates, increased government spending, erratic monetary policy, and wage-price controls undermine private property rights, send negative signals to the global capital markets, and destroy the wealth of nations. The failure of central planning in the Soviet Union and China has moved those countries in the direction of greater economic freedom, but the ghost of communism still haunts Russia, while the Chinese

Page 80 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Communist Party has yet to abandon its monopoly on power. Leaders of emerging market economies need to recognize that economic freedom is an important component of personal freedom, that freemarket prices and profits provide useful information and incentives to allocate resources to where consumers (not politicians or planners) deem them most valuable, and that markets extend the range of choice and increase human welfare. Most important, leaders must understand that ultimately economic liberalization requires limited government and constitutionally protected rights. Emerging market economies, especially in Asia, have discovered the magic of the market; they have also found that chaos emerges when the institutional infrastructure necessary for free markets is weakened by excessive government. When politics trumps markets, coercion and corruption follow. The Ethical Basis the ethical basis of the market system is often overlooked, but not by those like Zhang Shuguang, an economist at the Unirule Institute in Beijing, who were deprived of their economic liberties under central planning. He compares the coercive nature of planning with the voluntary nature of the market and concludes: In the market system . . . the fundamental logic is free choice and equal status of individuals. The corresponding ethics . . . is mutual respect, mutual benefit, and mutual credit.1 The moral justification for individual freedom is selfevident. In Ethics for the New Millennium , the Dalai Lama wrote:We all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering. . . . Ethical conduct is not something we engage in because it is somehow right in itself but because, like ourselves, all others desire to be happy and to avoid suffering. Given that this is a natural disposition, shared by all, it follows that each individual has a right to pursue this goal. Freedom without rules is an illusion. The famous Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote in his classic text, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind: People, especially young people, think that freedom is to do just what they want. . . . But it is absolutely necessary . . . to have some rules. . . . As long as you have rules, you have a chance for freedom. The rules necessary for a market-liberal order are rules to protect the private sphere so individuals can pursue their selfinterest while respecting the equal rights of others. Without clear rules to limit the use of force to the protection of persons and property, freedom and justice will sufferand economic development, properly understood, will cease. In 1740 the great liberal David Hume wrote that the peace and security of human society entirely depend [on adherence to] the three fundamental laws of nature, that of the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises (A Treatise of Human Nature). His legacy of liberty should not be forgotten. Development and Freedom in Economic Analysis and Policy in Underdeveloped Countries , the late Peter (Lord) Bauer argued that economic development and freedom are inseparable: I regard the extension of the range of choice, that is, an increase in the range of effective alternatives open to people, as the principal objective and criterion of economic development. Economists have found that countries with secure private property rights create more wealth (as measured by real GDP per capita) than countries in which property is not protected by law. Trade liberalization is vital to the process of development. Voluntary international exchange widens consumers range of effective choices and lowers the risk of conflict. There is a saying in China: Wu wei ze wu shu bu weiIf no unnatural control, then there is nothing you cannot do. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu advocates the principle of nonintervention ( wu wei) as the ideal way of ruling. The wise ruler says,I take no action and the people of themselves are transformed. I engage in no activity and the people of themselves become prosperous. 2 To take no action does not mean to do nothing, but rather, as Chinese scholar Derk Bodde has noted, to refrain from those actions that are forced, artificial, and unspontaneous.3 A natural order is one consistent with free markets and free people; it is Adam Smiths simple system of natural liberty.As former Czech President Vclav Havel so elegantly stated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the free-market economy is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself.4 Leaders in the West as well as the East should keep the following five lessons in the forefront of their minds as they contemplate future policy decisions: (1) private property, freedom, and justice are inseparable; (2) justice requires limiting government to the protection of persons and property; (3) minimizing the use of force to defend life, liberty, and property will maximize freedom and create a spontaneous market-liberal order; (4) private free markets are not only moral, they create wealth by providing incentives to discover new ways of doing things and increase the range of alternatives; and (5) governments rule best when they follow the rule of law and the principle of noninterference.

Page 81 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Government power inevitably leads to war and mass genocide limiting the power of the government and fostering individual freedom solves Rudolph Joseph Rummel (professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii) 1994: Power, Genocide, and Mass Murder. Journalof Peace Research 31 (1): 110
Now for the overview. The principle conclusion emerging from previous work on the causes of war and this project is that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide.8 At the extremes of power, totalitarian communist governments murder their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers. As listed in Table 1 , this century's megamurderers--those states killing in cold blood, aside from warfare, 1,000,000 or more men, women, and children--have murdered over 151,000,000 people, almost four times the almost 38,500,000 battle-dead for all this century's international and civil wars up to 1987. The most absolute Power, that is the communist U.S.S.R., China and preceding Mao guerrillas, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia, as well as Nazi Germany, account for near 128,000,000 of them, or 84 percent. No one of
the remaining megamurderers, which include the regimes of Pakistan, 9 wartime Japan, Nationalist China, Cambodia, communist Vietnam, post-War II Poland, 10 and communist Yugoslavia, were democratic when it committed its democide. Then there are the kilomurderers, or those states that have killed innocents by the tens or hundreds of thousands, the top five of which were the China Warlords (1917-1949), Atatrk's Turkey (1919-1923), the United Kingdom (primarily due to the 1914-1919 food blockade of the Central Powers and Levant in and after World War I, and the 1940-45 indiscriminate bombing of German cities), Portugal (1926-1982), and Indonesia (1965-87). These are shown in Table 1. Some lesser kilomurderers were communist Afghanistan, Angola, Albania, Rumania, and Ethiopia, as well as authoritarian Hungary, Burundi, Croatia (1941-44), Czechoslovakia (1945-46), Indonesia, Iraq, the Czar's Russia, and Uganda. For its indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese civilians, the United States must also be included on this list. These and other kilomurderers add almost 15,000,000 people killed to the democide for this century. As listed in Table 2, the most lethal

regime in this century was that of the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during 1975 through 1978. In less than four years of governing they exterminated over 31 percent of their men, women, and children; the odds of any Cambodian surviving these four long years was only about 2.2 to 1. As mentioned, the Appendix exemplifies some of the estimates of this killing. The major and better known episodes and institutions for which these and other regimes were responsible are listed in Table 3. Far above all is gulag--the Soviet slave-labor system created by Lenin and built up under Stalin. In some 70 years it likely chewed up almost 40,000,000 lives, over twice as many as probably died in some 400 years of the African slave trade, from capture to sale in an Arab, Oriental, or New World market. In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170,000,000 men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; or buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens or foreigners. The dead even could conceivable be near a high of 360,000,000 people. This is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of absolute power and not germs. Adding the human cost of war to this democide total, governments have violently killed over 203,000,000 people in this century. Table 4 breaks down this toll by type of regime. Figure 1 graphs the regime comparisons. Now, democracies themselves are responsible for some of the democide. Almost all of this is foreign democide during war, and mainly those enemy civilians killed in indiscriminate urban bombing, as of Germany and Japan in World War II. It also includes the large scale massacres of Filipinos during the bloody American colonization of the Philippines at the beginning of this century, deaths in British concentration camps in South Africa
during the Boar War, civilian deaths due to starvation during the aforementioned British blockade, the rape and murder of helpless Chinese in and around Peking in 1900, the atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam, the murder of helpless Algerians during the Algerian War by the French, and the unnatural deaths of German prisoners of war in French and American POW camps after World War II. All this killing of foreigners by democracies may seem to violate

the principle that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely, but really underlines it. For in each case, the killing was carried out in secret, behind a conscious cover of lies and deceit by those agencies and power-holders involved. All were shielded by tight censorship of the press and control of journalists. Even the indiscriminate bombing of German cities by the British was disguised before the House of

Commons and in press releases as attacks on German military targets. That the general strategic bombing policy was to attack working men's homes was kept secret still long after the war. And finally, Figure 2 (one of the most important comparisons on democide and power produced by this project) displays the range of democide estimates for each regime,

Page 82 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

that is, level of power. As mentioned over 8,100 estimates of democide from over a thousand sources were collected to arrive at a most likely low and high for democide committed by 219 regimes or groups. The totals that have been displayed in previous figures have been the sum of conservatively determined mid-totals in this range. Figure 2 then presents for each type of regime, such as the authoritarian, this range resulting from the sum of all the lows and highs for all the democide of all regimes of that type. The difference between the three resulting ranges drawn in the figure can only be understood in terms of power.11 As the arbitrary power of regimes increase left to right in the figure, the range of their democide jumps accordingly and to such a great extent that the low democide for the authoritarian regime is above the democratic high, and the authoritarian high is below the totalitarian low. The empirical and theoretical conclusion from these and

other results is clear. The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking power. This means to foster democratic freedom. This is the ultimate conclusion of this project.

Government provision is inefficient and ineffective three reasons. Blank, UMich, 2k (Rebecca M. Blank, UMich, 03-2k, When Can Public Policy Makers Rely on Private Markets? The Effective Provision of Social Services, Economic Journal Vol. 110 Issue 462, pC34-C49) First, government inefficiencies might become large enough that even with somewhat higher quality, the cost of allowing government management offsets the benefits. As Stiglitz (1989) has noted, `public management' is itself a public good, and one that is often hard for voters to observe easily. Wolf (1988) reviews a large number of studies on the comparative efficiency of the public and private sector, noting that most -- but by no means all -- of them conclude the private sector is able to operate at lower (in some cases very much lower) costs.[6] Few of these studies focus on social service areas, however. Poterba (1996)
notes that it is not clear that the government is markedly less efficient in comparison to the non-profit sector, which provides the primary private-sector alternative to the public sector in many areas of social services in the United States.

Second, the more that government is plagued by patronage and corruption problems, the less attractive is the government management of services. Such
problems may be one particular reason why the government is less efficient, but they are likely to also affect the quality of services provided, as well as the extent to which the government meets public goals about access and equity in the provision of services. Of course, it is worth noting that corruption in the public sector in many countries often mirrors corruption in the private sector. In this situation, it is unclear which sector is the preferred provider of services.

Third, the government may be ineffective in providing higher quality services. Poor management and inefficiencies in the public sector may be causally related to low quality services, in which case the price/quality tradeoff posited above is
an inaccurate characterisation; lower prices and higher quality may be complements rather than substitutes. Indeed, in cases where the public sector underpays workers relative to the market, or provides particularly bad managerial oversight, the quality of government-provided services may be very low. (There are plenty of examples of this in my current hometown of Washington, D.C.) The lower the quality of publicly-provided services, the less apparent force there is to the argument that the private sector will provide services at too low a quality level. As Wolf (1988) has noted, there is extensive `nonmarket failure' in government, just as there may

be market failure in the private sector.

Page 83 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Eliminating licensing requirements for medical establishments and restrictions on medical supplies, deregulating health insurance, and eliminating subsidies such as Medicaid key to greater effectiveness and availability of health care. Hoppe, Prof. Emeritus of Econ, University of Nevada, 93 (Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Prof. Emeritus of Econ, University of Nevada, 04/1993, A Four-Step Health-Care Solution, Mises Institute, http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=279) It's true that the U.S. health care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls. It's time to get serious about health care reform. Tax credits,
vouchers, and privatization will go a long way toward decentralizing the system and removmg unnecessary burdens from business. But four additional steps must also be taken: 1. Eliminate all

licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health care services would appear on the market. Competing voluntary accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing --if health care providers
believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it. Because consumers would no longer be duped into believing that there is such a thing as a "national standard" of health care, they will

increase their search costs and make more discriminating health care choices. 2. Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices.
This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases costs. Costs and prices would fall, and a wider variety of better products would reach the market sooner. The market would force consumers to act in accordance with their own-rather than the government's--risk assessment. And competing drug and device manufacturers and sellers, to safeguard against product liability suits as much as to attract customers, would provide increasingly better product descriptions and guarantees. 3. Deregulate the health

insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for
example, because it is in one's own hands to bring these events about.
Because a person's health, or lack of it, lies increasingly within his own control, many, if not most health risks, are actually uninsurable. "Insurance" against risks whose likelihood an individual can systematically influence falls within that person's own responsibility. All insurance, moreover, involves the pooling of individual risks. It implies that insurers pay more to some and less to others. But no one knows in advance, and with certainty, who the "winners" and "losers" will be. "Winners" and "losers" are distributed randomly, and the resulting income redistribution is unsystematic. If "winners" or "losers" could be systematically predicted, "losers" would not want to pool their risk with "winners," but with other "losers," because this would lower their insurance costs. I would not want to pool my personal accident risks with those of professional football players, for instance, but exclusively with those of people in circumstances similar to my own, at lower costs. Because of legal restrictions on the health insurers' right of refusal--to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable--the present health-insurance system is only partly concerned with insurance. The industry cannot discriminate freely among different groups' risks. As a result, health insurers cover a multitude of uninnsurable risks, alongside, and pooled with, genuine insurance risks. They do not discriminate among various groups of people which pose significantly different insurance risks. The industry thus runs a system of income redistribution--benefiting irresponsible actors and high-risk groups at the expense of responsible individuals and low risk groups. Accordingly the industry's prices are high and ballooning. To deregulate the industry means to restore it to unrestricted freedom of contract: to allow a health insurer to offer any contract whatsoever, to include or exclude any risk, and to discriminate among any groups of individuals. Uninsurable risks would lose coverage, the variety of insurance policies for the remaining coverage would increase, and price differentials would reflect genuine insurance risks. On average, prices would drastically fall.

4. Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased breed illness and disease, and promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate them, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid. Only these four steps, although drastic, will
And the reform would restore individual responsibility in health care.

Page 84 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

restore a fully free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry will have serious problems, and so will we, its consumers. Abolishing federal programs is the first step to solving poverty allows private sector to grow. Blanchette, Research Fellow, 07 (Jude Blanchette, Henry Hazlitt Research Fellow at the Foundation for Economics Education, The Shortcomings of Government Charity May 2007, The Freeman Volume: 57 Issue: 4 http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-shortcomings-of-governmentcharity/) /A.C. History shows that it is only through private voluntary solutions that we see true human compassion. Organizations and individuals , in the spirit of compassion, provided poverty relief that embraced generosity, but recognized the dire consequences of haphazardly given aid . Most social workers of a century ago
understood that good character, self-reliance, and strong social ties were virtues that must be instilled in the poor if there were to be any gains made in alleviating poverty. Before the Depression private solutions played an important moral and material role for the poor. Whereas government relies on coercion , charities and fraternal societies embody the qualities that make volunteerism socially advantageous. Conversely,

the past 70 years have shown that government has not prudently handled, and cannot prudently handle, the plight of the poor . Rather than help those in need of assistance during times of trouble , the federal government has imprisoned them in a political power game, resulting in increased dependence. Only abolition of the government dole will allow the private sector to once again achieve the levels of social welfare seen in the past.

Lower tax rates induce charitable giving studies prove. Benzing, economics professor, 04
(Cynthia Benzing, Ph.D Drexel University, Associate Dean of the College of Business and Public Affairs, Chairperson and Professor of Economics and Finance, Thomas Andrews The effect of tax rates and uncertainty on contributory crowding out, September 2004, Atlantic Economic Journal http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6413/is_3_32/ai_n29125440/pg_11/?tag=content;col1) /A.C. According to the results of this experiment, uncertainty and tax rates significantly influence both the rate of voluntary contributions and the crowding out effect . Subjects voluntarily contributed a higher percentage of income when the tax rate was low and subjects were uncertain as to whether they would be disadvantaged. This leads one to conjecture that low income individuals with less education and skills may be more inclined to voluntarily contribute to income support and social programs because their probability of needing such support is higher. High income, two wage earning families are less likely to ever need welfare, food stamps, etc. and, consequently, are less inclined to voluntarily contribute to such programs. If this is the case, then taxation to compel the contribution of higher income individuals may well increase the supply of income support and social programs. This study points to progressive taxation as a means of maintaining or increasing the supply of social programs. With respect to crowding out, 97 percent of contributions were crowded out when tax rates were increased from 0 to l0 percent.

Page 85 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Failure to privatize collapses the economy Bresiger, business writer & editor, 08
Gregory Bresiger, business writer & managing editor of Traders Magazine, The Non-Issue that Should be an issue, 7/3/2008, Von Mises http://mises.org/story/3020) /A.C. But they do matter, according to one of the great economic historians, Joseph Schumpeter. Indeed, history has endless episodes of nations that experienced incredible economic and social problems owing to the government, which took over bigger and bigger pieces of the economy. If the will of the people demands higher and higher public expenditures , if more

and more means are used for purposes for which private individuals have not produced them, if more and more power stands behind this will, and if finally all parts of the people are gripped by entirely new ideas about private property and the forms of life then the tax state will have run its course and society will have to depend on other motive forces for its economy than self-interest. This limit can certainly be reached. Without doubt, the tax state can collapse. **Alternative to Government Provision** The alternative is to reject the coercive policies of the affirmative. By embracing negative freedoms, the free market will alleviate social ills, turning the case. Rothschild, University of Linz, Vienna, Austria, 03
(Kurt Rothschild, University of Linz, Vienna, Austria, 2003, Reflections on an anniversary: Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, Journal of Economic Studies, Volume 30, Number 5, pp. 548-557(10), IngentaConnect) jz

The usual distinction between negative and positive freedom is that the first demands that individuals should not be interfered with when carrying out their desired actions (which in turn must not interfere with the plans of other people), while positive freedom is concerned with the question to what degree individuals are given the opportunity to choose between different actions. Nothing speaks against adopting one's personal preference as a concept of Freedom which
includes both aspects, the positive and the negative one. Amartya Sen or John Rawls are the outstanding examples of social scientists adopting such a view. But this wider perspective leads to a more complicated situation when it comes to practical applications of one's philosophy. While policies and institutions in both politics and economics may very well foster at the same time both positive and negative freedoms, there are also frequent cases where the two come into conflict. Then, difficult problems of trade-offs can arise[2]: How much can be taken away from some people (e.g. through taxes) reducing the degree of their (negative) freedom, in order to increase the degree of (positive) freedom of some other people (e.g. through subsidies). Friedman gets rid of such difficult choices in his

abstract and practical deliberations by making negative freedom a dominant and sole target. He draws a sharp division between equality of rights and equality of opportunity , on the one hand, and material equality or equality of outcome on the other (p. 195). While he accepts the first target, he rejects the second because it might come into conflict with the first. This confrontation of the two supposedly
contradictory alternatives has two decisive flaws. First, equality need not (and cannot in practice) be a question of complete equality, but only of degrees of equality which makes it unnecessary to draw a sharp either-or line, and second, the two alternatives are not completely independent of each other. In particular, equality of opportunity is not independent of the degree of equality or inequality of material means. Friedman, however, insists that the first alternative has to be the dominant principle of a free society. This does not mean that he does not care about social and other societal problems. He does. But in his view they should as far as possible be left to voluntary private activities

Page 86 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

with state interference kept at a minimum, because coercion is abhorred . I find it hard, as a liberal, to see any justification for graduated taxation solely to redistribute income. This seems a clear case of using coercion to take from some in order to give to others and thus to conflict head-on with individual freedom (p. 174). Added to this rejection of coercion is Friedman's belief that the undisturbed free market with its efficiency can contribute to an alleviation of social problems. Government motives and actions are regarded with doubt and distrust. This brings problems connected with Friedman's
approaches to capitalism and government. Freedom both in its wider and narrower (Friedman-type) sense can be divided into political and economic freedom. In both cases, the problem is for Friedman the only one that power-based coercion can force people to act differently from what they really want to do. In the political field, this raises the question: how far the state should be allowed to interfere into private decisions. This will be dealt with later. But political freedom is also connected with economic freedom, which deals with freedom for transactions in the economic sphere. For Friedman, with his stress on negative freedom and his scepticism about government power, which would be enhanced by controlling economic affairs, economic freedom achieves priority. Freedom in economic arrangements is an end in itself and is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom (p. 8, italics added).

We should reject coercion for deliberative democracy. Medearis, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 05

(John Medearis, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 2005, Social Movements and Deliberative Democratic Theory, British Journal of Political Science, 35 : 53-75 Cambridge University Press)

I adopt a view of coercion rooted in the current conceptualization of deliberation itself .

Indeed, before offering a definition, it is worth exploring the close connection between non-coercion and deliberation. One of the deliberative theorists basic premises is that only those decisions are legitimate that are or could be supported by citizens for reasons they have reflected upon and think are good ones. Coercion, simply as it is conventionally understood as compelling through force or threats stands in obvious contrast to such a notion of deliberation . For coercion, in this quite ordinary sense, would bypass the attempt to gain reasoned support. This is surely why Dryzek contrasts coercion with

persuasion and contends that deliberative democratic theory in general (not just his variety) rejects coercion.11 A principled rejection of coercion runs deep in the writings of Habermas and Rawls, who have not only endorsed deliberative democracy, but, more importantly, provided much of its intellectual apparatus. In a frequently-cited formulation, Habermas writes that participants in argumentation cannot
avoid the presupposition that the structure of their communication rules out all external or internal coercion other than the force of the better argument and thereby also neutralizes all motives other than that of the cooperative search for truth.12 Such a co-operative search for truth, or action oriented to reaching understanding, is the principled heart of at least one major strand of deliberation .13 A similar

understanding of coercion is clearly also embedded in Rawlss central insistence that parties to deliberation offer each other reasons and forms of co-operation that they can accept, as he puts it, for the right reasons and not merely because of a balance of political and social forces or sanctions.14 Likewise, a number of central features of Gutmann and Thompsons influential deliberative writings would seem to rule out coercion: their Rawlsian commitment to reciprocity, one of three putative deliberative values, which
involves a sole reliance on reasons that are shared or could come to be shared; their stringent demand that people who disagree continue to reason together to reach mutually acceptable decisions; and their disapproval of outcomes that turn, strategically, on actors self-interests.15 Bohman, similarly,

makes the exposing of coercion one of the three conditions of deliberative legitimacy in pluralistic societies.16 Of course, deliberative democrats do not claim that politics can be entirely non-coercive,
any more than they claim politics can be entirely deliberative. But they do claim that decisions are democratically legitimate only in so far as they are deliberative. And thus from their perspective,

Page 87 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

decisions are democratically legitimate only in so far as the processes from which they result are noncoercive. Reject coercion in favor of capitalism and individual rights. Biddle, editor and publisher of The Objective Standard, 06

(Craig Biddle, editor and publisher of The Objective Standard, The Objectivist Standard, Spring 2006, Vol. 1, No. 1, Introducing The Objective Standard, http://theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2006spring/introducing-the-objective-standard.asp)

In the realm of politics, we recognize that in order to take life-promoting action, a person must be free to do so; he must be free to act on the judgment of his mind, his basic means of living. The only thing that can stop him from doing so is other people, and the only way they can stop him is by means of physical force. Thus, in order to live peacefully together in a societyin order to live together as civilized beings, rather than as barbarianspeople must refrain from using physical force against one another. This fact gives rise to the principle of individual rights, which is the principle of egoism applied to politics. The principle of individual rights is the recognition of the fact that each person is morally an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others ; therefore, he morally must
be left free to act on his own judgment for his own sake, so long as he does not violate that same right of others. This principle is not a matter of personal opinion or social convention or divine revelation; it

is a matter of the factual requirements of human life in a social context . A moral societya civilized societyis one in which the initiation of physical force against human beings is prohibited by law. And the only social system in which such force is so prohibited consistently and on principleis pure, laissez-faire capitalism. Capitalismwhich, contrary to widespread mis-education, is not merely an economic systemis the social system of individual rights, including property rights, protected by a strictly limited government. In a laissez-faire society, if people want to deal with one another, they may do so only on voluntary terms, by uncoerced agreement. If they want to receive goods
or services from others, they may offer to exchange value for value to mutual benefit; however, they may not seek to gain any value from others by means of physical force. People are fully free to act on

their own judgment and thus to produce, keep, use, and dispose of their own property as they see fit; the only thing they are not free to do is to violate the rights of others. In a capitalist society, individual rights cannot legally be violated by anyoneincluding the government. Rejection of the collectivist welfare policies of the aff is critical to imagining a better world. Only through this can we establish concrete foundations for reasonable change. Ebeling, president of Foundation for Economic Freedom, 06
(Richard Ebeling, president of Foundation for Economic Freedom, October 2006, Principles Must Come Before Politics, http://www.nassauinstitute.org/articles/article636.php?view=print)

The real political task, however, is not to try to attract votes or nudge policy in the context of the existing bell curve of voter preferences. Rather, it is to move the curve in the direction of individual freedom, limited constitutional government, and a truly free market. In other words, the task is to shift the
curve's dome over to where its individualist tail end is today, so that someday the middle mass of voters will more or less hold views generally consistent with classical-liberal ideas. But this requires looking beyond what is politically expedient today. Indeed, it requires ignoring what seem to

be the boundaries of the politically possible and instead thinking in terms of the politically desirable. If policies really consistent with individual freedom are ever to be implemented, we must first explain to our fellow citizens what such a society of freedom would look like, how it would work, and why it is desirable. They must slowly but surely come to see the vision of liberty.

Page 88 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Maybe part of the reason so many people seem unable or unwilling to think beyond five minutes is that they are so infrequently challenged to do. Maybe our fellow citizens find it hard to break out of

the current mindset of the existing interventionist welfare state because they are too rarely offered a clear and consistent case for the classical-liberal ideal and why it would be good for them and others they care about . Maybe people are often trapped in the
policies of the short run precisely because they almost never are presented with a political and economic philosophy of freedom for the long run. Politics will always only reflect the existing distribution of people's political views. Political campaigns , therefore, will never be the primary method for transforming society from less free to more free. This will only happen outside of the narrow political process-through a change in the climate of ideas. Though most people don't know it, they are guided by

an implicit set of political and economic principles when they think about and decide on what they want government to do. These principles are the ideological residues of nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectivism. They need to be replaced with a new set of political and economic principles, those of classical liberalism. When a sufficient number of our fellow citizens accept classical liberalism, politics will follow principle and the interventionist welfare state will be opposed and finally abolished. This is why a radical change in principles must come before any successful change in politics. Alt view the invisible victims Walter E. Williams (John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University) January 15, 1996. THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE
MARKETS: MORALITY VS. EFFICIENCY. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n2-3-3.html Demystification of the State A. V. Dicey (1914: 257) wrote: The beneficial effect of State intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak visible, whilst its evil effects are gradual and indirect, and lie outside our sight.... Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favour upon government intervention. This natural bias can be counteracted only by the existence, in a given society, ... of a presumption or prejudice in favour of individual liberty, that is of laissez-faire. One can hardly determine the casualties of war simply by looking at survivors. We must ask what happened to those whom we do not see. Similarly, when evaluating interventionist public policy we cannot evaluate it simply by looking at its beneficiaries. We must discover its victims. Most often the victims of public policy are invisible. To garner greater public support against government command and control, we must somehow find a way to make those victims visible. In all interventionist policy there are those who are beneficiaries and those who are victims. In most cases the beneficiaries are highly visible and the victims are invisible. A good example is the minimum wage law. After enactment of an increase in the minimum wage law, politicians accompanied by television crews readily point to people who have benefitted from the legislation. The beneficiaries are those with a fatter paycheck. Thus, the politician can lay claim to the wisdom of his legislation that increased minimum wages. Moreover, the politician is also a beneficiary since those now earning higher wages will remember him when election time comes around. By parading minimum wage beneficiaries across the stage, those who oppose minimum wage increases can be readily portrayed as having a callous, mean-spirited disregard for interests of low-wage workers. A political strategy of those who support liberty should be that of exposing the invisible victims of minimum wage laws. We need to show those who have lost their jobs, or do not become employed in the first place, because their productivity did not warrant being employed at the minimum wage. We should find a way to demonstrate jobs destroyed by minimum wages such as busboys, gasoline station attendants, and movie ushers. We must show how marginally profitable firms have been forced out of business, though surviving firms may have the same number of employees. We should show how capital was artificially substituted for labor as a result of higher mandated wages and how firms have adjusted their production techniques in order to economize on labor. The particular adjustments firms make in response to higher mandated wages are less important than the fact that adjustments will be made.

Page 89 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

A more dramatic example of the invisible victims of interventionist state policy can be found in the regulation of medicines and medical devices, as in the case of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States. Essentially, FDA officials can make two types of errors. They can err on the side of undercaution and approve a drug with dangerous unanticipated side effects. Or they can err on the side of overcaution, not approving a useful and safe drug, or creating costly and lengthy drug approval procedures. Errors on the side of undercaution lead to embarrassment and possibly loss of bureaucratic careers and promotions because the victims of unsafe drugs will be visible through news stories of sick people, congressional investigations, and hearings. However, errors on the side of overcaution, through extensive delay in the approval of drugs--as in the cases of propranolol, Septra, and other drugs-impose virtually no costs on the FDA. Victims of FDA errors on the side of overcaution are mostly invisible to the press, the public, and politicians. Those victims should be made visible. Once the FDA (or some other approving agency) approves a drug widely used elsewhere with no untoward effects, we should find people who died or needlessly suffered as a result of the FDA's delay. For political efficiency we cannot simply offer intellectual arguments. We must get pictures and stories of FDA victims in an effort to appeal to a sense of fair play, decency, and common sense among the citizenry. But there is also a role for intellectual arguments in the sense of teaching people that any meaningful use of "safe'' must see safety as a set of tradeoffs rather than a category. The attempt to get a "safe'' drug means that people will die or needlessly suffer during the time it takes to achieve greater safety. That toll must be weighted against the number of people who might die or become ill because of the drug's earlier availability and attendant unanticipated harmful side effects. People should also be taught to understand that if a 100 percent safe drug is ever achieved, it will be the only thing in this world that is 100 percent safe.

Americans want smaller government when taxes matter Boaz, Cato's executive vice president, 09
(David Boaz, Cato's executive vice president, 6/23/09, CATO Institute, http://www.cato-atliberty.org/2009/06/23/americans-want-smaller-government/)

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll again shows that voters prefer smaller government with fewer services to larger government with more services:Obama has used the power and financial resources of the federal government
repeatedly as he has dealt with the countrys problems this year, to the consternation of his Republican critics. The poll found little change in underlying public attitudes toward government

since the inauguration, with slightly more than half saying they prefer a smaller government with fewer services to a larger government with more services. Independents, however, now split 61 to 35 percent in favor of a smaller government; they were more narrowly divided on this question a year ago (52 to 44 percent), before the financial crisis hit.The Post calls a 54 to 41 lead for
smaller government barely more than half, which is fair enough, though its twice as large as Obamas margin over McCain. Its also twice as large as the margin the Post found in the same poll in November 2007.Ive always thought the smaller government question is incomplete. It offers respondents a benefit of larger governmentmore servicesbut it doesnt mention that the cost of larger government with more services is higher taxes. The question ought to give

both the cost and the benefit for each option. A few years ago a Rasmussen poll did ask the question that way. The results were that 64 percent of voters said that they prefer smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes, while only 22 percent would rather see a more active government with more services and higher taxes. A similar poll around the same time, without the information on taxes, found a margin of 59 to 26 percent. So its reasonable to conclude that if you remind respondents that more services means higher taxes, the margin by which people prefer smaller government rises by about 9 points. So maybe the margin in this poll would have been
something like 59 to 37 if both sides of the question had been presented.

Page 90 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

AT: Cant imagine. Confinement to the politically possible makes change impossible. Prefer the reformist policies Ebeling, president of Foundation for Economic Freedom, 06
(Richard Ebeling, president of Foundation for Economic Freedom, October 2006, Principles Must Come Before Politics, http://www.nassauinstitute.org/articles/article636.php?view=print)

there are many people who talk about dealing with the dangers of bigger and bigger government and the budgetary burdens it imposes on all of us . But, again, rather than focusing on fundamentals, theirs is often only an attempt to find short-term gimmicks to deal with the problems. This, too, is the result of focusing on politics. It's often pointed out that the political preferences of voters are distributed in the shape of a bell curve. At the ends are the political "extremists," collectivists
At the same time, and individualists respectively. In between, under the dome, are the vast majority of voters who are somewhere "in the middle." If a politician is to be elected , it is explained, he [or she] must appeal to a significant number in that middle, since there are just not enough votes at either end of the curve to win an election. Thus he [or she] must weave together a patchwork of inconsistent and often contradictory

positions that will reflect the diverse political views of his potential constituents. This also limits what market-oriented think tanks in either Washington or in the various state capitals can offer as policy options in the debates about the role of government. Even while seeming to be nudging the debate more in a free-market, smaller government direction, the boundaries in which they can frame their proposals are constricted by what the politicians consider "politically possible." Beyond those boundaries the policy advocate becomes a "kook ," a pie-in-the-sky "nut," an extremist who does not realize that "nobody" is going to take those views seriously. The policy advocate risks losing political legitimacy and a hearing in the halls of power -which is why his organization is located in that center of political decision-making. This often means that policy proposals are "watered down" to be politically acceptable . Even the defense of a policy is often
couched in terms designed to avoid the impression that its advocates support anything as radical as, well, laissez faire and the end to the interventionist welfare state. Any detailed and fundamental discussion of government policy is therefore implicitly ruled out of court. Once attention is

focused on influencing what government is doing right now, the debate is defined by what is politically practicable today.

Page 91 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**Private Charities CP** Private charities are more successful than the government at providing aid Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96 (Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare, http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html) Private efforts have been much more successful than the federal government's failed attempt at charity. America is the most generous nation on earth. Americans already contribute more than $125 billion annually to charity. In fact, more than 85 percent of all adult Americans make some charitable contribution each year. In addition, about half of all American adults perform volunteer work; more than 20 billion hours were worked in 1991. The dollar value of that volunteer work was more than $176 billion. Volunteer work and cash donations combined bring American charitable contributions to more than $300 billion per year, not counting the countless dollars and time given informally to family members, neighbors, and others outside the formal charity system. Private charities have been more successful than government welfare for several reasons. First, private charities are able to individualize their approach to the circumstances of poor people in ways that governments can never do. Government regulations must be designed to treat all similarly situated recipients alike.
Glenn C. Loury of Boston University explains the difference between welfare and private charities on that point. "Because citizens have due process rights which cannot be fully abrogated .

. . public judgments must be made in a manner that can be defended after the fact, sometimes even in court." The result is that most government programs rely on the simple provision of cash or other goods and services without any attempt to differentiate between the needs of recipients. Government eligibility requirements skew aid distribution Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96 (Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare, http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html) In addition to being better able to target individual needs, private charities are much better able to target assistance to those who really need help. Because eligibility requirements for government welfare programs are arbitrary and cannot be changed to fit individual circumstances, many people in genuine need do not receive assistance, while benefits often go to people who do not really need them. More than 40 percent of all families living below the poverty level receive no government assistance. Yet more than half of the families receiving means-tested benefits are not poor. Thus, a student may receive food stamps, while a homeless man with no mailing address goes without. Private charities are not bound by such bureaucratic restrictions.

Page 92 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Governmental programs are inefficient; Private charities arent Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96 (Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare, http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html) Private charity also has a better record of actually delivering aid to recipients. Surprisingly little of the money being spent on federal and state social welfare programs actually reaches recipients. In 1965, 70 cents of every dollar spent by the government to fight poverty went directly to poor people. Today, 70 cents of every dollar goes, not to poor people, but to government bureaucrats and others who serve the poor. Few private charities have the bureaucratic overhead and inefficiency of government programs. A greater diversity of solutions makes private charities more effective Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96 (Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare, http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html) Second, in general, private charity is much more likely to be targeted to short-term emergency assistance than to long-term dependence. Thus, private charity provides a safety net, not a way of life. Moreover, private charities may demand that the poor change their behavior in exchange for assistance. For example, a private charity may reduce or withhold benefits if a recipient does not stop using alcohol or drugs, look for a job, or avoid pregnancy. Private charities are much more likely than government programs to offer counseling and one-on-one follow-up rather than simply provide a check. By the same token, because of the separation of church and state, the government cannot support programs that promote religious values as a way out of poverty. Yet church and other religious charities have a history of success in dealing with the problems that often lead to poverty. Private Charity causes an attitudinal shift encouraging recipients to escape poverty Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96 (Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare, http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html) Finally, and perhaps most important, private charity requires a different attitude on the part of both recipients and donors. For recipients, private charity is not an entitlement but a gift carrying reciprocal obligations. As Father Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute describes it, "An impersonal check given without any expectations for responsible behavior leads to a damaged sense of self-worth. The beauty of local [private charitable] efforts to help the needy is that . . . they make the individual receiving the aid realize that he must work to live up to the expectations of those helping him out." Private charity demands that donors become directly involved. Former Yale political science professor James Payne notes how little citizen involvement there is in government charity:

Page 93 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Private Charity promotes participatory democracy Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96 (Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare, http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html) Private charity demands that donors become directly involved. Former Yale political science professor James Payne notes how little citizen involvement there is in government charity: We know now that in most cases of government policy making, decisions are not made according to the democratic ideal of control by ordinary citizens. Policy is made by elites, through special interest politics, bureaucratic pressures, and legislative manipulations. Insiders decide what happens, shaping the outcome according to their own preferences and their political pull. The citizens are simply bystanders. Private charity, in contrast, is based on "having individuals vote with their own time, money, and energy." Only the counterplan solves informal private networks are not only solve poverty but protect key values Walter E. Williams (John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University) January 15, 1996. THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE
MARKETS: MORALITY VS. EFFICIENCY. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n2-3-3.html Ultimately, the struggle to achieve and preserve freedom must take place in the habits and minds of individuals. And, as admonished by the Constitution of the State of North Carolina (Art. I, Sec. 35), "The frequent reference to fundamental principles is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty.'' It is those fundamental principles that deliver economic efficiency and wealth, not the other way around. Fundamental moral principles or values are determined in the arena of civil society. Values such as thrift, hard work, honesty, trust and cooperative behavior, based on shared norms, are the keys to improving the human condition and provide the undergirding for a free-market economy. Just as important are such social institutions as respect for private property, sanctity of contracts, educational institutions, clubs, charities, churches, and families. All those institutions provide the glue to hold society together in terms of common values and provide for the transmission of those values to successive generations. Too often informal institutions and local networks are trivialized and greater favor is given to the intellectual's narrow conception of what constitutes knowledge and wisdom. The importance of informal networks such as friends, church members, neighbors, and families cannot be underestimated--as demonstrated in the following example of small proprietorships. [1] The critical determinants of a proprietor's success are perseverance, character, ability, and other personal characteristics. Banks seldom finance the establishment of such business. Most small businesses are financed through friends and family. The reason is that those are the people who have the lowest cost in acquiring the necessary information about the proprietor's characteristics deemed critical for success. Also, friends and family, who lend the proprietor money, have a personal stake in the business and have an incentive to moderate their likely bias in favor of the borrower. Clearly, a formal lending institution could query friends and relatives. However, the information obtained would have greater bias because friends and relatives would not have sufficient stake in the business to offset any personal bias they had in favor of the borrower.

Privatization promotes choice and increases quality of services to all people The case for privatization includes other claims besides improved efficiency, budget savings, and increased economic growth. The key word is choice. Advocates claim that privatization will enlarge

the range of choice for individuals while serving the same essential functions as do traditional programs. Thus, if Social Security were privatized, the Federal government would still require people to put aside funds for retirement but would allow them to choose their own retirement

Page 94 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

investments.

Educational vouchers would not abolish laws requiring children to go to school but would allow families to choose which one. Asset sales and shifts of services from public agencies to private contractors might permit greater choice among suppliers. Proponents of privatization maintain that

greater choice would serve the interests of equity. The rich have always been able to afford private schools; educational vouchers would give the middle classes and the poor that ability. Social Security, they say, favors whites, whose longer life expectancy enables them to receive greater retirement benefits than do blacks; privatization would allegedly correct that bias. According to the privatizers, greater freedom of choice will generally lead to a more just distribution of benefits. Product choice because of privatization will resolve the inefficiency preventing high quality goods and services Choice is unquestionably the single strongest point in the case for privatiza tion. The uniformity of public programs and services is often a grave limitation. Even where it is not logically required, the demands of equal treatment are often interpreted to prohibit heterogeneity in public services. Rules requiring uniform pricing also impede the production of varied services, especially those of high quality. These barriers to heterogeneity have long been a weakness of public services, but the problem grows more serious as personal income increases with economic growth. Larger numbers of consumers demand the more varied, specially designed
services available previously only to those with the highest incomes. This demand for qualityor rather for different qualities constitutes a source of dissatisfaction with the public sector that may be expected to grow.

Privatizing is a prerequisite to eliminating poverty. Blanchette, Research Fellow, 07 (Jude Blanchette, Henry Hazlitt Research Fellow at the Foundation for Economics Education, The Shortcomings of Government Charity May 2007, The Freeman Volume: 57 Issue: 4 http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-shortcomings-of-governmentcharity/) /A.C. For large charities such as the Salvation Army and smaller local charities run by churches and other private organizations, the fight against poverty has been going on for the past 150 years . Tragically, standing in their way has been the federal government. Besides an effort to wage war on poverty beginning in the 1960s, the federal government has attempted to intercede and dole out aid since the beginning of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal. These interventions have proven costly and yielded disastrous results . By continually siphoning funds away from the private sector, lawmakers and bureaucrats further diminish the ability of civil society to deal with the problem of poverty. (As Charles
Murray shows in Losing Ground, poverty was declining steadily through the 1950s and 1960s up until the Great Society programs kicked in during the early 1970s.) If the plight of the poor is to be truly addressed, Americans should study the lessons of the past. Earlier in the twentieth century , private charities offered a more effective cure for chronic indigence, and it was through mutually beneficial activities and voluntary funding that the spirit of American compassion was unleashed. In the best interests of the poor, the government should withdraw itself

Page 95 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

completely from all activities designed to help them and allow civil society its full range of motion.
Unfortunately, most social commentators see increased state action as the best (indeed, the only) way to fight poverty. With apologies to Ian McEwan, the welfare state has become the repository of collective fantasy. Private charities, they often argue, financed by volunteers and private donations, cannot meet the immense burden of welfare provision. Advocates of public assistance see private enterprise as an economic system that functions on Hobbesian selfinterest and that would leave the poor to suffer if profit could not be squeezed from their labor. Many proponents of laissez faire recognize these common protestations, but are unable to provide cogent rebuttal. On the surface it would seem that only government, with its vast infrastructure and immense financial resources, can improve the plight of the poor. Private charities, subject to the vagaries of voluntary donations, are a far less reliable source of income. Yet if this were the case , how is it that after more than 40 years since the Great Society and more than $8 trillion spent (in 2000 dollars) so little headway has been made by the government in alleviating poverty? This is not to say that poverty has not diminished in America . Indeed, the market economy has virtually eliminated extreme poverty in the United States. The average poor American lives a lifestyle that would be envied by most of the worlds citizens. But this is a product of the market economy not government handouts. It is only through wealth creation, not wealth distribution, that we see the wellspring of human progress.

Private charities solve poverty Awenius, retired attorney, 84

(Robert Awenius, retired attorney, Why Not Private Charity, November 1984 The Freeman Volume: 34 Issue: 11 http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/why-not-private-charity/) /A.C.

For some period of time there has been considerable evidence that private charity is superior to government welfare as a means of overcoming poverty in America. Empirical data suggests that private charity indeed would do more for the poverty-level families of this nation than is being achieved under the present welfare system. However, we must
not conclude that this seemingly radical plan is anything new in the annals of mankind. In the nineteenth century one of Englands most powerful voices for social reform, Charles Dickens, professed a belief in private charity as opposed to public charity. He opposed government charity because of its ineffectiveness. He was convinced that the polestar of charity was the human beings innate concern for another creature. He felt that the aid and assistance extended by private persons was more powerful , useful, and kind than the charity of government . Just to cite his views is to affirm the favored position of private charity, as in the following statement: Following the Napoleonic Wars much discontent and unrest prevailed in England, but instead of revolution the Victorian Age brought relative peace, manifested by great reforms such as the Reform Acts of 1832, the Factory Reform of 1833, and the Poor Laws of 1834. With these reforms passed, the general bent of the programs was to treat the symptoms of poverty, not the causes. As a result, there was a great alienation of the working masses and only partial satisfaction within the commercial and industrial strata of society. That is the very same complaint we hear today concerning our welfare laws: alienation of welfare clients and complaint of the taxpayers who are shouldering the burden of the necessary taxation to support the system. Today in the United States the bulk of the donating public make their contributions to philanthropy by taxes through their government or privately to organized charities . There is negligible warmth of heart between the public donors (taxpayers) and the recipients albeit, there is slight concern by those giving funds as to direct knowledge of the state of affairs or indigency of the beneficiaries. There is undoubtedly more concern in this regard in the case of private charities. Also, there is some little suspicion on the part of many contributors that a considerable number of those who ask for charity are undeserving . This same attitude was true

Page 96 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

during Dickens time when, beginning about 1818, the upper classes made attempts to protect themselves by forming a Mendicity Society, where subscribers contributed funds to the Society rather than give directly to beggars. The Society investigated each case to see if each had merit.

Government programs are ineffective and trade-off with private efforts. Awenius, retired attorney, 84
(Robert Awenius, retired attorney, Why Not Private Charity, November 1984 The Freeman Volume: 34 Issue: 11 http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/why-not-private-charity/) /A.C.

The adoption of welfare state procedures and plans tends to encourage the destructive activity of the modern state in the mass liquidation and redistribution of wealth. The normal and hitherto accepted role of government has been to maintain law, justice, and order, defend the nation abroad, and to permit every man the ownership of his property. In general, the governments business in the past was to protect the common
welfare of its citizens.

The destructive effect of the welfare state is manifested in its expropriation , taxation, or arbitrary creation of money and creditall done in the name of the poor. The effect of this damaging tendency is to abolish the independent citizen and foster the idea that all the people should look to Washington for subsistencei.e., to become parasites, wholly dependent on government for all their needs and wants. With this tendency, the politicians follow a short-term
expediency of approving sophisticated theft (in redistributing the wealth) without regard to ultimately damaging long-term results.

The very people who have done so much and will do so much in aiding private charitythe great middle classare economically squeezed by the welfare state and find its capacity to support private charity greatly diminished. Private charities solve coercion. Reed, adjunct scholar, 01
(Lawrence W. Reed, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan, Charity and Free Will, 8/9/2001 http://mises.org/story/751)/A.C. From start to finish, what private charities do is a manifestation of free will . No one is compelled to provide assistance. No one is coerced to pay for it. No one is required to accept it. All parties come together of their own, individual volition . And thats the magic of it. The link between the giver, the provider, and the receiver is strong precisely because each knows he can walk away from it at the slightest hint of insincerity, broken promises, or poor performance. Because each party is giving of his own time or resources voluntarily, he tends to focus on the mission at hand and doesnt get bogged down or diverted by distant or secondary agendas, like filling out the proper paperwork or currying favor with the political powers-that-be.

Private charity best targets causes, not symptoms. Johnston, economist, 98

Jim Johnston, economist and a member of the board of directors of the Heartland Institute ,Welfare and Charity: Yes, There Is a Difference, Juny/July 1998 http://www.newcoalition.org/Article.cfm? artId=768

There are probably more solutions than there are causes for poverty . The reason
is that many "solutions" are not well considered, and sometimes they actually worsen the condition of the poor. Clearly, effective help for the poor takes more than just good intentions. Wealth and poverty have been important topics in economics for more than 200 years since

Page 97 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

1776. One of the most important contributions made recently to the literature is by Jennifer Roback Morse, a fellow economist who is a person of deep religious conviction. Morse has compared government welfare and private charity in a way that helps to understand the issue in a new light . She points out that private charity operates to treat particular causes of poverty . The help is tailored to the individual person. By contrast, government welfare does not, and should not, discriminate among recipients. The discretion of social workers must be circumscribed in
Adam Smith, a professor of moral philosophy, published The Wealth of Nations in order to reduce corruption in the system.

Taxes trade off with charity. Garret and Rhine, economic researchers, 09
Thomas A. Garrett and Russell M. Rhine, economic researchers at the Federal Reserve,Government Growth and Private Contributions to Charity, July 2009 http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2007/2007012.pdf)/A.C. We obtained the interesting result that a decrease in state and local government spending on education increases private giving to education, and that increased education giving then leads to a reduction in federal government spending on education. We argued that this one-way relationship is a result of changing fundraising efforts and the nature of state and local government versus federal government education expenditures (general appropriations versus grants, respectively) and the relative size of each toward total education expenditures . In

addition to a reduction in private charitable contributions resulting from government spending on charitable organizations, government growth itself, ignoring the destination of government spending, may reduce private charitable contributions. Private contributions may decrease because of reduced disposable income that results from higher taxes used to fuel future government growth.

Page 98 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

*****UTILITARIANISM GOOD / DEON BAD***** **Util Good For Rights** Utilitarianism upholds self-ownership and thus liberty. Bailey, lecturer Politics at Princeton, 97 (James Bailey, lecturer Politics at Princeton, 1997, Utilitarianism, Institutions, and Justice, Oxford University Press, p. 160) attempts to subvert utilitarianism through appeals to formal properties about theories of justice such as finality and publicitydo not work either. The finality of utilitarianism is unlikely to be in jeopardy in a world in which people cannot suffer horrible acts as patients or alienating acts as agents. The rules protecting self-ownership, which are necessary to prevent exploitation , also forbid the horrible acts and allow individuals the liberty to do much of what they see as with their lives. The question of utilitarianism's subversion in its finality by grossly, unfair distributive arrangements is answered by a set of institutions in which no deep suffering is allowed and a generous provision is made
I have also tried to show that for educational opportunities for all.

Utilitarianism is best it protects rights while not totally rejecting all policies that might infringe. Harvey, J.D. Yale, 02 (Philip Harvey, J.D. Yale, Spring 2002, Human Rights and Economic Policy Discourse: Taking Economic and Social Rights Seriously, 33 Colum. Human Rights L. Rev. 353)
Perhaps the clearest illustration of this compromise or balancing principle is the distinction drawn in constitutional jurisprudence between the standard of

Laws that do not infringe on certain constitutionally protected rights will pass muster if there is a mere rational basis for their enactment, whereas laws that do infringe on such rights require more compelling justification , with the level of justification varying depending on the right at issue. 196 Human rights claims have bite precisely because they declare that certain actions may be improper, even if those actions are supported by a majority of the population, indeed, even if the actions in question would increase the total utility of the population as a whole. But it is not necessary to take the position that rights-based claims should always trump conflicting utility-maximizing purposes . 197 It should be possible to honor multiple goals in public policy decision-making.
review applied by courts in deciding whether legislative enactments comply with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Util protects rights in social and constitutional hierarchies. Bailey, lecturer Politics at Princeton, 97
(James Bailey, lecturer Politics at Princeton, 1997, Utilitarianism, Institutions, and Justice, Oxford University Press, p. 153-154) Even in a world full of rules and institutionslike that of Imperfectia there is still normative work for utilitarianism to do. The foundation for this work stems from an argument in chapter 1 that the work of utilitarianism is more likely a form of local

Page 99 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

rather than global maximizing, of making the best use of new information and opportunities on the margin rather than a complete revolution of social relations. In imperfect worlds, this work thus includes local maximization, constitutional change, and exceptional case guidance. In addition there is a kind of
distinctive normative work specifically for utilitarians in venal oligarchies. To provide anything like a full theory of any of these things here would require an entire new book. What I do provide is merely a series of thumbnail sketches of the problems. The aim is to show that there is still plenty of value in a consciously held global theory of utilitarianism , and therefore we should not fall hack only on common sense and whatever reasonable institutions are lying about.

Utilitarian calculus is the only way to determine rights relative importance. Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992 Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press. Pg 199.
Before turning to possible " deeper" difficulties, let me make just one point favorable to the utilitarian view, that it tells us, in principle, how to find out what are a person's rights, and how stringent they are, relative to each other, which is much more than can be said of most other theories, unless reliance on intuitions is supposed to be a definite way of telling what a person's rights are. How does one do this, on the utilitarian theory? The idea, of course, is that we have to determine whether it would maximize long-range expectable utility to include recognition of certain rights in the moral code of a society, or to include a certain right with a certain degree of stringency as compared with other rights. (For instance, it might be optimistic to include a right to life with more stringency than a right to liberty and this with more stringency than the right to pursue happiness.) Suppose, for instance, one wants to know what should be the scope of the " right to life." Then it would be proper to inquire whether the utility-maximizing moral system would require people to retrain from taking the life of other adults, more positively to support life by providing adequate medical care, to abstain from life-termination for seriously defective infants or to refrain from abortion, to require abstaining from assisting a person with terminal illness in ending his own life if he requests it, to refrain from assisting in the discharge of a sentence of capital punishment, or to refrain from killing combatants in war time and so on. If one wants to know whether the right to life is stronger than the right of free speech on political subjects, it is proper to inquire whether the utility maximizing moral code would prefer free speech to the cost of lives (and in what circumstances).

Page 100 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Util Good: Generics**

Their moral imperatives revolve around a flawed libertarian methodconsequences must be evaluated first to escape the cycle Friedman, Political Science at Bernard University, 97 (Jefferey Friedman, PoliSci Bernard U, 1997, "What's Wrong with Libertarianism," Critical Review, Volume: 3, pp. 435-436)
The effect of libertarian straddling on libertarian scholarship is suggested by a passage in the scholarly appendix to Boazs collection of libertarian essays, The Libertarian Reader. There, Tom G. Palmer (also of the Cato Institute) writes that in libertarian scholarship, the moral imperatives of peace and voluntary cooperation are brought together with a rich understanding of the spontaneous order made possible by such voluntary cooperation, and of the ways in which coercive intervention can disorder the world and set in motion complex trains of unintended consequences (Boaz r997b, 416, emphasis added). Palmers ambiguous brought together suggests (without coming right out and saying) that even if there were no rich

understanding of spontaneous order, libertarianism would be sustained by moral imperatives? But in that case, why develop the rich understanding of spontaneous order in the first place, and why emphasize its importance now that it has been developed? Spontaneous order is, on Palmers own
terms, irrelevant, since even if a rich understanding of it yielded the conclusion that markets are less orderly or less spontaneous than states, or that the quality of the order they produce is inferior to that produced by states, we would still be compelled to be libertarians by moral imperatives. The premise of the philosophical approach is that nothing can possibly trump freedom-cum-private property. But if libertarian freedom is an end in itself and is the greatest of

all values, ones endorsement of it should not be affected in the slightest by such empirical questions as whether libertarianism would spell starvation or warfare. The premise of the empirical approach is, conversely, that such consequences do matter. Why investigate the effects of libertarianism if they could not conceivably outweigh the putative intrinsic value of private property? If a priori reasoning tells us that laissez-faire capitalism is just, come what may, then why should we care to find out what may, in fact, come? Policy must be viewed through a consequentialist framework- slipping into the libertarian mindset only recreates the root cause of the affirmative harms Friedman, Political Science at Bernard University, 97 (Jefferey Friedman, PoliSci Bernard U, 1997, "What's Wrong with Libertarianism," Critical Review, Volume: 3, pp. 458-459)
On the one hand, the reclamation of the Enlightenment legacy can lead in far more directions than the politicalscience path I have suggested. It is surely important to launch anthropological, economic, historical, sociological, and psychological investigations of the preconditions of human happiness. And post-libertarian cultural historians and critics are uniquely positioned to analyze the unstated assumptions that take the place of the requisite knowledge in determining democratic attitudes. A prime candidate would seem to be the

overwhelming focus on intentions as markers for the desirability of a policy. If a policy is well intended, this is usually taken to be a decisive consideration in its favor. This heuristic might
explain the moralism that observers since Tocqueville have noticed afflicts democratic cultures. To date, this phenomenon is relatively unexplored. Analogous opportunities for insightful postlibertarian research can be found across the spectrum of political behavior. What is nationalism, for example, if not a device that helps an ignorant public navigate the murky waters of politics by applying a simple us-versus-them test to any proposed policy? Pursuit of these possibilities, however, must be accompanied by awareness of the degeneration of postwar skepticism into libertarian ideology. If the post-libertarian social scientist yields to the

hope of re-establishing through consequentialist research the antigovernment politics that has until

Page 101 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

now been sustained by libertarian ideology; she will only recreate the conditions that have served to retard serious empirical inquiry. It is fashionable to call for political engagement by scholars and to deny the possibility that one can easily isolate ones work from ones political sympathies . But difficulty is no excuse for failing to try. Libertarians have even less of an excuse than most, since, having for so long accused the intellectual mainstream of bias and insulation from refutation, they should understand better than anyone the importance of subverting ones own natural intellectual complacency with the constant reminder that one might be wrong. The only remedy for the sloppiness that has plagued libertarian scholarship is to become ones own harshest critic. This means thinking deeply and skeptically about ones politics and its premises and, if one has libertarian sympathies, directing ones scholarship not at vindicating them, but at finding out if they are mistaken. Governments must weigh consequences Harries, editor and founder of National Interest, Senior Fellow at Centre for Independent Studies, 94 (Owen Harries, editor and founder of National Interest, Senior Fellow at Centre for Independent Studies, Spring 1993/1994, Power and Civilization, The National Interest)
Performance is the test. Asked directly by a Western interviewer, In principle, do you believe in one standard of human rights and free expression?, Lee immediately answers, Look, it is not a matter of principle but of practice. This might appear to represent a simple and rather crude pragmatism. But in its context it might also be interpreted as an appreciation of the fundamental point made by Max Weber that, in politics, it is the ethic of responsibility rather than the ethic of absolute ends that is appropriate. While an individual is free to treat human rights as absolute, to be observed whatever the cost, governments must always weigh consequences and the competing claims of other ends. So once they enter the realm of politics, human rights have to take their place in a hierarchy of interests, including such basic things as national security and the promotion of prosperity. Their place in that hierarchy will vary with circumstances, but no responsible government will ever be able to put them always at the top and treat them as inviolable and over-riding. The cost of implementing and promoting them will always have to be considered.

Moral absolutism suffers from tunnel vision that generates evil and political irrelevance Isaac, PhD.Yale, Prof. PoliSci Indiana-Bloomington, dir. Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, 02 (Jeffrey C. Isaac, PhD.Yale, Prof. PoliSci Indiana-Bloomington, dir. Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, Spring 2002, End, Means, and Politics, Dissent Magazine, vol. 49, no. 2)
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of ones intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as

Page 102 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with good may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of good that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that ones goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important , always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it

undermines political effectiveness. Utilitarianism key to policy making Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.731-2, professor of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline)
Evolutionary progression toward majoritarian decision-making follows from the utilitarian function of social organization to enhance human need/want fulli1lment. Because the

need/want preference of community members are best known to them, resource allocations and behavior constraints that significantly reflect their input best implement those preferences. The need/want fulfillment of such members expands with their approval of community decision-making institutions. Such approval lowers the costs of dissenter disruption while increasing psychological security and productive efficiency. The utilitarian enhanced-fulfillment goal is most effectively implemented by communities that optimize (not maximize) individual participation in policy formulation . Optimal
participation involves the selection of capable officials who make independent community fulfillment decisions but remain subject to effective community supervision. Self-constrained majoritarianism thus appears to be the evolving political counterpart of utilitarianism, a continuity suggested by the progression of western nations from autocracy toward representative democracy, the enhanced need/want fulfillment that has accompanied the progression, and the inability of totalitarian governments to match that fulfillment.

Policymakers should adapt utilitarian calculus applicable throughout society

Goodin90 [RobertE. Goodin The Utilitarian Response. Ed p. 140-1 http://books.google.com/books?id=l3ZBwjK_1_QC&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=%22That,+I+submit, +is+a+fallacy %22+goodin&source=bl&ots=9hUQGnLTzV&sig=URHUw3uamFPyVmKwTyG1onBQvZI&hl=en&ei=z KxmSsfVMpCEtgfLvP3yDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1] The distinction I shall here propose works along a dimension orthogonal to that one. Instead of differentiating utilitarianisms on the basis of what they are used to choose, I suggest doing so on the basis of who is supposed to use the utilirarian calculus to make choices, Implicitly, contemporary discussions of varieties of utilitatianism are all standardly addresses, first and foremost, to individuals acting in their personal capacities and making choices which, while they may affect others as well, principally affect the choosers own lives, Implicitly, public officials choices of general social policy. A different menu of options in some respects greater, in others, less, but in any case different- is available to public and private users. That, I submit, is a fallacy. It does not matter who is using the utilitarian calculus, in what circumstances and for what purposes.

Page 103 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Using the felicific calculus for micro-level purposes of guiding individuals choices of personal conduct is altogether different from using it for macro-level purposes of guiding public officials shoices of general social policy. A different menu of options in some respects greater, in others, less, but in any case different is available to public and private choosers. Those differences are such as to neutralize in the public sphere, most of the objections standardly lodged against utilitarianism in the private sphere. True through such complaints may be as applied to utilitarianism as a standard of personal conduct, they are irrelevant (or anyway much less problematic) as applied to utilitarianism as a standard of public policy. Or so I shall argue.

In a nuclear world, you have to weigh consequences Bok, Prof. Phil. Brandeis, 88 (Sissela Bok, Prof. Phil. Brandeis, 1988, Applied Ethics and Ethical Theory, ed. David Rosenthal and Fudlou Shehadi, pp. 202-203)
The same argument can be made for Kants other formulations of the Categorical Imperative: So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means; and So act as if you were always through actions a law-making member in a universal Kingdom of Ends. No one with a concern for humanity could consistently will to risk eliminating humanity in the person of himself and every other or to risk the death of all members in a universal Kingdom of Ends for the sake of justice. To risk their collective death for the sake of following ones conscience would be, as Rawls said, irrational, crazy. And to say that one did not intend such a catastrophe, but that one merely failed to stop other persons from bringing it about would be beside the point when the end of the world was at stake. For

although it is true that we cannot be held responsible for most of the wrongs that others commit, the Latin maxim presents a case where we would have to take such a responsibility seriouslyperhaps to the point of deceiving, bribing, even killing an innocent person, in order that the world not perish.

Utilitarianism necessitates public policy that requires that leaders take the action which is in the best interest of people Shaw Philosophy Professor 1999 (William H. Shaw, 1999, Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy at SJSU, contemporary ethics: taking account of utilitarianism p 171-2)
Utilitarianism ties right and wrong to the promotion of well-being, but it is not only n personal ethic or a guide to individual conduct. lt is also a "public philosophy" - that is, a normative basis for public policy and the structuring of our social, legal, and political institutions. Indeed, it was just this aspect of utilitarianism that primarily engaged Bentham, john Stuart Mill, his father James, and their friends and votaries. For them utilitarianism was, first and foremost, a social and political philosophy and only secondarily a private or personal moral code. In particular, they saw utilitarianism as providing the yardstick by which to measure, assess, and, where necessary, reform government social and economic policy and the judicial institutions of their day. In the public realm, utilitarianism is especially compelling. Because of its

consequentialist character, a utilitarian approach to public policy requires officials to base their actions, procedures, and programs on the most accurate and detailed understanding they can obtain of the circum- stances in which they are operating and the likely results of the alternatives open to them .

Page 104 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Realism and empiricism are the hallmarks of a utilitarian orientation, not customary practice, unverified abstractions, or wishful Promotion of the well being of all seems to be the appropriate, indeed the only sensible, touchstone for assessing public policies and institutions, and the standard objections to utilitarianism as a personal morality carry little or no weight against it when viewed as a public philosophy . Consider, for instance, the criticisms that utilitarianism is too impersonal and ignores one's individual attachments and personal commitments, that it is coldly calculating and concerned only with maximizing, that it demands too much of moral agents and that it permits one to violate certain basic moral restraints on the treatment of others. The previous two chapters addressed sorne of these criticisms; others will be dealt with in Chapter 8. The point here, though, is that far from undermining utilitarianism as a public philosophy , these criticisms highlight its strengths. We want public officials to be neutral, impersonal. and detached and

to proceed with their eyes firmly on the effects of the policies they pursue and the institutions that their decisions shape. Policy making requires public officials to address general issues, typical conditions. and common circumstances. Inevitably, they must do this through general rules, not on a case by case basis. As explained later in this chapter, this fact precludes public officials from violating the rights of individuals as a matter of policy. Moreover, by organizing the efforts of
countless individuals and compelling each of us to play our part in collective endeavors to enhance welfare, public officials can make it less likely that utilitarianism will demand too much of any one individual because others are doing too little. Utilitarians will seek to direct

and coordinate people's actions through effective public policy and to reshape, in utility-enhancing ways, the institutions that structure the choices people face. By doing so, utilitarians can usually accomplish more good than they can through isolated individual action, however dedicated and well intentioned . For
this reason, they will strive to Easter institutions that false over from individuals much of the task of promoting the general welfare of society. General welfare is a broad goal, of

course, and sensible policies and institutions will typically focus on more specific desiderata - such as promoting productivity, increasing individual freedom and opportunity, improving peoples physical health, guaranteeing their personal security, and so on that contribute significantly to people's well-being. Implementing even there goals can prove difficult. Furthermore, many of the
problems facing society have no simple answers because they are tangled up with contested issues of fact and controversial questions of psychology, sociology, and economics. To the extent that utilitarians disagree among themselves over these matters, their policy recommendations will diverge. Nevertheless, by clarifying what is at stake and continually orienting discussion toward the promotion of well-being, a. utilitarian approach provides the necessary framework for addressing questions of institutional design and for fashioning effective public policy. The present chapter explicates the utilitarian approach to three matters that have long engaged social and political philosophers and that concern.

Page 105 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Consequences matter the tunnel vision of moral absolutism generates evil and political irrelevance

Deontology is bad in the context of public policy five reasons

Woller, 1997 (Gary, Economics Professor at BYU, Policy Currents, June, http://apsapolicysection.org/vol7_2/72.pdf , p. 11)
At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by streetlevel enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy . It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient, though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.

Page 106 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Maximizing all lives is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity
Cummiskey, 1996 (David, Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College, Kantian Consequentialism, p. 145-146)
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 (GMM 429). 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 (chapter 5). 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 Kants 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 (GMM 436), but

persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). 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. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many .

Utilitarianism is the most moral outlook provides the most benefits for the most number of people Calculating Consequences: The Utilitarian Approach to Ethic, Developed by Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer, This article appeared originally in Issues in Ethics V2 N1 (Winter 1989), http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/calculating.html
Over the years, the principle of utilitarianism has been expanded and refined so that today there are many variations of the principle. For example, Bentham defined benefits and harms in terms of pleasure and pain. John Stuart Mill, a great 19th century utilitarian figure, spoke of benefits and harms not in terms of pleasure and pain alone but in terms of the quality or intensity of such pleasure and pain. Today utilitarians often describe benefits and harms in terms of the satisfaction of personal preferences or in purely economic terms of monetary benefits over monetary costs. Utilitarians also differ in their views about the kind of question we ought to ask ourselves when making an ethical decision. Some utilitarians maintain that in making an ethical decision, we must ask ourselves: "What effect will my doing this act in this situation have on the general balance of good over evil?" If lying would produce the best consequences in a particular situation, we ought to lie. Others, known as rule utilitarians, claim that we must choose that act that conforms to the general rule that would have the best consequences. In other words, we must ask ourselves: "What effect would everyone's doing this kind of action have on the general balance of good over

Page 107 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

evil?" So, for example, the rule "to always tell the truth" in general promotes the good of everyone and therefore should always be followed, even if in a certain situation lying would produce the best consequences. Despite such differences among utilitarians, however, most hold to the general principle that morality must depend on balancing the beneficial and harmful consequences of our conduct.

Ethics are accessed through the evaluation of consequences through an impartial outlook David Sanford Horner, Policies for a nanosociety: Can we learn now from our future mistakes? 2005 - bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar
At the same time Moor wishes to retain the notion that consequences count that is that the evaluation of a given policy requires the evaluation of the consequences and often the consequences of that policy compared with other the consequences of other possible policies (Moor, 1999, p.66). Moors approach involves two stages. Firstly, the application of an impartiality test and then secondly the appraisal of the various outcomes and consequences of actions and policies, weighing the good consequences and the bad consequences, of those policies surviving the impartiality test. In the first stage deliberation takes place over the various policies to determine whether or not they meet ethical criteria. A policy is determined to be ethical if (a) it does not cause any unnecessary harm to individuals and groups and (b) it supports individual rights, the fulfilling of duties etc. In the second stage the best policy is selected from the set of just policies arrived at in the deliberation stage by ranking ethical policies in terms of benefits and (justifiable) harms. In carrying out this evaluation of policies we are required to: (a) weigh carefully between the good consequences and bad consequences in ethical policies, and (b) distinguish between disagreements about facts and disagreements about principles and values, when deciding which ethical policy should be adopted (Tavani, 2004, 60 61).

Turn calculation is inevitable and justified every action requires calculation, and refusing to engage in calculation means allowing the worst atrocities to occur. Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998 [David, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia, p. 186-188] "that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as alibi for stay ing out of juridicopolitical battles, within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others." Indeed, "incalculable justice requires us to calculate." From where do these insistences come? What
That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues,
109

is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship

"left to itself, the incalculable and giving (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse cal culation." 170 The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty, a duty that inhabits the instant of madness and compels the decision to avoid "the bad," the "perverse calculation," even "the worst." This is the duty that also dwells with deconstructive thought and makes it the starting point, the "at least necessary condition," for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we rec ognize that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences "we recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, antiSemitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."
that because of its undecidability multiplies responsi bility, and the fact that Furthermore, the duty within the decision, the obligation that recognizes the necessity of negotiating the possibilities provided by the impossibilities of justice, is not content with simply avoiding, con taining, combating, or negating the worst-violence-though it could certainly begin with those strategies. Instead, this responsibility, which is the responsibility of responsibility, commissions a "utopian" strat egy. Not, a strategy that is beyond all bounds of possibility so as to be considered "unrealistic," but one

Page 108 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This which in respecting

Mega LD Backfile

the necessity of calculation takes the possibility summoned by the calculation as far as possible, "must take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and inter national, public and private, and so on." "' As Derrida

declares, "The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention.""' This leads Derrida to enunciate a proposition that many, not the least of whom are his Habermasian critics, could hardly have expected: "Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without treating it too lightly and forming the worst complicities."14 Residing within-and not far below the surface-of Derrida's account of the experience of the undecidable as the context for the decision is the duty of deconstructive thought, the responsibility for the other, and the opposition to totalitarianism it entails. The Levinasian supplement that Critchley argues deconstruction requires with respect to politics thus draws out that which is already present. It is, though, perhaps an element that needs to be drawn out, for Derrida has been candid about, and often criticized for, his political hesitancy. In answer to a question about the potential for translating the "theoretical radicality of

praxis," Derrida confessed (his term) "that I have never succeeded in directly relating deconstruction to existing political codes and programmes." This "failure" is derived not from any apolitical sentiment within deconstructive thought but from the "fundamentally metaphysical" nature of the political codes within which both the right and the left presently operate. The problem for politics that this disjuncture creates is, according to Derrida, that one has "to gesture in opposite di rections at the same time: on the one hand to preserve a distance and suspicion with regard to the official political codes governing reality; on the other, to intervene here and now in a practical and engaged man ner whenever the necessity arises." This, Derrida laments, results in a "dual allegiance" and "perpetual
deconstruction" into a "radical political
115

uneasiness" whereby the logic of an argument structured in terms of "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" may mean that political action, which follows from a decision between the competing hands, is in the end insufficient to the intellectual promise of deconstructive thought16 But in The Other Heading, Derrida's reflection on the question and politics of European identity, the difficulty of simultaneously gesturing in different directions is posed in an affirmative political manner.

Rejection of prediction is an implicit prediction which undercuts good predictions.

Fitzsimmons 06
(Michael, defense analyst in Washington D.C. for Global Politics and Strategy. The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning. 484.4 (2006), pp. 131-146. <http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/00396330601062808>; d/l 7/15/09) Finally, the planning for post-war operations in Iraq offers another perspective on the tangled relationship between uncertainty and strategy. Problems of predicting the future are at the heart of intelligence analysis and its role in national-security strategy. While few would question the fragility of intelligence estimates or the chequered history of judgements made by the US intelligence community, prediction remains an important part of its mission. Beyond collecting and reporting raw information, intelligence organisations are often expected to identify trends and consider the implications of alternative strategies on the behaviour of allies and adversaries. To accomplish this difficult mission, intelligence analysts must rely on two crucial resources: good analytic tradecraft that provides transparent standards of evidence, and subject-matter expertise that enables an appreciation for the subtleties of complex human phenomena. But standards of evidence and subject-matter expertise are exactly the sorts of factors decision-makers sceptical of the reliability of prediction might be apt to discount. If uncertainty defines the strategic environment, then what greater insight can the expert analyst bring to bear on strategy than the generalist? This attitude could marginalise intelligence analysis in strategic decision-making. US planning for the aftermath of the Iraq War exemplifies how such marginalisation has played a significant role in recent strategic decision-making. In the judgement of Paul Pillar, the senior US intelligence official for Middle East analysis from 2000 to 2005, what is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades.26 While great volumes of ink have been spilled in the debate over intelligence estimates of Iraqi nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, there is much more clarity about the intelligence communitys estimates of the political environment the US would face in post-war Iraq. Those estimates accurately predicted most of the major challenges that developed, from insurgency and sectarian violence to the strengthening of Irans geopolitical hand and the galvanising effect on foreign radical Islamists.27 The reported expectations of most key administration officials bore little

Page 109 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

resemblance to these predictions.28 Rumsfelds famous distinction between known unknowns and unknown unknowns came in response to a reporters question on the intelligence supporting assertions of linkages between the Iraqi government and terrorist organisations.29 The implication of his remark was that presumption of a genuine Iraqiterrorist linkage was justified because the absence of evidence to support the presumption did not conclusively disprove it. Here, as with the post-war planning assumptions, uncertainty served to level the playing field between facts and analysis, on the one hand, and the preconceptions of senior leadership on the other. Many of the US governments experts on Iraq and the Arab world outside the intelligence community were also marginalised in the planning for the Iraq War. In 2002, the State Department launched the Future of Iraq Project to write a detailed plan for the governance of a post-Saddam democratic Iraq. Participants included dozens of career Middle East specialists from the State Department and the intelligence community, as well as native Iraqis. The projects report covered a wide variety of topics, from development of a constitution to the management of municipal utilities. In the end, however, leaders in the White House and the Pentagon viewed the report as too pessimistic and ignored many of its conclusions.30 Another wellpublicised instance where decision-makers rejected expert advice on weak grounds was the public exchange between Pentagon civilian leaders and the Army chief of staff regarding the number of ground troops required for successful post-hostilities operations in Iraq. One month prior to the invasion, General Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that establishing security and conditions for political stability in Iraq following the end of major combat operations would take several hundred thousand coalition ground troops. His estimate was based on the application of trooptopopulation ratios from previous security and stabilisation operations.31 While fairly rudimentary, the thrust of this analysis was shared by a variety of expert analysts outside the government.32 Two days after Shinsekis testimony, both Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz publicly renounced the estimate. Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee that Shinseki was wildly off the mark, and offered several unsubstantiated and, in retrospect, incorrect predictions about post-war attitudes toward American forces among Iraqis and US allies. Having made these predictions, he then proceded to reject the validity of making predictions, insisting that the most fundamental point is that we simply cannot predict ... we have no idea what we will need unless and until we get there on the ground.33 In effect, by denying the validity of prediction, Wolfowitz locked himself into a very specific but implicit prediction that conformed to his own preconceptions. The point is neither that Army generals are always better qualified to make such judgements than civilians, nor that hindsight shows Shinsekis judgement to be better than Wolfowitzs. It is that the grounds for the decision that was actually made on troop levels were conspicuously shakier than those of Shinsekis judgement, and yet they prevailed. The mistakes that were made in the Bush administrations post-war planning for Iraq are entirely consistent with a bias in decision-making against the authority of expertise in predicting the future, and the invocation of uncertainty in this instance became a rationale for rigidity in planning rather than flexibility.

Predictions are key to check disasters

Kurasawa 04
[Fuyuki Kurasawa, Professor of Sociology York University of Toronto, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight, Constellations, 11(4), 2004] When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one is likely to encounter from some intellectual circles is a deep-seated skepticism about the very value of the exercise. A radically postmodern line of thinking, for instance, would lead us to believe that it is pointless, perhaps even harmful, to strive for farsightedness in light of the aforementioned crisis of conventional paradigms of historical analysis. If, contra teleological models, history has no intrinsic meaning, direction, or endpoint to be discovered through human reason, and if, contra scientistic futurism, prospective trends cannot be predicted without error, then the abyss of chronological inscrutability supposedly opens up at our feet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of chance. Therefore, rather than embarking upon grandiose speculation about what may occur, we should adopt a pragmatism that abandons itself to the twists and turns of history; let us be content to formulate ad hoc responses to emergencies as they arise While this argument has the merit of underscoring the fallibilistic nature of all predictive schemes, it conflates the necessary recognition of the contingency of history with unwarranted assertions about the latters total opacity and indeterminacy. Acknowledging the fact that the future cannot be known with absolute certainty does

Page 110 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

not imply abandoning the task of trying to understand what is brewing on the horizon and to prepare for crises already coming into their own. In fact, the incorporation of the principle of fallibility into the work of prevention means that we must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for responses that provoke unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in the final section of this paper). In addition, from a normative point of view, the acceptance of historical contingency and of the self-limiting character of farsightedness places the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present generations. The future no longer appears to be a metaphysical creature of destiny or of the cunning of reason, nor can it be sloughed off to pure randomness. It becomes, instead, a result of human action shaped by decisions in the present including, of course, trying to anticipate and prepare for possible and avoidable sources of harm to our successors. Combining a sense of analytical contingency toward the future and ethical responsibility for it, the idea of early warning is making its way into preventive action on the global stage. Despite the fact that not all humanitarian, techno- scientific, and environmental disasters can be predicted in advance, the multiplication of independent sources of knowledge and detection mechanisms enables us to foresee many of them before it is too late. Indeed, in recent years, global civil societys capacity for early warning has dramatically increased, in no small part due to the impressive number of NGOs that include catastrophe prevention at the heart of their mandates. These organizations are often the first to detect signs of trouble, to dispatch investigative or factfinding missions, and to warn the inter- national community about impending dangers; to wit, the lead role of environ- mental groups in sounding the alarm about global warming and species depletion or of humanitarian agencies regarding the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, fre- quently months or even years before Western governments or multilateral institu- tions followed suit

Despite studies predictions experts are still trustworthy

Caplan 5
[Bryan Caplan, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, EconLog, 12-26-2005, http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/12/tackling_tetloc_1.html] Philip Tetlock, one of my favorite social scientists, is making waves with his new book, Expert Political Judgment. Tetlock spent two decades asking hundreds of political experts to make predictions about hundreds of issues. With all this data under his belt, he then asks and tries to answer a bunch of Big Questions, including "Do experts on average have a greater-than-chance ability to predict the future?," and "What kinds of experts have the greatest forecasting ability?" This book is literally awesome - to understand Tetlock's project and see how well he follows through fills me with awe. And that's tough for me to admit, because it would be easy to interpret Tetlock's work as a great refutation of my own. Most of my research highlights the systematic belief differences between economists and the general public, and defends the simple "The experts are right, the public is wrong," interpretation of the facts. But Tetlock finds that the average expert is an embarassingly bad forecaster. In fact, experts barely beat what Tetlock calls the "chimp" stategy of random guessing. Is my confidence in experts completely misplaced? I think not. Tetlock's sample suffers from severe selection bias. He deliberately asked relatively difficult and controversial questions. As his methodological appendix explains, questions had to "Pass the 'don't bother me too often with dumb questions' test." Dumb according to who? The implicit answer is "Dumb according to the typical expert in the field." What Tetlock really shows is that experts are overconfident if you exclude the questions where they have reached a solid consensus.

Page 111 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Consequentialism accesses their internal link we make the best decisions based on moral AND utilitarian consequences Normative Ethics by Shelley Kagan, Westview Press 1997, Page 61, http://books.google.com/books?
id=YllnYJ9R0q0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=deontology+vs.+consequentialism&client=firefoxa&source=gbs_similarbooks_s&cad=1

Consequentialism is not calculative in fact, it rejects complete calculation because thats not an accurate way to determine impacts Normative Ethics by Shelley Kagan, Westview Press 1997, Page 61, http://books.google.com/books?
id=YllnYJ9R0q0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=deontology+vs.+consequentialism&client=firefoxa&source=gbs_similarbooks_s&cad=1

Page 112 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Concrete decision making - Only Utilitarianism makes justifications based on the end result rather then ambiguous language Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.758-9, professor of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline)
Disregarding the significance of evolutionary survival, nonutilitarian intuitionists deny that utilitarianism provides a "moral" basis for choice between competing need/want fulfillments. They seek instead to identify the intuitive "preexisting rights that must, they insist, underlie such choice.' But they disclose no nonrnystical. source of the rights,*' which are, in fact, derived from the search for increased per capita need/want fulfillment. Although frequently accorded a transcendental immutability, rights identify the resource and behavior allocations that are perceived by the community as enhancing such fulfillment. Indeed, revelation of

various a priori rights or moral standards is often accompanied by disparagement of other such rights or standards as crypto-nti1itarian. A priori rights divorced from need/want fulfillment depend on the magic power of language. When not determined by social consequences, the morality of behavior tends to be resolved by definition of the words used to characterize the behavior. Necessarily ambiguous generalizations, evolved to describe and correlate heterogeneous events, acquire a controlling normative role . Definition,
of course, reflects human experience. But the equivocal significance of that experience may be replaced with the illusory security of fixed meaning. Ethical connotations are then drawn not from the underlying empirical lessons that provide a context for meaning, but from inflexible linguistic "principles and their emotional overtones. Derivation of meaning from the social purposes that engender the terminology leads to a utilitarian appraisal of need] want fulfillment. The preexisting rights of nonutilitarian morality are usually identified

as components of "liberty," "equality, and autonomy,"' labels that suggest a concern with individual need/want fulfillment and its social constraints. Liberty is perceived as freedom for behavior that improves the quality of existence, such as speech, religion, and other "civil rights activity; equality as rejection of disparate individual worth and "discriminatory" treatment; autonomy as the individual choice implied by liberty and equality. Utilitarianism prevents nuclear war Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.758, professor of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline)
Without effective reciprocity, self-defense is the only survival remedy. Passive resistance to a Hitler has survival costs that are acceptable to few communities. Rejection of those costs is perhaps being accommodated with the intolerable survival costs of nuclear warfare by payment of more immediate nuclear-deterrence costs. Negotiations to reduce the nucleardeterrence costs confront the participants with a predicament like the "prisone1s dilemma"' if nuclear weapons can escape detection: although both participants would benefit from a reduction, each is impelled to increase its nuclear weapons as protection against an undetected increase by the other. But each may also be impelled to refrain from their use. If that accommodation fails, so may the evolutionary process. While the accommodation

holds, nonnuclear self defense re- mains the survival remedy pending a reciprocity solution. The survival costs of nonnuclear warfare of course continue to be high, but when the survival costs of capitulation are perceived

Page 113 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

as exceeding them, compensation for combatants commensurate with risk would provide a kind of market accommodation for those induced thereby to volunteer and would reduce the disproportionate wartime-con-scription assessment.

Utilitarianism inevitable Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.727, professor of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline)
utilitarianism reconciles autonomy and reciprocity, surmounts the strident intuitionist attack, and exposes the utilitarian underpinning of a priori rights." In the context of the information provided by biology, anthropology, economics, and other disciplines, a functional description of evolutionary utilitarianism identities enhanced per capita need/want fulfillment as the long-term utilitarian-majoritarian goal, illuminates the critical relationship of self interest to that goal, and discloses the trial-and-error process of accommodation and priority assignment that implements it. The description confirms that process as arbiter of the tension

between individual welfare and group welfare (i.e., between autonomy and reciprocity)* and suggests a utilitarian imperative: that utilitarianism is unavoidable, that morality rests ultimately on utilitarian self interest, that in the final analysis all of us are personal utilitarians and most of us are social utilitarians. Utilitarianism is inevitable - people are inherently utilitarians Gino et al 2008 [Francesca Gino Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Don Moore Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University, Max H. Bozman Harvard Business School, Harvard University No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-080.pdf]
A home seller neglects to inform the buyer about the homes occasional problems with flooding in the basement: The seller intentionally omits it from the houses legally required disclosure document, and fails to reveal it in the negotiation. A few months after the closing, the basement is flooded and destroyed, and the buyer spends $20,000 in repairs. Most people would agree that the sellers unethical behavior deserves to be punished. Now consider the same behavior on the part of a second seller, except that it is followed by a long drought, so the buyer never faces a flooded basement. Both sellers were similarly unethical, yet their behavior produced different results . In this paper, we seek to answer the question: Do people judge the ethicality of the two sellers differently, despite the fact that their behavior was the same ? And if so, under what conditions are peoples judgments of ethicality influenced by outcome information? Past research has shown

some of the ways that people tend to take outcome information into account in a manner that is not logically justified (Baron & Hershey, 1988; Allison, Mackie, &
Messick, 1996). Baron and Hershey (1988) labeled this tendency as the outcome bias. Extending prior work on the effect of outcome severity on judgments (Berg-Cross, 1975; Lipshitz, 1989; Mitchell & Kalb, 1981; Stokes & Leary, 1984), their research found that people

judge the wisdom and competence of decision makers based on the nature of the outcomes they obtain. For instance, in one study participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario of a

Page 114 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

surgeon deciding whether or not to perform a risky operation (Baron & Hershey, 1988). The surgeon knew the probability of success. After reading about identical decision processes, participants learned either that the patient lived or died, and were asked to rate the quality of the No Foul 4 surgeons decision to operate. When the patient died, participants decided it was a mistake to have operated in the first place. Consequentialism is best, short term impacts are key even when the longterm impacts are uncertain Cowen 2004 [Tyler Cowen, Department of Economics George Mason University The epistemic Problem does not refute consequentialismNovember2,2004 http://docs.google.com/gview? a=v&q=cache:JYKgDUM8xOcJ:www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/Epistemic2.pdf+ %22nuclear+attack+on+Manhattan%22+cowen&hl=en&gl=us]
Let us start with a simple example, namely a suicide bomber who seeks to detonate a nuclear device in midtown Manhattan. Obviously we would seek to stop the bomber, or If we stop the bomber, we know that in the short run we will save millions of lives, avoid a massive tragedy, and protect the long-term strength, prosperity, and freedom of the United States. Reasonable moral people, regardless of the details of their meta-ethical stances, should not argue against stopping the bomber. No matter how hard we try to stop the bomber, we are not, a priori, committed to a very definite view of how effective prevention will turn out in the long run. After all, stopping the bomber will reshuffle future genetic identities, and may imply the birth of a future Hitler. Even trying to stop the bomber, with no guarantee of success, will remix the future in similar fashion.Still, we can see a significant net welfare improvement in the short run, while facing radical generic uncertainty about the future in any case. Furthermore, if we can stop the bomber, our long-run welfare estimates will likely show some improvement. The bomb going off could lead to subsequent attacks on other major cities, the emboldening of terrorists, or perhaps broader panics. There would be a new and very real doorway toward general collapse of the world. While the more distant future is remixed radically, we should not rationally believe that some new positive option has been created to counterbalance the current destruction and the new possible negatives. To put it simply, it is difficult to see the violent destruction of Manhattan as on net, in ex ante terms, favoring either the short-term or long-term prospects of the world. We can of course imagine possible scenarios where such destruction works out for the better ex post; perhaps, for instance, the explosion leads to a subsequent disarmament or anti-proliferation advances. But we would not breathe a sigh of relief on hearing the news of the destruction for the first time. Even if the long-run expected value is impossible to estimate, we need only some probability that the relevant time horizon is indeed short (perhaps a destructive asteroid will strike the earth). This will tip the consequentialist balance against a nuclear attack on Manhattan.

Concept of morals not mutually exclusive with utilitarianism Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992 Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press. Pg 204-205.
There is, however, another line of thinking that connects desirability with moral obligation for the utilitarian, and in fact shows why a utilitarian requires a concept of moral obligation and what the concept will be. This line of reasoning goes as follows. We begin with the assumption that the utilitarian wants to maximize happiness in society. Now, he knows that one important means to his goal, indeed the only one within our control, is human actions with that effect. So he will want acts that produce welfare, ideally ones that will maximize it as compared with other options. Let us say, then, that he will want expedient acts as a means to happiness. But the thoughtful

Page 115 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

utilitarian will further ask himself how he can bring it about that people perform acts which, taken together, will maximize happiness. One way, and surely a good way up to a point, is to employ moral education to make people more sympathetic or altruistic; if they become so, they will tend to act more frequently to produce happiness in others. It looks, however, ;as if such educational encouragement of sympathy is not enough, mainly because people are illinformed about the probable consequences of what they do, and in any case because the intent to do as much good as one can may lead to action at cross-purposes rather than to more beneficial cooperative behavior. S o the

utilitarian, who wants maximal happiness, will do something more than just try to motivate people to aim directly at it. It will occur to him that a legal system, with its sanctions and implicit directives, will both guide people what to do, and at the same time provide motivation to conform to the legal standards. He will want, with Bentham, a legal system which as a whole will maximize happiness by producing pro-social conduct at the least cost. Moreover, the one thing should be clear: If the moral system has been carefully devised, there will not be gross disparity between what it requires and conduct that promises to maximize benefit. To avoid such disparity, an optimal rule-utilitarian moral code will contain " escape clauses." For instance, it will permit a driver to obstruct a driveway illegally when there is an emergency situation. But suppose there is a minor disparity between the requirements of the moral code and what will do most good: suppose Mary will have to walk to work tomorrow, but the gain in convenience to the person who obstructs her driveway will be: greater than the loss to her. Will the consistent utilitarian then advise the driver to park illegally? Let us suppose the utilitarian has decided that a utility maximizing moral code will not direct a person to do what he thinks will maximize expectable utility in a particular situation, but to follow certain rules - roughly, to follow his conscientious principles, as amended where long-range utility requires. If he has decided this, then it is inconsistent of him to turn around and advise individuals just to follow their discretion about what will maximize utility in a particular case. Of course, the utilitarian will want everyone to be sensitive to the utility of giving aid to others and avoiding injury; requirements or encouragement to do so are pan of our actual moral cede, and it is optimal for the code to be $0. But once it is decided that the optimal code is not that of act-utilitarianism, the utilitarian will say it is desirable for a person to follow the optimal moral code, that is, follow conscience except where utility demands amendment of the principles of the code, So it seems the consistent utilitarian will conclude that there is a moral obligation not to obstruct Mary' s driveway illegally, in accordance with the optimal code.

Successful integration of morality into utilitarian calculus possible Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992 Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press. Pg 212.
My conclusion is that if we are to be utilitarians in the sense that we think morality should maximize long-range utility, and at the same time think that a utilitarian morality should have room for recognition of rights that cannot be overridden by marginal gains in utility, there are two positions we must espouse. First, we must hold that a person does the right act, or the obligatory act, not by just following his actual moral principles wherever they may lead, but by following the moral principles the acceptance of which in society would maximize expectable utility. Of course, this means that people who want to do what is right may have to do some thinking about their moral principles in particular situations. Second, we must emphasize that the right act is the one permitted by or required by the moral code the acceptance of which promises to maximize utility, and not compromise, except in extreme circumstances, in order to do what in a particular situation will maximize utility , where so doing conflicts with the utility-maximizing code. Only if we do this will we have room for a concept of " a right" which cannot be overridden by a marginal addition to the general welfare. It is clear that acting morally in this sense will never be very costly in utility, and where it is costly at all, that is the price that has to be paid for a policy, a morality of principle. If my exegesis of J. S. Mill is correct, these recommendations are ones in which he would join.

Page 116 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Utilitarianism is inevitable it will indefinitely permeate human thought

Allison, Professor of Political Philosophy at University of Warwick, 1990 (Lincoln, The Utilitarianism Response)
And yet if an idea can be compared to a castle, though we find a breached wall, damaged foundation and a weapons spiked where not actually destroyed, there still remains a keep, some thing central and defensible, with in utilitarianism. As Raymond Frey puts it,

utilitarianism has never ceased to occupy a

central place in ... [and] has come to have a significant impact upon the moral thinking of many laymen. The simple core of the doctrine lies in the ideas that actions should be judged by their consequences and that the best actions are those which make people, as-a whole, better off than do the alternatives. What utilitarianism always excludes there fore, is any idea-about

moral theorizing

The wide acceptance of utilitarianism in this broad sense may well be residual for many people . Without a serious God (one, this is, prepared to reveal Truth and instruction) or a convincing deduction of ethical prescription from pure reason, we are likely to turn towards Bentham and to judge actions on there consequences for people's well-being.
the Tightness or wrongness of actions which is not explicable in terms of the consequences of those actions.

Because of the advent of nuclear omnicide, ethics should not be held absolute

Joseph Nye, Director of the Center for Science and International Affairs @ Harvard University, Nuclear Ethics, 1986
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case. Imagine that you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where an army captain is about to order his men to shoot peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village shot at the captains men last night. Why you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all have dirty hands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle and tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other. Otherwise both die. He warns you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play his dirty game? The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both traditions, Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would refuse to shoot. But at what point does the principle of not taking an innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it matter if there were 20 or 1,000 peasants to be saved?

What if killing or torturing one innocent person could save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists nuclear device ? At some point does not integrity become the ultimate egoism of fastidious selfrighteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the lives of countless others? Is it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit remorse or regret over the immoral means, but justify the actions by consequences? Do absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons

Do what is

right though the world should perish was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that he did not mean it to be taken literally even then. Now that it may be literally possible in the Nuclear age, it seems more than ever to be self-contradictory. Absolutist ethics bear a heaver burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.
Once an action enters the policy realm we must use a Consequentialist approach, this is necessary to minimize suffering and conflict.

Murray in 97, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh, [Alastair J. H., Reconstructing Realism: between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 110]
Weber emphasised that, while the 'absolute ethic of the gospel' must be taken seriously, it is inadequate to the tasks of evaluation presented by politics. Against this 'ethic of ultimate ends' Gesinnung he therefore proposed the 'ethic of responsibility' Verantwortung. First, whilst the former dictates only the purity of intentions and pays no attention to consequences, the ethic of responsibility commands acknowledgement of the divergence between intention and result. Its adherent 'does not feel in a position to burden others with the ] own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say: these results are ascribed to my action'. Second, the 'ethic of ultimate ends' is incapable of dealing adequately with the moral dilemma presented by the necessity of using evil means to achieve moral ends : Everything that is striven for through results of his [OR
HER

political action operating with violent means and following an ethic of responsibility endangers the 'salvation of the soul.' If, however, one chases after the ultimate good in a war of beliefs, following a pure ethic of absolute ends, then the goals may be changed and discredited for generations, because responsibility for consequences is lacking. The 'ethic of responsibility', on the other hand, can accommodate this paradox and limit the employment of such means, because it accepts responsibility for the consequences which they imply. Thus, Weber maintains that only the ethic of responsibility can cope with the 'inner tension' between the 'demon of politics' and 'the god of love'. 9 The realists followed this conception closely in their formulation of a political ethic.10 This influence is particularly clear in Morgenthau.11 In terms of the first element of this conception, the rejection of a purely deontological ethic, Morgenthau echoed Weber's formulation, arguing that:

the political actor has, beyond the general moral duties, a special moral responsibility to act wisely ... The individual , acting on his own behalf, may act unwisely without moral reproach as long as the consequences of his inexpedient action concern only [her or] himself. What is done in the political sphere by its very nature concerns others who must suffer from unwise action. What is here done with good intentions but
unwisely and hence with disastrous results is morally defective; for it violates the ethics of responsibility to which all action affecting others, and hence political action par excellence, is subject.12

Utilitarianism and other forms of calculation are inevitable

Stelzig, Tom J.D. candidate at U PENN, 1998 (University of Pennsylvania Law Review)

Page 117 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

when substantially more good will result - Thomason's Trade Off Idea n. 107 - then almost ever situation will involve a true conflict of rights. Determining the resolution of these rights-conflicts would require that morality be supplemented with principles other than rights. If this is correct, rights would perform relatively little theoretical work beyond triggering these principles. Whatever principles would be regularly invoked for resolving rights-conflicts would do the bulk of the work of determining right action . Such a notion does not sit well with the claim that deontology
If the latter is true, no more need be said to show that deontological norms do not exhaust morality. If the former is correct, because rights claims may be overridden only exhausts morality, for the reason already discussed.

Individual and government choices on morality are different, once we play the role of policy makers we must follow a utilitarian calculus

Goodin, Fellow of philosophy at Austialian National University, 1990 (Robert, The Utilitarian Response) It does matter who is using the utilitarian calculus, in what circumstance and for what propose . Using the felicific calculus for micro-level purposes of guiding individuals choices of personal conduct is altogether different from using it for macro-level purposes of guiding public officials choices of general social policy. A different menu of option in some respects greater, in others, less, but in any case different is available to public and private choosers. Thos differences are such as to neutralized in the public sphere, most of the objections standardly lodged against utilitarianism in the private sphere. True though such complaints may be as applied to utilitarianism as a standard of personal conduct they are irrelevant (or anyway much less problematic) as applied to utilitarianism as a standard of public policy . Or so I shall
That, I submit is a fallacy. argue.

Consequences come first for governments - only our evidence draws the distinction between moral theories for individuals and governments Harries, editor of National Interest, 1994 (Owen, The National Interest, Spring, p. 11)
Performance is the test. Asked directly by a Western interviewer, "In principle, do you believe in one standard of human rights and free expression?", Lee immediately answers, "Look, it is not a matter of principle but of practice." This might appear to represent a simple and rather crude pragmatism. But in its context it might also be interpreted as an appreciation of the fundamental point made by Max Weber that,

in politics, it is "the ethic of responsibility" rather than "the ethic of absolute ends" that is appropriate. While an individual is free to treat human rights as absolute, to be observed whatever the cost. Governments must weigh consequences and the competing claims of other ends. So once the enter the realm of politics, human rights have to take their place in a hierarchy of interests, including such basic things as national security and the promotion of prosperity. Moral rights and wrongs are based on consequences proves Consequentialism is best Johnson, 85 (Conrad D. Johnson, 'The Authority of the Moral Agent', Journal of Philosophy 82, No 8 (August 1985), pp. 391) the wrongness must in some wav be connected to the consequences . That an innocent person is killed must be a consequence that has some important bearing on the wrongness of the action; else why be so concerned about the killing of an innocent? Further, if it is wrong in certain cases for the agent to weigh the consequences in deciding whether to kill or to break a promise, it is hard to deny that this has some connection to the
If we follow the usual deontological conception, there are also well-known difficulties. If it is simply wrong to kill the innocent,

Page 118 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

consequences. Following one line of thought, it is consequentialist considerations of mistrust that stand behind such restrictions on what the agent may take into account .3
But then again it is hard to deal with that rare case in which the agent can truly claim that his judgement about the consequences is accurate, or, in that last resort of the philosophical thought experiment, has been verified by the Infallible Optimizer.

Ignoring consequences is immoral - they sacrifice others to preserve moral purity. It is most moral to act to produce the best end regardless of the moral cleanliness of the means
Ailinsky 1971
24-7)
"Does this particular end justify this particular means?" Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends. The end is what you want, and the means is how you get it. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The person [man] of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. The practical revolutionary

(Saul D., Activist, Prof, Social Organizer with Int'l Fame, Founder of Industrial Areas Foundation, Rules for Radicals, p.

conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action in action one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one s individual conscience and the good of [humankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual's personal salvation. He [or she1 who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has peculiar conception of "personal salvation"; he doesn't care enough for people to be "corrupted" for them . The people [men] who pile up the heaps of
will understand Geothe's " discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends-which with rare exception is conspicuous for its sterility-rarely write about their won experiences in the perpetual struggle of life and change. They are strangers, moreover, to the burdens and problems of operational responsibility and the unceasing pressure for immediate decisions. They are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land. They can be recognized by one of two verbal brands; "We agree with the ends but not the means," or "This is not the time." The means-and- end moralists or non-doers always wind up on their ends without any means. The means-and- 'ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive-but real-allies of the Haves. They are the ones Jacques Maritain referred to in his

The fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue." These non-doers were the ones who chose not to fight the Nazis in the only way they could have been fought; they were the ones who drew their window blinds to shut out the shameful spectacle of Jews and political prisoners being dragged through the streets; they were the ones who privately deplored the horror of it all-and did nothing. This is the nadir of immorality. The most unethical of all means is the nonuse of any means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences
statement, " between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced from the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not to men. The standards ofjudgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be. 1 present here a series of rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends: first, that one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue. When we are not directly concerned our morality overflows; as La Rochefoucauld put it, "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others."

Justice must save humanity and weigh Sissela Bok, Professor of Philosophy, Brandeis, Applied Ethics and Ethical Theory, Ed. David Rosenthal and Fudlou Shehadi, 1988
The same argument can be made for Kant's other formulations of the Categorical Imperative: "So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other,

No one with a concern for humanity could consistently will to risk eliminating humanity in the person of himself and every other or to risk the death of all members in a universal Kingdom of Ends for the sake of justice. To risk their collective death for the sake of following one's conscience would be, as Rawls said, "irrational, crazy." And to say that one did not intend such a catastrophe, but that one merely failed to stop other persons from bringing it about would be beside the point when the end of the world was at stake , For although it is true that we cannot be held responsible for most of the wrongs that others commit, the Latin maxim presents a case where we would have to take such a responsibility seriously - perhaps to the point of deceiving, bribing, even killing an innocent person, in order that the world not perish .
always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means"; and "So act as if you were always through actions a law-making member in a universal Kingdom of Ends."

Utilitarian actions only act as a last resort. Lack of alternatives means the only inhuman action is to not act at all.
Nielsen, 93 Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary (Kai, Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber Pg 170-71)

Page 119 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

If there really is no other way of unsticking our fat man and if plainly, without blasting him out, everyone in the cave will drown, then, innocent or not, he should be blasted out. This indeed overrides the principle that
Forget the levity of the example and consider the case of the innocent fat man. the innocent should never be deliberately killed, but it does not reveal a callousness toward life, for the people involved are caught in a desperate situation in which, if such extreme action is not taken, many lives will be lost and far greater misery will obtain.

Moreover, the people who do such a horrible thing or acquiesce in the doing of it are not likely to be rendered more callous about human life and human suffering as a result. Its occurrence will haunt them for the rest of their lives and is as likely as not to make them more rather than less morally sensitive. It is not even correct to say that such a desperate act shows a lack of respect for persons. We are not treating the fat man merely as a means. The fat man's person-his interests and rights-are not ignored. Killing him is something which is undertaken with the greatest reluctance. It is only when it is quite certain that there is no other way to save the lives of the others that such a violent course of action is justifiably undertaken. Alan Donagan, arguing rather as Anscombe argues, maintains that "to use any innocent man ill for the sake of some public good is directly to degrade him to being a mere means" and to do this is of course to violate a principle essential to morality , that
is, that human beings should never merely be treated as means but should be treated as ends in themselves (as persons worthy of respect).l1 But, as my above remarks show,

it need not be the case, and in the above situation it is not the case, that in killing such an innocent man we are treating him merely as a means. The action is universalizable, all alternative actions which would save his life are duly considered, the blasting out is done only as a last and desperate resort with the minimum of harshness and indifference to his suffering and the like. It indeed sounds
ironical to talk this way, given what is done to him. But if such a terrible situation were to arise, there would always be more or less humane ways of going about one's grim task.

And in acting in the more humane ways toward the fat man, as we do what we must do and would have done to ourselves were the roles reversed, we show a respect for his person.12 In so treating the fat man-not just to further the public good but to prevent the certain death of a whole group of people (that is to prevent an even greater evil than his being killed in this way}- the claims of justice are not overriden either, for each individual involved, if he is reasonably correct, should realize that if he were so stuck rather than the fat man, he should in such situations be blasted out. Thus, there is no question of being unfair. Surely we must choose between evils here, but is there anything
more reasonable, more morally appropriate, than choosing the lesser evil when doing or allowing some evil cannot be avoided? That is, where there is no avoiding both and where our actions can determine whether a greater or lesser evil obtains, should we

is it not obviously a greater evil that all those other innocent people should suffer and die than that the fat man should suffer and die? Blowing up the fat man is indeed monstrous. But letting him remain stuck while the whole group drowns is still more monstrous.
not plainly always opt for the lesser evil? And

Overriding rights is justified when more rights of others and lives are at stake.
Kateb 92 William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University (George, Cornell University Press; The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture pg 12)
One can even think, against utilitarianism, that any substantive outcome achieved by morally proper procedure is morally right and hence acceptable (so long as rights are not in play). The main point, however, is that

utilitarianism has a necessary pace in any democratic country's normal political deliberations . But its advocates
must know its place, which ordinarily is only to help to decide what the theory of rights leaves alone. When may rights be overridden by government? I have two sorts of cases in mind:

overriding a particular right of some persons

Page 120 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

for the sake of preserving the same right of others, and overriding the same right of everyone for the sake of what I will clumsily call "civilization values." An advocate of rights
could countenance, perhaps must countenance, the state's overriding of rights for these two reasons. The subject is painful and liable to dispute every step of the way. For the state to override-that is, sacrificea right of some so that others may keep it.

The situation must be desperate. I have in mind, say, circumstances in which the choice is between sacrificing a right of some and letting a right of all be lost. The state (or some other agent) may kill some (or allow them to he killed), if the only alternative is letting every-one die. It is the right to life which most prominently figures in thinking about desperate situations. I cannot see any resolution but to heed the precept that "numbers count." Just as one may prefer saving
one's own life to saving that of another when both cannot be saved, so a third parrylet us say, the statecan (perhaps must) choose to save the greater number of lives and at the cost of the lesser number, when there is otherwise no hope for either group. That choice does not mean that those to be sacrificed are immoral if they resist being sacrificed. It follows, of course, that if a third party is right to risk or sacrifice the lives of the lesser for the lives of the lesser for the lives of the greater number when the lesser would otherwise live, the lesser are also not wrong if they resist being sacrificed.

We must choose the lesser evil. Hard and fast rules about what is right must be made to limit further atrocities against civilization
Issac 02 Professor of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale (Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, Ends, Means, and Politics, p. Proquest)
WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean

There is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong . It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion. Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought . And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped .
taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends . A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will

such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to oppose it . In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power . But equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to
sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.

Page 121 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Moral policy only blocks decision making necessary to limit further damage. Injustice can only be destroyed by inaction to make sacrifices
Issac, 02 Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale (Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, Ends, Means, and Politics, p. Proquest)

It is assumed that U.S. military intervention is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand . The campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in

Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility . The concern may
the world. one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends.

be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of

Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness. Utilitarianism is the only moral framework and alternatives are inevitability self-contradictory

Page 122 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; Nuclear Ethics pg. 18-19)

Imagine an army captain is about to order his men to shoot two peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason,
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case.34 that you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where you are told someone in this village shot at the captain's men last night. When you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all have dirty hands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle

and tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other. Otherwise both die. He warns you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play his dirty game? The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both traditions. Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would refuse to shoot. But at what point does the principle of not taking an innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it matter if there were twenty or 1,000 peasants to be saved? What if killing or torturing one innocent person could save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists' nuclear device? At some point does not
integrity become the ultimate egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the lives of countless others?

Is it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit remorse or regret over the immoral means, but justify the action by the consequences? Do
absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons? "Do what is right though the world should perish" was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that

Now that it may be literally possible in the nuclear age, it seems more than ever to be self-contradictory.35 Absolutist ethics bear a heavier burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.
he did not mean it to be taken literally even then.

Politics can only be one of responsibility. Rational policy makers must consider first whether to put rights before all else.
Harris, 94 (Owen Spring 1994; Editor of National Interest Journal of International affairs and diplomacy; Power of Civilizations Via Questia)
Performance is the test. Asked directly by a Western interviewer, "In principle, do you believe in one standard of human rights and free expression?", Lee immediately answers, "Look, it is not a matter of principle but of practice." This might appear to represent a simple and rather crude pragmatism. But in its context it might also be interpreted as an appreciation of the fundamental point made by Max Weber that, in

politics, it is "the ethic of responsibility" rather than "the ethic of absolute ends" that is appropriate. While an individual is free to treat human rights as absolute, to be observed whatever the cost, governments must always weigh consequences and the competing claims of other ends. So once they enter the realm of politics, human rights have to take their place in a hierarchy of interests , including such basic things as national security and the promotion of prosperity. Their place in that hierarchy will vary with circumstances, but no responsible government will ever be able to put them always at the top and treat them as inviolable and over-riding. The cost of implementing and promoting them will always have to be considered. Lee's answer might also be compared to Edmund
Burke's conclusions on how England should govern its colonies, as expressed in his Letter to the Sheriffs of the City of Bristol in 1777: |I~t was our duty, in all soberness, to conform our government to the character and circumstances of the several people who composed this mighty and strangely diversified mass.

I never was wild enough to conceive that one method would serve for the whole, that the natives of Hindostan and those of Virginia could be ordered in the same manner, or that the Cutchery court and the grand jury of Salem could be regulated on a similar plan. I was persuaded that government was a

Page 123 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

practical thing made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians. Only consequentialism can resolve conflicting moral values and promote healthy society
Bailey, 97 (James Wood 1997; Oxford University Press; Utilitarianism, institutions, and Justice pg 9)

A consequentialist moral theory can take account of this variance and direct us in our decision about whether a plausible right to equality ought to outweigh a plausible right to freedom of expression. 16 In some circumstances the effects of pornography would surely be malign enough to justify our banning it, but in others they may be not malign enough to justify any interference in freedom. I? A deontological theory, in contrast, would be required either to rank the side constraints, which forbid agents from interfering in the free expression of others and from impairing the moral equality of others, or to admit defeat and claim that no adjudication between the two rights is possible. The latter admission is a grave failure since it would leave us no principled resolution of a serious policy question. But the former conclusion is hardly attractive either. Would we really wish to establish as true for
all times and circumstances a lexical ordering between two side constraints on our actions without careful attention to consequences? Would we, for instance, really wish to establish that the slightest malign inegalitarian effect traceable to a form of expression is adequate grounds for an intrusive and costly censorship? Or would we, alternatively, really wish to establish that we should be prepared to tolerate a society horrible for women and children to live in, for the sake of not allowing any infringement

Consequentialist accounts can avoid such a deontological dilemma. In so doing, they show a certain healthy sense of realism about what life in society is like. In the world outside the theorist's study, we meet trade-offs at every tum. Every policy we make with some worthy end in Sight imposes costs in terms of diminished achievement of some other plausibly worthy end. Consequentialism demands that we grapple with these costs as directly as we can and justify their incurrence. It forbids us to dismiss them with moral sophistries or to ignore them as if we lived in an ideal world.
on the sacred right of free expression?18

Morals and questions of human dignity will constantly conflict making deontological policy making impossible
Kateb 92 William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, Princeton University (George, Cornell University Press; The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture pg 14-15)
Let us say that a society of rights-based individualism encourages these and other crepuscular activities to become topics for open and popular discussion;

that that fact can be taken as a paradoxical sign of the moral grandness of such a society, for practically every desire can be honestly admitted and talked about despite shame or without shame; that a society devoted to rights has no absolutely compelling arguments, in every case, to prohibit them and that, nevertheless, civilization (democratic
or not) so we are trained to understand it commits us to continue to condemn and prohibit them. The issue must be raised in dismay, and I am not able to deal with it adequately. Can rights conflict? It

is not agreeable to admit that a particular right of one person may apparently conflict with a different right of someone else. Familiar antagonisms include that between the rights to a fair trial unprejudiced by excessive publicity and the right of press to report a story and its background fully, or that between the right to privacy again, the right of the press to do what it thinks is its work. Though I believe, as I have said, that some rights (including freedom of the press) are more fundamental than others, in some conflicts no clear priority is likely to be established and only ad hoc adjustments are desirable. To be sure, although these conflicts may be less frequent or stark than is claimed by those who are impatient with the rights in question, conflicts nevertheless take place. This is a fact of life which no appeal to an elaborated theory of

Page 124 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

rights can eliminate. If it is a shortcoming in the theory of rights, it is also a shortcoming that no supplementary principle such as utilitarianism can make good.

Human value and dignity is impossible to determine externally, utilitarianism is only alternative.
Kateb 92 William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University (George, Cornell University Press; The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture pg 13-14)

We can say in regard to the relevant examples that no one has the right to enslave or mutilate or ritually kill another, even with the others permission. There is no right to accept anothers renunciation of a right. One cannot cooperate with or take advantage of another persons abdication of humanity. We can also say, for other activities, that one has no right to use ones freedom
to abandon it altogether (as with drug addiction) or alienate it (as with voluntary slavery), for freedom is meaningless when it becomes the instrument of bondage.

All these arguments are true but do not reach the deepest level of objection, for all these activities arouse deep and wide spread disgust and revulsion. To be guided by these feelings, however, is risky because many activities once thought disgusting and horrible are now allowed and sometimes welcomed and celebrated, at least in some democratic societies. Also, we cannot say that the feelings hostile to these activities are instinctual; though common, such feelings are culturally deposited. I can understand the wish to say that these activities injure the human dignity of people who do
them. It can be argued that the injury results not merely because (in some cases) they are renouncing a right and (in other cases)

Rather, these free or consensual activities degrade people who do them below the level of decent humanity. The practitioners forfeit respect: that is the reason they must be controlled. I do not think, however, that I can follow this line because I do not associate human dignity with any teleology or reason for being, or even with a more bounded perfectionism . As I understand the theory of rights-based individualism, it disallows universal and enforceable answers to the questions, Why do we live? What is the point of living? I am therefore reluctant to rest a case for control on the notion of human dignity itself.
using their rights in ways never contemplated by advocates of rights.

The impossibility to attain knowledge of every outcome or abuse leaves utilitarianism as the only option for most rational decision-making
Goodin 95 Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the Australian National University (Robert E., Cambridge University Press, Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy pg 63)

there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes them
My larger argument turns on the proposition that adopt a form of utilitarianism that we would find more acceptable) than private individuals. Before proceeding with that larger argument, I must therefore say what it is that is so special about public officials and

their situations that makes 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, at relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices

Page 125 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

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 allow public policy makers to use the utilitarian calculus if they want to use it at all to choose general rules of
conduct. Knowing aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each alternative possible general rule. But

they cannot be sure what the payoff will be to any given individual or on any particular occasion. Their knowledge of generalities, aggregates and averages is just not sufficiently fine-grained for that. Not knowing conditions for each individual or ramifications forces us to adopt utilitarianism. Policy makers must use in their decision making
Goodin 95 Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the Australian National University (Robert E., Cambridge University Press, Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy pg 63)
Furthermore, the argument from necessity would continue,

the instruments available to public policy-

makers are relatively blunt. They can influence general tendencies, making rather more people behave in certain sorts of ways rather more often. But perfect compliance is unrealistic. And (building on the previous point) not knowing particular circumstances of particular individuals, rules and regulations must necessarily be relatively general in form. They must treat more people more nearly alike than ideally they should, had we perfect information. The combined effect of these two factors is to preclude public policy-makers from fine-tuning policies very well at all. They must, of necessity, deal with people in aggregate, imposing upon them rules that are general in form. Nothing in any of this necessarily forces them to be utilitarian in their public policy-making, of course. What it does do, however, is force them- if they are inclined to be utilitarian at all-away from direct (act) utilitarianism. The circumstances surrounding the selection and implementation of public policies simply do not permit the more precise calculations required by any decision rule more tailored to peculiarities of individuals or situations. True equality is only attainable under utilitarian framework.
Dworkin 77 Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University (Ronald 1977, Taking Rights Seriously pg 274-5)

The liberal conception of equality sharply limits the extent to which ideal arguments of policy may be used to justify any constraint on liberty. Such arguments cannot be used if the idea in question is itself controversial within the community. Constraints cannot be defended , for example, directly on the ground that they contribute to a culturally sophisticated community , whether the community wants the sophistication or not, because that argument would violate the canon of the liberal conception of equality that prohibits a government from relying on the claim that certain forms of life are inherently more valuable than others . Utilitarian argument of policy, however, would seem secure from that objection. They do not suppose that any form of life is inherently more valuable than any other, but instead base their claim, that constraints on liberty are necessary to advance some collective goal of the community, just on the fact that that goal happens to be desired more widely or more deeply than any other. Utilitarian arguments of policy, therefore, seem not to oppose but on the contrary to embody the fundamental right of equal concern and respect, because they treat the wishes of each member of the community on a par with the wishes of any other, with no bonus or discount reflecting the view that that member is more or less worthy of concern, or his views more or less worthy of respect, than any other. This appearance of egalitarianism has, I think, been the principal source of the great appeal
that utilitarianism has had, as a general political philosophy, over the last century. In Chapter 9, however, I pointed out that the

Page 126 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

egalitarian character of a utilitarian argument is often an illusion. I will not repeat, but only summarize, my argument here.

Utilitarian arguments fix on the fact that a particular constraint on liberty will make more people happier, or satisfy more of their preferences, depending upon whether psychological or preference utilitarianism is in play . But people's overall
preference for one policy rather than another may be seen to include, on further analysis, both preference that are personal, because they state a preference for the assignment of one set of goods or opportunities to him and preferences that are

a utilitarian argument that assigns critical weight to the external preferences of members of the community will not be egalitarian in the sense under consideration. It will not respect the right of everyone to be treated with equal concern and respect.
external, because they state a preference for one assignment of goods or opportunities to others. But

Page 127 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**AT: Rights / Liberty Come First** Upholding life is the ultimate moral standard. Uyl and Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 81 (Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 1981, Reading Nozick, p. 244) Rand has spoken of the ultimate end as the standard by which all other ends are evaluated. When the ends to be evaluated are chosen ones the ultimate end is the standard for moral evaluation. Life as the sort of thing a living entity is, then, is the ultimate standard of value; and since only human beings are capable of choosing their ends, it is the life as a human being-man's life qua man-that is the standard for moral evaluation. Life is the end toward which all purposeful action is directed. Uyl and Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 81
(Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 1981, Reading Nozick, p. 244-245) Why should this be the standard for moral evaluation? Why must this be the ultimate moral value? Why not "death" or "the greatest happiness for the greatest number"? Man's life must be

the standard for judging moral value because this is the end toward which all goal-directed action (in this case purposive action) is directed, and we have already shown why goal-directed behavior depends on life. Indeed, one cannot make a choice without implicitly choosing life as the end. Life is the prerequisite to all other value. Uyl and Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 81 (Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 1981, Reading Nozick, p. 245)
In so far as one chooses, regardless of the choice, one choose (value) man's life. It makes no sense to value some X without also valuing that which makes the

If one lets X be equivalent to "death" or "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," one is able to have such a valuation only because of the precondition of being a living being. Given that life is a necessary condition for valuation, there is no other way we can value something without also (implicitly at least) valuing that which makes valuation possible.
valuing of X possible ~:notice that this is different from saying "that which makes X possible").

Utilitarianism precludes any claim of moral rights rights not quantifiable. McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984 HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and Rights. Pgs 121-122.
In spite of this, Bentham's clear apprehension of utilitarianism's commitment to rejecting the view that there are certain basic natural human moral rights that hold of human beings as human beings, very many utilitarians today seek to reconcile their utilitarianism with theories of human moral rights, with theories of natural moral rights of persons of the kinds set out in the UN Declarations, according to which we are claimed to possess various basic, fundamental moral rights simply by virtue of being human beings, or human persons, and not by virtue of

Page 128 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

the utility of a belief in and action on the basis of respect for such rights. Utilitarianism denies, and is committed to denying, that there are natural moral rights that hold of persons as persons, of human beings qua human beings. If its ethic is to be expressed in the language of moral rights, it might be said to hold that it is the greatest good or the greatest /pleasure that has a moral right to exist, that individual persons and animals have no moral right to a specific share in or of the greatest good, I their roles being those of being instruments for achieving or vehicles for bringing into being and sustaining the greatest good, they having a moral right to contribute to the common good as vehicles or instruments thereof. Of course, strictly speaking, an abstraction such as the greatest good cannot in any literal sense of 'moral right,' possess moral rights, whilst the rights individuals may possess as vehicles or instruments of the greatest good would be a mixed bunch, including such rights as the rights to live or to be killed, to be free or to be constrained, to be helped or to be harmed or used-the rights varying from person to person, situation to situation, from time to lime. Thus, if the greatest good could be realized by promoting the pleasure of only one or other of two distinct groups of one hundred persons, then, in terms of utilitarianism, it would morally be indifferent which group was chosen, and no member of either group would have a moral right to the pleasure. Similarly, if, in a war, the greatest good could be achieved only be sending a particular platoon on a suicide mission, the officer in charge would have the moral right to order the platoon to go on the mission, and the members of the platoon would have the moral right to be killed for the sake of the greatest good. This is a very different way of thinking about moral rights from that in terms of there being certain basic human moral rights.

No legitimate reason to include rights discussion under util f/w McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984 HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and Rights. Pg 124.
A utilitarian might seek to accommodate talk about human moral rights within the utilitarian framework by arguing that there are good utilitarian reasons for attributing human rights to persons who do not possess moral rights, just as there may be good utilitarian reasons for ascribing responsibility to persons who are not morally responsible for their actions. This might be urged in terms of act-utilitarianism as a tactical move for maximizing good. Alternatively, it could be developed as an element of a rule-utilitarianism. Clearly it would be difficult to find plausible act-utilitarian reasons for propagating such a falsehood . On the other hand, whilst a rule-utilitarianism that incorporated such a human moral rights component would normatively be more attractive than many versions of rule-utilitarianism, it would remain exposed to the basic criticisms of rule-utilitarianism set out by JJ. C. Smart, myself, and others.'

Utilitarianism is the only calculus that takes into account human response Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.735, professor of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline) utilitarianism is concerned with human survival and depends on human response, its goal is necessarily fulfillment of human needs and wants. Utilitarian choices are made by existing humans. The decisions of every human are derived from the experience, and reflect the desires, of that human. Humans may be
Because evolutionary concerned with the needs and wants of animals or of future generations, but that concern is inescapably a product of existing human needs and wants.

Page 129 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Rights dont come first conflicting values and ideologies. McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984 HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and Rights. Pg 129.
Problems of a different kind are encountered by the claim that certain negative rights, for example, the right to life interpreted as a right not to be killed, are always absolute, namely, that such a claim leads to morally unacceptable conclusions. Different rights, for example, the rights to life and to moral autonomy and integrity, may conflict with one another, such that we have morally to determine which to respect and in what way; the one right, such as the right to life, may give rise to conflicts, such that we can protect, save one life, only by sacrificing or not saving another life. And rights may conflict with other values , such as pleasure or pain, in ways that morally oblige us to qualify our respect for the right, as in curtailing acts directed at a persons' self-development to prevent gross cruelty to animals. Thomists have offered partial, but only partial, replies to criticisms based on these difficulties in terms of theories such as the Doctrine of Double Effect, the theory of the Unjust Aggressor (who may be neither unjust nor morally responsible for what he does). However these replies themselves encounter difficulties of many kinds, including those of involving their exponents in morally abhorrent conclusions not unlike those to which they object when such I conclusions are shown to follow from rival theories.

Rights not absolute doesnt take into account intended good. McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984 HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and Rights. Pg 129.
Thus the Doctrine of Double Effect permits the knowing, unintentional killing of thousands of innocent children for the sake of a proportional good; yet it commits its exponents to losing a just war if success can be achieved, and millions of innocent lives be saved, only by the intentional killing of one innocent person. Similarly objectionable conclusions follow about the permissibility of killing morally innocent 'unjust aggressors' to save one's life. At the same time, acceptance of these supporting theories amounts to an admission that human rights such as the right to life are not always absolute. How can it be so if we are said to have the moral right intentionally to kill the morally innocent unjust aggressor, and knowingly, albeit unintentionally, to kill innocent persons, when and if the intended good is proportionately good, and cannot be achieved without bringing about the unintended, foreseen good?

No appropriate duty to satisfy rights of conscience. McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984 HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and Rights. Pg 123..
The view that rights and duties are correlative would, if true, lend support to the reducibility-ofrights-to-duties thesis.' However, whilst duties and rights may be correlative-as when by a voluntary act a person enters into a promise, contract, becomes a parent - commonly / rights, and more evidently, basic human moral rights, and duties are not correlative. This is so with the examples cited above. There may be no correlative duty to a right of conscience. With rights of recipience, rights to aids and facilities, the duties that arise from the right are not the determinate, fixed, finite duties, correlative duties are thought of as being. Equally, we may have important duties in respect of other persons, without those persons necessarily having rights against us. This is often so in respect of duties of benevolence towards determinate persons. The duty to maximize good, which dictates that we visit our lonely, ailing I aunt in hospital, need give her no moral right to our visit.

Page 130 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

No absolute rights competing values and rights of different groups. McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984 HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and Rights. Pg 129.
A similar distinction needs to be drawn and a similar terminology is required in respect of basic human rights. They are always rights-inalienable, intrinsic rights-but they are simply prima facie rights; they are rights that are absolute rights only if they are not overridden by more stringent moral rights or other moral considerations. The introduction of this distinction into human moral rights theory is both right and necessary. It does however greatly complicate the problem of determining what are the absolute, morally operative rights of a person in any concrete situation. Yet the acknowledgment of this feature of basic human rights is necessary for two reasons, the one because (physical resources may be inadequate to allow all to enjoy their basic rights, and the other because, in specific situations, we may have to decide between the rights of different persons, and between respecting rights and securing other values.

Priority of liberty not viable as basis of government at best it would be a competing theory among other liberal conceptions of justice. Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003. Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, No. 3, Pg 24. Project MUSE.
Is such acceptance likely? Consider the important example of the adherents of utilitarian reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Would a utilitarian be able to endorse a Kantian conception of free persons, with its elevation of rationality over the satisfaction of desire and its consequent implications for agent motivation in the Original Position? It seems unlikely that any utilitarian (with the possible exception of John Stuart Mill in his most syncretic mood) would countenance this variety of asceticism. Thus, utilitarians would be likely to focus on another interpretation of the idea of free persons or perhaps on an entirely different fundamental idea or set of ideas; doing so would lead them to structure the Original Position differently and would presumably produce a political conception of justice that did not include the Priority of Liberty. Rawls argues in Political Liberalism that classical utilitarians (such as Jeremy Bentham and Henry Sidgwick) would be likely to endorse a political conception of justice liberal in content, but he never suggests that they would choose the Priority of Liberty, or Justice as Fairness more generally (PL, p. 170). We can conclude from this finding that the class of liberal political conceptions of justice constituting the focus of a realistic overlapping consensus would include conceptions that did not endorse the Priority of Liberty (although they would all give the basic liberties special priority). Moreover, Justice as Fairness might not be alone among the liberal conceptions in endorsing the Priority of Liberty: a reasonable comprehensive doctrine might, for example, support a Kantian conception of free persons but not Rawlss particular interpretation of society as a fair system of cooperation, leading through the procedures of political constructivism to a liberal conception of justice that endorsed the Priority of Liberty but rejected, say, the Difference Principle. Thus, the Priority of Liberty would be one competitor idea among many in an overlapping consensus, endorsed by both adherents of Kantian comprehensive doctrines and their fellow travelers, but rejected by others.

No justification for violation of rights to prevent external loss - principle of intervening actions means that government is not held responsible for death of others. Gewirth, prof of philosophy @ U Chicago. 1994.
Alan. Are There Any Absolute Rights? Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics. Joram Graf Haber. Pgs 143. He may be said to intend the many deaths obliquely, in that they are a foreseen but unwanted side-effect of his refusal . But he is not responsible for that side-effect because of the terrorist

Page 131 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

s' intervening action. It would be unjustified to violate the mother's right to life in order to protect the rights to life of the many other residents of the city. For rights cannot be justifiably protected by violating another right which, according to the criterion of degrees of necessity for action, is at least equally important. Hence, the many other residents do not have a right that the mother' s right to life be violated for their sakes . To be sure , the mother also does not have a right that their equally important rights be violated in order to protect hers. But here too it must be emphasized that in protecting his mother's right the son does not violate the rights of the others; for by the principle of the intervening action, it is not he who is causally or morally responsible for their deaths . Hence too he is not treating them as mere means to his or his mother's ends.

Government cannot act to uphold the rights of the subject on the basis of moral principle Gewirth, professor of philosophy, 81. Alan. Reason and Morality. Pg 65.
In the agent's statement, 'I have rights to freedom and well-being,' the subject of the rights is the agent himself, the same person for whom freedom and well-being are necessary goods. The object of the rights is these same necessary goods. Now in rights-judgments, the subject who is said to have rights is not always the same as the person who makes a claim or a rightjudgment attributing the rights to the subject. Moreover, a rights-judgment need not be set forth independently; it may, instead, figure as a subordinate clause wherein the attribution of rights to the subject is only conditional. In all cases. however, there is assumed some reason or ground that is held, at least tentatively, to justify that attribution. This reason may, but need not, be some moral or legal code. In the present case, where what is at issue is the justification of a moral principle, such a principle cannot, of course, be adduced as constituting the justifying ground for the attribution of the generic rights to the agent. Rather, in his statement making this attribution, the justifying reason of the generic rights as viewed by the agent is the fact that freedom and well-being are the most general and proximate necessary conditions of all his purpose- fulfilling actions, so that without his having these conditions his engaging in purposive action would be futile or impossible. Because of this necessity, the agent who is the subject of the generic rights is assumed to set forth or uphold the rights-judgment himself, as knowing what conditions must be fulfilled if he is to be a purposive agent; and he upholds the judgment not merely conditionally or tentatively but in an unqualified way.

Page 132 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**AT: Util No Rights** Utility cant be maximized in the long term by violating rights. Robert Goodin, fellow Philosophy, Australian National Defense U, 1990, The Utilitarian Response, p. 148
My main argument, though, is that at the level of social policy the problem usually does not even arise. When promulgating policies, public officials must respond to typical conditions and common circumstances. Policies, by their nature, cannot be case- by-case affairs.

In choosing general rules ot govern a wide range of circumstances, it is extraordinarily unlikely that the greatest happiness can ever be realized by systematically violating peoples rights. Liberties or integrity or even, come to that, by systematically contravening the Ten Commandments. The rules that maximize utility over the long haul and over the broad range of applications are also rules that broadly conform to deontologists demands. Utilitarianism Protects Fairness Robin Barrow, Prof. Simon Fraser U, 1991, Utilitarianism, p. 29 the principle of justice may also be equated with the principle of fairness, and utilitarianism does have such a principle, as it must do, since a fully fledged ethical theory tells us what is right, and no account of what is right can compete if it makes no reference to the distribution of the good.
However

Page 133 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**AT: Freedom / Liberty Outweighs Life/Util** Libertarianism denies emotional satisfaction outside that of freedom. Locke, Writer for American Conservative, 05 (Robert Locke, Writer for American Conservative, Marxism of the Right, 314-2005, Marxism of the Right, The American Conservative, http://www.amconmag.com/2005_03_14/article1.html) The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a
prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoons wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk

of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature , independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill. Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the
factory that emitted it and sue?

Utilitarian policy-making ensures there will be no unnecessary constrains on liberty because each scenario is weighed.
Dworkin 77 Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University (Ronald 1977, Taking Rights Seriously pg 275-276)

Suppose, for example, that a number of individuals in the community holds racist rather than utilitarian political theories. They believe, not that each man is to count for one and no one for more than one in the distribution of goods, but rather that a black man is to count for less and a white man therefore to count for more than one. That is an external preference, but it is nevertheless a genuine preference for one policy rather than another, the satisfaction of which will bring pleasure. Nevertheless if this preference or pleasure is given the normal weight in a utilitarian calculation, and blacks suffer accordingly, then their own assignment of goods and opportunities will depend, not simply on the competition among personal preferences that abstract statements of utilitarianism suggest, but precisely on the fact that they are thought less worthy of concern and respect than others are. Suppose, to take a different

Page 134 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

that many members of the community disapprove on moral grounds of homosexuality, or contraception, or pornography, or expressions of adherence to the Communist party. They prefer not only that they themselves do not indulge in these activities, but that no one else does so either, and they believe that a community that permits rather than prohibits these acts is inherently worse a community. These are external
case, preferences, but, once again, they are no less genuine, nor less a source of pleasure when satisfied and displeasure when ignored, than purely personal preferences. Once again, however

if these external preferences are counted, so as to justify a constraint on liberty, then those constrained suffer, not simple because their personal preferences have lost in a competition for scarce resources with the personal preferences of the others, but precisely because their conception of a proper or desirable form of life is despised by others . These arguments justify the following important conclusion. If utilitarian arguments of policy are to be used to justify constraints on liberty, the care must be taken to insure that the utilitarian calculations on which the argument is based fix only on personal and ignore external preferences. That is an important conclusion for political theory because it shows for example, why the arguments of John Stuart Mill in On Liberty are not counter-utilitarian, but on the contrary, arguments in service of the only defensible form of utilitarianism .

Page 135 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**AT: Calculations Bad** Turn calculation is inevitable and justified every action requires calculation, and refusing to engage in calculation means allowing the worst atrocities to occur. Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998 [David, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia, p. 186-188] "that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the cannot and should not serve as alibi for staying out of juridicopolitical battles, within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others." Indeed, "incalculable justice requires us to calculate." From where do these insistences come? What
That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, unpresentable exceeds the determinable
109

is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship

"left to itself, the incalculable and giving (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse cal culation." 170 The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty, a duty that inhabits the instant of madness and compels the decision to avoid "the bad," the "perverse calculation," even "the worst." This is the duty that also dwells with deconstructive thought and makes it the starting point, the "at least necessary condition," for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we rec ognize that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences "we recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, antiSemitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."
that because of its undecidability multiplies responsi bility, and the fact that Furthermore, the duty within the decision, the obligation that recognizes the necessity of negotiating the possibilities provided by the impossibilities of justice, is not content with simply avoiding, con taining, combating, or negating the worst-violence-though it could certainly begin with those strategies. Instead, this responsibility, which is the responsibility of responsibility, commissions a "utopian" strat egy. Not, a strategy that is beyond all bounds of possibility so as to be considered "unrealistic," but one

the necessity of calculation takes the possibility summoned by the calculation as far as possible, "must take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and inter national, public and private, and so on." "' As Derrida
which in respecting

declares, "The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention.""' This leads Derrida to enunciate a proposition that many, not the least of whom are his Habermasian critics, could hardly have expected: "Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without treating it too lightly and forming the worst complicities."14 Residing within-and not far below the surface-of Derrida's account of the experience of the undecidable as the context for the decision is the duty of deconstructive thought, the responsibility for the other, and the opposition to totalitarianism it entails. The Levinasian supplement that Critchley argues deconstruction requires with respect to politics thus draws out that which is already present. It is, though, perhaps an element that needs to be drawn out, for Derrida has been candid about, and often criticized for, his political hesitancy. In answer to a question about the potential for translating the "theoretical radicality of

praxis," Derrida confessed (his term) "that I have never succeeded in directly relating deconstruction to existing political codes and programmes." This "failure" is derived not from any apolitical sentiment within deconstructive thought but from the "fundamentally metaphysical" nature of the political codes within which both the right and the left presently operate. The problem for politics that this disjuncture creates is, according to Derrida, that one has "to gesture in opposite di rections at the same time: on the one hand to preserve a distance and suspicion with regard to the official political codes governing reality; on the other, to intervene here and now in a practical and engaged man ner whenever the necessity arises." This, Derrida laments, results in a "dual allegiance" and "perpetual
deconstruction" into a "radical political
115

uneasiness" whereby the logic of an argument structured in terms of "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" may mean that political action, which follows from a decision between the competing hands, is in the end insufficient to the intellectual promise of deconstructive thought16 But in The Other Heading, Derrida's reflection on the question and politics of European identity, the difficulty of simultaneously gesturing in different directions is posed in an affirmative political manner.

Page 136 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Multiplying probability by magnitude is the only moral option hard moral rules result in circular preferences and horrible consequences
Yudkowsky 08 Full-time Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Cofounder (Eliezer, January 22nd 2008, Circular Altruism)
Suppose that a disease, or a monster, or a war, or something, is killing people. And suppose you only have enough resources to implement one of the following two options:

1. Save 400 lives, with certainty. 2. Save 500 lives, with 90% probability; save no lives, 10% probability . Most people choose option 1. Which, I think, is foolish; because if you multiply 500 lives by 90% probability, you get an expected value of 450 lives, which exceeds the 400-life value of option 1. (Lives saved don't diminish in marginal utility, so this is an appropriate calculation.) "What!" you cry, incensed. "How can you gamble with human lives ? How can you think about numbers when so much is at
off a cliff!" Ah, but

stake? What if that 10% probability strikes, and everyone dies? So much for your damned logic! You're following your rationality

here's the interesting thing. If you present the options this way : 1. 100 people die, with certainty. 2. 90% chance no one dies; 10% chance 500 people die. Then a majority choose option 2. Even though it's the same gamble . You see, just as a certainty of saving 400 lives seems to feel so much more comfortable than an unsure gain, so too, a certain loss feels worse than an uncertain one. You can grandstand on the second description too: "How can you condemn 100 people to certain death when there's such a good chance you can save them? We'll all share the risk! Even if it was only a 75% chance of saving everyone, it would still be worth it - so long as there's a chance - everyone makes it, or no one does!" You know what? This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply. Previously on Overcoming Bias, I asked what was the least bad, bad thing that could happen, and suggested that it was getting a dust speck in your eye
that irritated you for a fraction of a second, barely long enough to notice, before it got blinked away. And conversely, a very bad thing to happen, if not the worst thing,

Now, would you rather that a googolplex people got dust specks in their eyes, or that one person was tortured for 50 years? I originally asked this question with a vastly larger number - an incomprehensible mathematical magnitude - but a googolplex works fine for this illustration . Most people chose the dust specks over the torture. Many were proud of this choice, and indignant that anyone should choose otherwise: "How dare you condone torture!" This matches research showing that there are "sacred values", like human lives, and "unsacred values", like money. When you try to trade off a sacred value against an unsacred value, subjects express great indignation
would be getting tortured for 50 years.

(sometimes they want to punish the person who made the suggestion). My favorite anecdote along these lines - though my books

team of researchers who evaluated the effectiveness of a certain project, calculating the cost per life saved, and recommended to the government that the project be implemented because it was cost-effective . The governmental agency rejected the report because, they said, you couldn't put a dollar value on human life. After rejecting the report, the agency decided not to implement the measure . Trading off a sacred
are packed at the moment, so no citation for now - comes from a value (like refraining from torture) against an unsacred value (like dust specks) feels really awful. To merely multiply utilities

Suppose you had to choose between one person being tortured for 50 years, and a googol people being tortured for 49 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. You would choose one person being tortured for 50 years, I do presume; otherwise I give up on you. And similarly, if you had to choose between a googol people tortured for 49.9999999 years, and a googolsquared people being tortured for 49.9999998 years, you would pick the former . A googolplex is ten to the googolth power. That's a
would be too cold-blooded - it would be following rationality off a cliff... But let me ask you this.
googol/100 factors of a googol. So we can keep doing this, gradually - very gradually - diminishing the degree of discomfort, and multiplying by a factor of a googol each time, until we choose between a googolplex people getting a dust speck in their eye, and a googolplex/googol people getting two dust specks in their eye.

If you find

your preferences are circular here, that makes rather a mockery of moral grandstanding .

If you drive from San Jose to San

Maybe you think it a great display of virtue to choose for a googolplex people to get dust specks rather than one person being tortured. But if you would also trade a googolplex people getting one dust speck for a googolplex/googol people getting
Francisco to Oakland to San Jose, over and over again, you may have fun driving, but you aren't going anywhere.

Page 137 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

two dust specks et cetera, you sure aren't helping anyone. Circular preferences may work for feeling noble, but not for feeding the hungry or healing the sick. Altruism isn't the warm fuzzy feeling you get from being altruistic. If you're doing it for
the spiritual benefit, that is nothing but selfishness. The primary thing is to help others, whatever the means. So shut up and multiply!

Page 138 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**AT: Catastrophes Low Probability**

Policy-making requires assessment of all risks despite probability

Yudkowsky 08 Full-time Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Cofounder (Eliezer, January 22nd 2008, Circular Altruism)

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

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
nanotechnology is capable of producing, and this condition will persist indefinitely." 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 ventures survive after 4 years . (Knaup 2005.) Dawes (1988) 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

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 discussed in this book - or some other cause which none of us fore saw. Yet for a futurist, disjunctions make for an awkward and unpoetic-sounding prophecy .
are much more probable than are conjunctions.'

Policy makers risk political backlash when proper action isnt taken to prevent catastrophe
Yudkowsky 08 Full-time Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Cofounder (Eliezer, January 22nd 2008, Circular Altruism)

People are surprised by catastrophes lying outside their anticipation, beyond their historical probability distributions . Then why are we so taken aback when
The lesson of history is that swan happens. Black Swans occur? Why did LTCM borrow leverage of $125 billion against $4.72 billion of equity, almost ensuring that any Black Swan would destroy them? Because of hindsight bias, we learn overly specific lessons.

After September 11th, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration prohibited box-cutters on airplanes. The hindsight bias rendered the event too predictable in retrospect, permitting the angry victims to find it the result of 'negligence' - such as intelligence agencies' failure to distinguish warnings of Al Qaeda activity amid a thousand other warnings. We learned not to allow hijacked
planes to overfly our cities. We did not learn the lesson: "Black Swans occur; do what you can to prepare for the unanticipated." Taleb (2005) writes:It

is difficult to motivate people in the prevention of Black Swans... Prevention is not easily perceived, measured, or rewarded; it is generally a silent and thankless activity. Just consider that a costly measure is taken to stave off such an event. One can easily compute the costs while the results are hard to determine. How can one tell its effectiveness, whether the measure was successful or if it just coincided with no particular accident? ... Job performance assessments in these matters are not just tricky, but may be biased in favor of the observed "acts of heroism". History books do not account for heroic preventive measures.

Page 139 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Page 140 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**A2: Strive for Perfection (Imagination)** Imagination fails cant change reality. Biddle, editor and publisher of The Objective Standard, 06

(Craig Biddle, editor and publisher of The Objective Standard, The Objectivist Standard, Spring 2006, Vol. 1, No. 1, Introducing The Objective Standard, http://theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2006spring/introducing-the-objective-standard.asp)

reality is an absolutethat facts are facts, regardless of anyones hopes, fears, or desires. There is a world independent of our minds to which our thinking must correspond if our ideas are to be true and therefore of practical use in living our lives, pursuing our values, and protecting our rights . Thus, we reject the idea that reality is ultimately determined by personal opinion or social convention or divine decree. An individuals ideas or beliefs do not make reality what it is, nor can they directly change anything about it; they either correspond to the facts of reality, or they do not. A person might think that the Sun revolves around the Earth (as some people do); that does not make it so.
We hold that

Page 141 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Deontology Bad**

Deontology is bad when people disagree about what is right or wrong. Daar 03 (Judith F. Daar, professor of law at Whittier Law School, The Prospect of Human Cloning: Improving
Nature or Dooming the Species? Seton Hall Law Review, LexisNexis Academic) A second criticism of deontology is its assumption about the moral rightness and wrongness of human conduct. Deontologists operate from the premise that there are moral absolutes in the world; certain conduct is morally correct and other actions are morally wrong. n121 But in our diverse and changing world, a system that depends on moral absoluteness is destined for challenge. Who or what is to be the arbiter of moral rightness? Actions that a large [*540] group might consider morally wrong an equally large group could view as morally acceptable. A Gallup Poll conducted in March 2002 is a chilling illustration that one person's sin is another person's sanctity. n122 The poll asked citizens of Kuwait, the country the United States defended in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, if the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center could be morally justified. n123 A full thirty-six percent responded that the perpetrators were morally justified in killing nearly 3000 individuals. n124 Though the survey was not conducted on U.S. citizens, it seems reasonable to assume that few if any Americans would find moral justification for the September 11th attacks.

While the ethical choice is normally a good idea, a threshold should be used in the face of a catastrophe. Alexander and Moore 07 (Larry Alexander and Michael Moore, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Deontological Ethics, November 1, 2007 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/)

The second plausible response is for the deontologist to abandon Kantian absolutism for what is usually called threshold deontology. A threshold deontologist holds that deontological norms govern up to a point despite adverse consequences; but when the consequences become so dire that they cross the stipulated threshold, consequentialism takes over (Moore 1997, ch. 17). A may not torture B to save the lives of two others, but he may do so to save a thousand lives if the threshold is higher than two lives but lower than a thousand.

Morality co-opts ethical behavior because the focus falls on ideology, not action Economic Analysis, Common-Sense Morality and Utilitarianism Author(s): J. Moreh Source: Erkenntnis (1975-), Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jul., 1992), pp. 115-143 Published by: Springer Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20012427 Accessed: 22/07/2009 13:24 Moral rules are very stringent. Lying is allowed only in a small number of situations, e.g., in a crisis (if one's life or that of another person is endangered by a malevolent character, it is permitted to lie to the latter to protect the victim) or in certain market places where it is accepted that telling lies is part of the bargaining process. In the latter case, care should be taken that deceit does not spill over into other situations (Bok, 1980, Chap. 8 and p. 131). Moral philosophers generally agree that moral rules are severe. Some argue in favour of severity, e.g., Bok whose book (1980) is concerned mainly with lying and refers to many authorities favouring stringency of the rule forbidding lying. Bar-Elli and Heyd (1986) uphold the stringency of the rule against vengeance, though they grudgingly admit that it may be regarded as morally justified by the special kind of personal relationship in the particular situation (p. 85). Some philosophers criticize the severity of the demands made by some moral rules, because of the inconsistencies and asymmetries or even absurdity they are thought to lead to. I shall refer to two authors: Williams and Slote. Williams criticizes morality for attaching disproportionate importance to obligations and giving them priority over other ethical considerations. One may not break a promise even if what was promised was in itself of minor importance and keeping it would prevent one from furthering some important cause (Williams, 1985, pp. 118 J. MOREH 6-7, 180, 187 and 222, footnote 7). Slote (1985, Chap. 1) notes the asymmetry in the prescriptions of moral rules and permissions allowed by them between the moral agent and others. A moral agent is allowed to sacrifice a great deal of his3 welfare for the purpose of promoting the welfare of others by a much smaller amount, yet he is forbidden to do the reverse

Page 142 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

(i.e., promote his welfare by a great deal at the expense of someone else's welfare). Slote contends that if all people count equally, the latter action should be permitted. Nor is one entitled to sacrifice the life of one person in order to save the lives of several others. Such an exemption to the rule 'do not kill' is not allowed. Nevertheless, a person is permitted to sacrifice his own life for the sake of saving that of others. Slote mentions these examples to show that morality is not impartial between the self and others, as it should be. I am, however, using them to illustrate the austerity of moral rules.

Deontology is unable to distinguish between better ethics, but is logically no longer ethical when peoples lives are at risk. Alexander and Moore 07 (Larry Alexander and Michael Moore, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Deontological Ethics, November 1, 2007, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/)

Fourth, there is what might be called the paradox of relative stringency. There is an aura of paradox in asserting that all deontological duties are categorical to be done no matter the consequences and yet asserting that some of such duties are more stringent than others. A common thought is that there cannot be degrees of wrongness with intrinsically wrong acts, (Frey 1995, 78 n. 3). Yet relative stringency degrees of wrongness seems forced upon the deontologist by two considerations. First, duties of differential stringency can be weighed against one another if there is conflict between them, so that a conflict-resolving, overall duty becomes possible if duties can be more or less stringent. Second, when we punish for the wrongs consisting in our violation of deontological duties, we (rightly) do not punish all violations equally. The greater the wrong, the greater the punishment deserved; and relative stringency of duty violated (or importance of rights) seems the best way of making sense of greater versus lesser wrongs. Fifth, there are situations unfortunately not all of them thought experiments where compliance with deontological norms will bring about disastrous consequences. To take a stock example of much current discussion, suppose that unless A violates the deontological duty not to torture an innocent person (B), ten, or a thousand, or a million other innocent people will die because of a hidden nuclear device. If A is forbidden by deontological morality from torturing B, many would regard that as a reductio ad absurdum of deontology.

Hatred between groups of people make human rights violations inevitable Kohen, Assistant Professor. Ph.D. Duke University Contemporary Political Science 05 Ari Kohen. "The Possibility of Secular Human Rights: Alan Gewirth and the Principle of Generic Consistency" Peer Reviewed Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, March 17, 2005, http://www.springerlink.com/content/8crjwyet6g6mr9fh/fulltext.pdf The trouble with this response is pointed out by Richard Rorty, who offers the rejoinder, made by an agent who wants to infringe upon the rights of another, that philosophers like Gewirth "seem ,oblivious to blatantly obvious moral distinctions, distinctions any decent person would draw. ''8~ For Rorty, the problem cannot be solved by sitting down with a chalkboard and diagramming how the agent and his potential victim are both PPAs. It is, he argues, a problem that will not be solved by demonstrating that the agent violates his victim on pain of self-contradiction
because, for this agent, the victim is not properly a PPA, despite looking and acting very much like one. The old adage about looking, swimming, and quacking like a duck

comes to mind here; no amount of quacking will convince the agent that his victim is, in fact, a duck. As Rorty points out,
This rejoinder is not just a rhetorical device, nor is it in any way irrational. It is heartfelt. The identity of these people, the people whom we should like to convince to join our Eurocentric human rights culture, is bound up with their sense of who they are not . . . . What is crucial for

Page 143 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

their sense of who they are is that they are not an infidel, not a queer, not a woman, not an untouchable .... Since the days when the term "human being" was synonymous with "member of our tribe," we have always thought of human beings in terms of paradigm members of the species. We have contrasted us, the real humans, with rudimentary or perverted or deformed examples of humanity. 82 There are, I believe, two problems for Gewirth's theory here. The first is that an agent can quite clearly sidestep rational inconsistency by believing that his victim is somehow less of an agent (and, in the case presented by Rorty, less of a human being) than he is himself. The agent, here, might recognize that his victim is a PPA, but other factors (being an infidel, a queer, a woman, or an untouchable) have far greater resonance and preclude her having the same rights as the agent. He might also recognize his victim as a potential PPA, but not one in the fullest sense of that term or one who has actually achieved that status; as Gewirth himself notes, "there are degrees of approach to being prospective purposive agents. ''83 It seems to me that the Nazis knew quite well that their Jewish victims could be PPAs in some sense ; the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 confirm their awareness that Jews could plan and execute the same sorts of actions they could (voting and working, for example). The rights of the Jews could be restricted, however, because Jews were quite different from Germans; rather than PPAs in the fullest sense, they were, in the eyes of the Nazis, what Rorty calls "pseudohumans. ''~4 On this point, Rorty's point is both clear and compelling: " Resentful young Nazi toughs were quite aware that many Jews were clever and learned, but this only added to the pleasure they took in beating such Jews . Nor does it do much good to get such people to read Kant and agree that one should not treat rational agents simply as means. For everything turns on who counts as a fellow human being, as a rational agent in the only relevant sense--the sense in which rational agency is synonymous with membership in our moral community. ''s5 The second problem for the PGC pointed out by Rorty is that it is overly academic and insufficiently pragmatic. In other words, its fifteen steps might be logically compelling to those in a philosophy department, but not to those who are actually making these decisions on inclusion and exclusion. "This is not," Rorty tells us, "because they are insufficiently rational. It is, typically, because they live in a world in which it would be just too risky-- indeed, would often be insanely dangerous--to let one's sense of moral community stretch beyond one's family, clan, or tribe. ''86 This second point leads to the final critique of Gewirth's argument for the PGC.

Deontology does not hold up against the threat of nuclear war Hardin and Mearsheimer 85 [ Russell Hardin and John Mearsheimer are both Professors of Political Science at the University of Chicago, ol. 95, No. 3, Special Issue: Symposium on Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence JSTOR ] Discussion among philosophers often stops at the point of fundamental disagreement over moral principles, just as discussion among strategists often stops at the point of disagreement over
hypothetical assertions about deterrence. But most moral theorists -- and all utilitarians -- also require consideration of hypothetical assertions to reach their conclusions, although they are typically even less adept at objective, causal argument than are strategists, who are themselves often quite casual with their social scientific claims.

Even if one wishes to argue principally from deontological principles, one must have some confidence in one's social scientific expectations to decide whether consequences might not in this instance be overriding. Only a deontologist who held the extraordinary position that consequences never matter could easily reach a conclusion on nuclear weapons without considering the quality of various outcomes. Alas, on this dreadful issue good causal arguments are desperately needed.

Page 144 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Deontology is a terrible system for policy- policies must use means to an end framework and are judged by their effectiveness Institute For Public Policy 97 [ Institute For Public Policy New Mexico June, 1997 A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics http://apsapolicysection.org/vol7_2/72.pdf] deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of
At the same time, policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman,

The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, thescope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning soconclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interes t (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the meansend language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient,though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.
.

Deontology is irrelevant in policy making - intentions are impossible to know, only the outcome matters Hinman98
(Lawrence Hinman is a professor of Ethics Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, p. 186)

When, for example, we want to assess the moral correctness of proposed governmental legislation, we may well wish to set aside any question of the intentions of the legislators. After all good laws may be passed for the most venal of political motives, and bad legislation may be the outcome of quite good intentions. Instead, we can concentrate solely on the question of what effects the legislation may have on the people. When we make this shift, we are not necessarily denying that individual intentions are important on some level, but rather confining our attention to a level on which those intentions become largely irrelevant. This is particularly appropriate in the case of policy decisions by governments, corporations, or other groups. In such cases there may

Page 145 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

be a diversity of different intentions that one may want to treat as essentially private matters hwen assessing the moral worth of the proposed law, policy, or action. Therefore, rule utilitarianism's neglect of intentions intuitively makes the most sense when we are assessing the moral worth of some large-scale policy proposed by an entity consisting of more than one individual. Deontology in policy making fails to uphold democracy and legitimizes oppression. Institute For Public Policy 97 [ Institute For Public Policy New Mexico June, 1997 A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics http://apsapolicysection.org/vol7_2/72.pdf] Regarding the policymaking role of deontological philosophy in a democracy, I am concerned about the same issue that concerned scholars such as Herman Finer and Victor Thompson--the specter of policymakers (whether elected or unelected) imposing their own perceptions of higher-order moral principles on an unwilling or uninformed society. History has shown that the imposition of higherorder moral principles from above all too often degenerates into instrumental oppression . Thus as Finer has--I believe correctly--pointed out, the crucial difference between democracy and totalitarianism is the people's power to exact obedience to the public will. In a democracy, values are not "discovered" by policy activists; instead, yhey emerge out of the democratic process. For
this reason I find very troubling the suggestion by Joel Kassiola that environmental ethics requires that such long-standing and powerful values as national sovereignty and property rights will have to be ethically assessed and, perhaps, redefined or subordinated to a more morally-weighty, environmentally-based values and policies. I cannot help but wonder just who will be doing the refining and subordinating of these values and how this is to be done. As

Kurt Baier reminds us, in a democracy the moral rules and convictions of any group can and should be subjected to certain tests (1958, p. 12). That test is the submission of those moral rules and convictions to the sovereign public. While policymakers are expected to sort out the value conflicts that arise in light of their duty to serve the public interest, they are seldom entitled to act solely according to some perceived a priori moral imperative. (Those who would act this way in the case of environmental policy are aptly
described by Bob Taylor as environmental ethicists who discover 'truth' even though this truth can't or won't be seen by their fellow citizens.) Herein lies one of the important moral

dilemmas of democratic government. Individuals are free, within the constraints of law, to act on perceived moral imperatives; democratic governments are not. It is, for example, one thing for individuals to donate their property for environmental preservation, but it is quite another thing for the government to seize private lands (i.e., redefine property rights) for the same purpose. Deontology fails-- no way of evaluating conflicting obligations Rainbow 2002 [ Catherine Rainbow is a teacher at Davidson College.Descriptions of
Ethical Theories and http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/kabernd/Indep/carainbow/Theories.htm] Although Principles

deontology contains many positive attributes, it also contains its fair number of flaws. One weakness of this theory is that there is no rationale or logical

Page 146 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

basis for deciding an individual's duties. For instance, businessman may decide that it is his duty to always be on time to meetings. Although this appears to be a noble duty we do not know why the person chose to make this his duty. Perhaps the reason that he has to be at the meeting on time is that he always has to
sit in the same chair. A similar scenario unearths two other faults of deontology including the fact that sometimes a person's duties conflict, and that deontology is not concerned with the welfare of others. For instance, if the deontologist who must be on time to

meetings is running late, how is he supposed to drive? Is the deontologist supposed to speed, breaking his duty to society to uphold the law, or is the deontologist supposed to arrive at his meeting late, breaking his duty to be on time? This scenario of conflicting obligations does not lead us to a clear ethically correct resolution nor does it protect the welfare of others from the deontologist's decision. Since deontology is not based on the context of each situation, it does not provide any guidance when one enters a complex situation in which there are conflicting obligations (1,2). The need for exceptions means deontology fails as a theory. Treasury Board 2006 [Canadian Treasury Board Professional Ethics and Standards for the Evaluation Community in the Government of Canada http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/eval/dev/career/pesecgc-enpcegc/pesecgcenpcegc_e.asp]
Among the criticisms of deontological theory is

that it is difficult to get universal

agreement on what principles should be considered fundamental. It is also difficult to prioritize and to apply such abstract principles as truth telling and the sanctity of life to specific cases that arise in ones day-to-day work. In addition, the application of certain principles, without reference to consequences, can have extremely negative resultsfor example, when telling the truth results in penalties for well-intentioned actions. Moreover, it is often the case that one principle will come into conflict with another. A celebrated example is truth telling versus the sanctity of life when one is considering whether to lie to a prospective murderer about the location of the intended victim. It is also argued that if exceptions are made in the application of a principle, it cannot be considered a fundamental one . Many deontologists, however, would approve of exceptions when a greater moral principle is at stake. At a less dramatic level than
life and death, one can envisage an evaluator having to choose between the publics right to know and a clients right to privacy.

Page 147 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The subjectivity of what rights are important means deontology fails. Rainbow 2002 [ Catherine Rainbow is a teacher at Davidson College.Descriptions of
Ethical Theories and http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/kabernd/Indep/carainbow/Theories.htm] Principles

In the rights ethical theory the rights set forth by a society are protected and given the highest priority. Rights are considered to be ethically correct and valid since a large or ruling population endorses them. Individuals may also bestow rights upon others if they have the ability and resources to do so (1). For example, a person may say that her friend may borrow the car for the afternoon. The friend who was given the ability to borrow the car now has a right to the car in the afternoon. A major complication of this theory on a larger scale, however, is that one must decipher what the characteristics of a right are in a society. The society has to determine what rights it wants to uphold and give to its citizens. In order for a society to determine what rights it wants to enact, it must decide what the society's goals and ethical priorities are. Therefore, in order for the rights theory to be useful, it must be used in conjunction with another ethical theory that will consistently explain the goals of the society (1). For example in America people have the right to choose their religion because this right is upheld in the Constitution. One of the goals of the founding fathers' of America was to uphold this right to freedom of religion. However, under Hitler's reign in Germany, the Jews were persecuted for their religion because Hitler decided that Jews were detrimental to Germany's future success. The American government upholds freedom of religion while the Nazi government did not uphold it and, instead, chose to eradicate the Jewish religion and those who practiced it. Deontologys absolutism prioritizes morality as a concept over moral results.
Nielsen 93 [Kai Nielsen is a Philosophy Professor at University of Calgary
Absolutism and It Consequentialist CriticsEdited by Joram Haber, p. 170-2] Blowing up the fat man is indeed monstrous. But letting him remain stuck while the whole group drowns is still more monstrous. The consequentialist is on strong moral ground here, and, if his reflective moral convictions do not square either with certain unrehearsed or with certain reflective particular moral convictions of human beings, so much the worse for such commonsense moral convictions. One could even usefully and relevantly adapt here-though for a quite different purpose-an argument of Donagan's. Consequentialism of the kind I have been arguing for provides so persuasive "a theoretical basis for common morality that when it contradicts some moral intuition, it is natural to suspect that intuition, not theory, is corrupt." Given the comprehensiveness, plausibility, and overall rationality of consequentialism, it is not unreasonable to override even a deeply felt moral conviction if it does not square with such a theory, though, if it made no sense or overrode the bulk of or even a great many of our considered moral convictions that would be another matter indeed Anticonsequentialists often point to the

inhumanity of people who will sanction such killing of the innocent but cannot the compliment be returned by speaking of the even greater inhumanity, conjoined with evasiveness, of those who will allow even more death and far greater misery and then excuse themselves on the ground that they did not intend the death and misery but merely forbore to prevent it? In such a context, such reasoning and such forbearing to prevent
seems to me to constitute a moral evasion. I say it is evasive because rather than steeling himself to do what in normal circumstances would be a horrible and vile act but in this circumstance is a harsh moral necessity he allows. when he has the power to prevent it, a situation which is still many times worse. He tries to keep his 'moral purity' and [to] avoid 'dirty hands' at the price of utter moral failure and what Kierkegaard

Page 148 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

called 'double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in this morally evasive way but this does not make it right.

Deontologys absolutism means it will inevitably fail. Pritchett No Date [ Adrian Pritchett is a University of Georgia graduate and an attorney.
Paper written post 1998. Kai Nielsens Support of Consequentialism and Rejection of Deontology http://pritchea.myweb.uga.edu/phil3200paper1.htm]

Throughout the article, Nielsen concurrently argues that deontology should be rejected but that consequentialism is viable. We may reconstruct his argument as follows: Deontology, as a morally absolute theory, makes mistakes. Likewise, an absolutist form of consequentialism also makes mistakes. So absolutism is wrong. Unfortunately, deontology can only be formulated as

some type of moral absolutism, while consequentialism can be flexible. Therefore, deontology should be rejected, and by rejecting deontology we are left with consequentialism as a viable theory.Nielsen relied heavily on examples to support his first premise that deontology makes mistakes. He discussed warfare to show how it is not the case that one is necessarily morally
corrupt if he or she knowingly kills the innocent while making moves to kill combatants, but this point would not have been salient without having seen the movie he referred to, The Battle of Algiers. Nielsen did present an effective example, though, with the case of the innocent fat man. In this thought experiment, a fat man is leading a group of people out of a cave when he

gets hopelessly stuck in the opening. There is a rising tide that will cause everyone inside the cave to drown unless they can get out. The only option for removing the fat man is to blast him out with dynamite that someone happens to have. Nielsen explains that the deontologist would hold that the fat man must not be blasted and killed because this would violate the prohibition against killing and it is only nature responsible for everyone else drowning. Nielsen challenges this principle by declaring that anyone in such a situation, including the fat man, should understand that the right thing to do is blast the fat man out in order to save the many live s in the cave. Furthermore, the deontologist exhibits moral evasion whenever he stands idly by and allows a greater tragedy than is necessary to occur. Nielsen explains that this is the kind of example that highlights the corrupt nature of deontology. Utilitarianism is the only way to access morality. Sacrifice in the name of preserving rights destroys any hope of future generations attaining other values.
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; Nuclear Ethics pg. 45-46)

Is there any end that could justify a nuclear war that threatens the survival of the species? Is not all-out nuclear war just as self contradictory in the real world as pacifism is accused of being? Some people argue that "we are required to undergo gross injustice that will break many souls sooner than ourselves be the authors of mass murder."73 Still others say that "when a person makes survival the highest value, he has declared that there is nothing he will not betray. But for a civilization to sacrifice itself makes no sense since there are not survivors to give meaning to the sacrifical [sic] act. In that case, survival may be worth betrayal." Is it possible to avoid the "moral calamity of a policy like unilateral disarmament that forces us to choose between being dead or red (while increasing the chances of both)"? 74 How one judges the issue of ends can be affected by how one poses the questions. If one asks " what is worth a billion lives (or the survival of the species)," it is natural to resist contemplating a positive answer. But suppose one asks, " is it possible to imagine any threat to our civilization and values that would justify raising the threat to a billion lives from one in ten thousand to one in a thousand for a specific period ?" Then there are several plausible answers, including a democratic way of

Page 149 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

When we pursue several values simultaneously, we face the fact that they often conflict and that we face difficult tradeoffs. If we make one value absolute in priority, we are likely to get that value and little else . Survival is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of other values, but that does not make it sufficient. Logical priority does not make it an absolute value. Few people act as though survival were an absolute value in their personal lives, or they would never enter an automobile. We can give survival of the species a very high priority without giving it the paralyzing status of an absolute value. Some degree of risk is unavoidable if individuals or societies are to avoid paralysis and enhance the quality of life beyond mere survival. The degree of that risk is a justifiable topic of both prudential and moral reasoning.
life and cherished freedoms that give meaning to life beyond mere survival.

Destruction of social institutions that limit rights literally cause social chaos and make it impossible to project right-based economies elsewhere.
Harris 94 (Owen Spring 1994; Editor of National Interest Journal of International affairs and diplomacy; Power of Civilizations Via Questia)

Had the United States been as demanding on human rights and democracy towards Taiwan and South Korea in the 1960s as it is now towards China, those countries would never have experienced their economic miracles, and they and the region would be in much
worse shape as a result. But perhaps the most cutting riposte that these Singaporeans make is that the internal condition of the United States itself today--the

evident consequence of pressing its own principles to extremes--deprives it of any authority to preach to others, to insist that all must follow its ways . Listen to this, from Kishore Mahbubani, a recent Singaporean ambassador to the United Nations and visiting fellow at Harvard: But freedom does not only solve problems; it can also cause them. The United States has undertaken a massive social experiment, tearing down social institution after social institution that restrained the individual. The results have been disastrous. Since 1960 the U.S. population has increased 41 percent while violent crime has risen by 560 percent, single-mother births by 419 percent, divorce rates by 300 percent and the percentage of children living in single-parent homes by 300 percent. This is massive social decay . Many a society shudders at the prospects of this happening on its shores. But instead of traveling overseas with humility, Americans confidently preach the virtues of unfettered individual freedom, blithely ignoring the visible social consequences .(3) How is one to respond to all that? One might I suppose simply say, thank God they didn't bring up Slavery and the Opium Trade, and leave it at that. But in this issue Eric Jones takes the Singaporean case seriously, analyzes its arguments, and then
speculates fascinatingly on China's possible futures. As he says, in one sense the debate is one between those who assert the primacy of history and those who assert the primacy of economics. But as Irwin Stelzer shows, there is room for interesting differences of opinion even among those who agree on the latter.

There is no Utopia in which we can get rid of difficult moral decisions. Political inaction in times of risks can only be for the worst
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; Nuclear Ethics pg. 25-26)

One way is to treat rules as prima facie moral duties and to appeal to a consequentialist critical level of moral reasoning to judge competing moral claims . For example,
How do we reconcile rules and consideration of consequences in practice? in judging the moral acceptability of social institutions and policies (including nuclear deterrence), a broad consequentialist might demand that the benefit they produce be not only large but also not achievable by an alternative that would respect rules. 40

In

addition, to protect against the basic difficulties of comparing different people's interests when making utilitarian calculations, a broad consequentialist would require very substantial majorities; otherwise he would base his decisions on rules and rights-based grounds. A consequentialist argument can also be provided for giving some weight to motives as well as means. For example William Safire argues that "the protection of acting in good faith, with no malicious intent, is

Page 150 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

what make decision-making possible. It applies to all of us. . . . The doctor who undertakes a risky operation, the lawyer who gambles on an unorthodox defense to save his client, the businessman who bets the company on a new product."42 While such an argument can be abused if good motives are treated as an automatic one-dimensional exculpation, it can be used by broad consequentialists as a grounds for including evaluation of motives in the overall judgment of an act . Whether one
accepts the broad consequentialist approach or chooses some other, more eclectic way to include and reconcile the three dimensions of complex moral issues,43 there will often be a sense of uneasiness about the answers, not just because of the

problems "but simply that there is no satisfactory solution to these issues-at least none that appears to avoid in practice what most men would still regard as an intolerable sacrifice of value."44 When value is sacrificed, there is often the problem of "dirty hands." Not all ethical decisions are pure ones. The absolutist may avoid the problem of dirty hands, but often at the cost of having no hands at all. Moral theory cannot be "rounded off and made complete and tidy." That is part of the modern human condition. But that does not exempt us from making difficult moral choices.
complexity of the

Political inaction to prevent further death is the greatest inhumanity one can commit.
Nielsen 93 Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary (Kai, Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber Pg 171-72)

Anticonsequentialists often point to the inhumanity of people who will sanction such killing of the innocent, but cannot the compliment be returned by speaking of the even greater inhumanity, conjoined with evasiveness, of those who will allow even more death and far greater misery and then excuse themselves on the ground that they did not intend the death and misery but merely forbore to prevent it? In such a context, such reasoning and such forbearing to prevent seems to me to constitute a moral evasion . I say it is
evasive because rather than steeling himself to do what in normal circumstances would be a horrible and vile act but in this circumstance is a harsh moral necessity, he allows, when he has the power to prevent it, a situation which is still many times

He tries to keep his 'moral purity' and avoid 'dirty hands' at the price of utter moral failure and what Kierkegaard called 'double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in this morally evasive way but this does not make it right My consequentialist reasoning about such cases as the case of the innocent fat man is very often resisted on the grounds that it starts a very dangerous precedent. People rationalize wildly and irrationally in their own favor in such situations. To avoid such rationalization, we must stubbornly stick to our deontological principles and recognize as well that very frequently, if people will put their wits to work or just endure, such admittedly monstrous actions done to prevent still greater evils will turn out to be unnecessary.
worse.

Attempts to totalize systems of morals is impossible

Green 02 (Joshua David; Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University. November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It", pg 288)

moral theorizing fails because our intuitions do not reflect a coherent set of moral truths and were not designed by natural selection or anything else to behave as if they were. And note that this is the case for a single persons intuitions. Troubles only multiply when one must reconcile the conflicting intuitions of many different people . Thus, while antirealism does not rule out the possibility of reinventing normative ethics as an attempt to organize our moral intuitions and values, its not likely to work. If you want to make sense of your moral sense, turn to biology, psychology, and sociologynot normative ethics.
I maintain, once again, that this sort of

Construction of moral lines is counter-productive to decision making.

Page 151 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Green 02 (Joshua David; Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University. November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It", pg 310)
Moral realists, and those anti-realists who would emulate them, have the option of dogmatism, of blindly acting by moral norms that one takes to be authoritative. Revisionists, in contrast, have no choice but to acknowledge that all moral judgment is an

imprecise process of weighing values. The nature of moral action requires the drawing of lines : One either jumps in and saves the drowning child, or one does not. One either votes to allow abortion or one does not. Of course, one will sometimes make compromises by adopting middle-ofthe- road courses of action, but, at some level, all action is discrete. judgment are fuzzy, fluid, and continuous considerations, the practical outputs of moral judgment are discrete actions.

To any particular course of action one must say either yes or no. Thus, while the inputs to moral Deontology is intuitively appealing because it offers answers as clear and forceful as our intuitions, drawing theoretical lines that translate into practical lines, the kinds of lines that we, like it or not, are forced to draw by the nature of action. But, contrary to appearances, nature contains no true moral lines. We begin with only a mush of 298 morally relevant considerations, things we care about, and any lines that get drawn must be drawn by us. Therefore, any attempt to settle a moral question with deontological appeals to rights, obligations, etc. always begs the question. Such appeals are merely attempts to settle moral issues by insisting that they have, in effect, already been settled by Mother Moral Nature and the lines she has drawn. Exceptions to all concrete lines of morals prove there exists no true deontological framework.
Green 02 (Joshua David; Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University. November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It", pg 312)

In the context of an openly anti-realist dialogue, what would it mean to say that a fetus has a right to life or that a woman has a right to choose? If all one means in saying these things is that one is against abortion,
What goes for private debates about marital infidelity goes for public moral debates as well. or in favor of allowing it, then why not just say that?17 Packaging ones opinion as a claim about rights is just pointless propaganda.

Perhaps, one might argue, that an appeal to a right can be understood as an appeal to a default assumption. To appeal to the moral right to free speech, for example, might be to appeal to the generally accepted principle that people should be able to say what they want in almost all cases. The problem is that in any real controversy in which rights are invoked, the question is inevitably about the limits of those rights. Therefore, it is pointless18 for civil libertarians to defend flag-burning by appeal to the right to free speech, regardless of how natural this feels. Everyone is generally in favor of free speech. The debate is about whether to make an exception for this sort of speech. Pointing out that this case would be an exception does nothing to change the minds of those who want it to be an exception. In this case, as in others, appeals to rights are, once again, just question-begging propaganda, useless in the face of anti-realists who know the meta-ethical truth and arent willing to play along. Alternatives to cost-benefit analyses would result in political paralyses and crush decision-making
Green 02 Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University (Joshua, November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It", pg 313)

Page 152 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

In contrast, one can appeal to good and bad consequences without propagandizing.
pill. This sort of claim contributes to a meaningful dialogue because its something a pro-choice liberal can acknowledge.

A pro-life conservative might say, for example, that restricting abortion rights is good (or good in certain respects) because it teaches people important lessons in personal responsibility. This claim is not

empty. A young woman who gets pregnant as a result of irresponsible choices and is forced to carry a baby to term and give it up for adoption is likely to learn some valuable life lessons that she might not learn if given the option to end her pregnancy with a

He can agree that there is an up side to anti-choice legislation, but then go on to argue that these advantages are outweighed by the disadvantages, bad things that an honest conservative can acknowledge as bad, such as harm caused by illegal abortions. Of course, this kind of dialogue may not
resolve the issue. There may remain untestable factual assumptions on either side concerning, for example, the existence of God and the nature of His will. Likewise, there may remain brute evaluative differences, for example, over the various weights to

But getting rid of questionbegging talk of rights and establishing some common ground about advantages and disadvantages may help focus the issue. If, for example, the pro-choice camp could get the pro-life camp to acknowledge that its opposition to abortion is ultimately grounded in untestable religious beliefs and nothing else, that would be a very worthwhile achievement.
attach to the mutually acknowledged good and bad consequences of (dis)allowing abortion.

Page 153 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

*****UTIL BAD / DEON GOOD***** **Util Bad** People are not a means to a result, the results of an action are never as important as the action itself. Schapiro 2001 [Tamar Schapiro is professor of philosophy at Stanford. Three Conceptions of Action in Moral Theory Ous, Mar 2001, Vol. 35 Issue 1, p93, 25p Ebsco]
Kamms view of action, though less explicit and developed, shares this propositional orientation. An action in accordance with moral constraints, Kamm claims, states that another person has or lacks value as a matter of fact. And since there is such a fact of the matter, actions can succeed or fail to express the truth. 18 And yet on both Wollastons and Kamms accounts, the world to which action relates us descriptively is not the utilitarians

world of natural causes and effects. The claim that youre really something is a not a claim about a persons empirical or psychological state; rather it is a claim about his status.19
Similarly, the examples Wollaston invokes to illustrate his theory of action all involve claims about the status of an agent in relation to others. Thus Wollastons view, echoed by Kamm, seems to be that action tracks certain practical factsfacts about where we stand in relation to one another as members of a social world. Wollastons conception of action seems to presuppose a moral psychology which is different from Cumberlands.

While Wollaston would not deny that every action involves an exercise of efficient causality, his view suggests that our ultimate practical concern is not for the effects we can produce. Indeed his conception implies that in addition to a causal element, action contains a reflexive element. The exercise of human agency, according to Wollaston, involves a reflective awareness of ourselves in relation to others. 20 Action expresses a conception of where we stand in relation to the other constituents of the world, conceived as a realm of status relations. Moreover, this awareness determines an ultimate end of action which is not an effect to be brought about. That end is the faithful representation of the interpersonal order of which we are members. Normality bias causes us to underestimate the impact of discriminatory outcomes. This justifies a feedback loop where we accept the established order and treat disadvantaged populations as suitable victims necessary for our safety. Lu-in Wang, Professor of Law @ University of Pittsburgh School of Law, 2006 Discrimination by
Default: How Racism Becomes Routine Pg 90-97 The Normalcy and Normalization of Discrimination Because counterfactual thinking influences our reactions to and explanations of negative events, biases in counterfactual thinking have the potential to distort our assessments of discriminatory outcomes at several levels. First, they can mute our reactions to discrimination generally, leading us to tolerate and even to accept unequal outcomes. Our acceptance of discrimination is not due solely to a general indifference or hardness toward groups that are vulnerable to discrimination, but results in part from the specific ways in which our preference for the normal or customary affects how we process and evaluate events and behavior. That is, the normality bias leads us to react less strongly to (and perhaps to not even notice) misfortunes that we take for granted or that follow an expected pattern. This bias also promotes the entrenchment of those patterns because it leads us to accept the established

Page 154 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

order but to End jarring, and therefore to resist, challenges to those accepted ways. Furthermore, it makes it easier for us to justify the established patterns by viewing them as rational and even fair. Second, when a case of alleged discrimination does come under scrutiny, biases in counterfactual thinking can distort our causal explanations of the events in question and our evaluations of the parties. Because determining whether discrimination has occurred is fundamentally an exercise in causal attribution,"7 the relative normality or mutability of the parties' conduct can influence our judgments of their roles in producing the outcome in a way that leads us to reduce the perpetrators responsibility and ascribe undue responsibility to the victim. More broadly, our judgments of blame and sympathy create a feedback loop that reinforces the norms, expectations, and practices that contributed to our biased judgments and perpetuate discriminatory reactions and behavior. Immutable Wrongs and Suitable Victims The more easily we can imagine the victim of a tragic fate avoiding it, the more badly we will feel that be has suffered, so that the level of sympathy we feel and the amount of compensation we dole out may turn on trivial differences in the circumstances of a tragedy. In the burglary study discussed earlier, for example, subjects expressed greater sympathy for victims if their homes were burglarized the night before they returned from vacation than if the burglary occurred several weeks before their return. Similarly, subjects in another study recommended significantly higher compensatory awards for a convenience store customer who was shot during a robbery at a store he rarely patronized than for a customer who was shot at his regular store. They also awarded significantly higher amounts to a plane crash victim who managed to walk miles through a remote area only to die one-quarter of a mile from the nearest town than to one who traveled just as far but died seventy-five miles from the nearest town. In none of the studies did the victims losses or suffering differ based on the circumstances of their misfortunes. Nevertheless, the fate of the more highly compensated victims seemed more poignant and the victims themselves more deserving of sympathy, because subjects could more easily imagine positive outcomes for them. A positive counterfactual also may come more easily to mind, as Delgados examples suggest, when it is not normal for a person to suffer a particular fate. Recall the bursting of the dot-com E bubble, when unemployment figures began to reflect not just the usual losses of blue-collar and lower-skilled service jobs but also substantial losses of high-paying, white-collar jobs. Numerous news articles highlighted and analyzed the trend, labeling the ` downturn a "white-collar recession and sympathetically profiling the newly idle (and mostly White) college educated professionals for whom unemployment was both a hardship and a shock. Although white collar professionals during that period did A indeed suffer higher rates of unemployment than were typical for that group, they were not, as many assumed, the hardest hit: the groups that usually get clobbered by unemploymentblue- collar workers, lower-skilled workers, people of color continued to bear disproportionately higher job losses. The misfortunes of unemployed professionals drew more attention and greater sympathy in part because, as one economist put it, They are not the people who come right to mind when you think about the jobless.* Similarly, our attention and sympathy for crime victims varies according to how accustomed we are to seeing themor, to be more precise, people like themsuffer crime and violence. Even the same, equally appalling forms of victimization can elicit different degrees of concern depending on race and class. A couple of high-profile cases from recent years illustrate this point. Many readers will likely recall the highly publicized 1989 case of the Central Park joggera case so famous that this reference to its victim generally suffices to identify it. As Kimberle Crenshaw has noted, this case, which was believed at the time to have involved the gang rape and brutal beating of a White investment banker by as many as twelve Black youths, drew massive, sensationalized media Coverage, provoked widespread public outrage, and even prompted Donald Trump to take out a full page ad in four New York newspapers demanding that New York Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police." While she does not suggest that the Central Park joggers ease did not merit great concern, Crenshaw does point out the dramatic disparity between the level of concern that case evoked and the virtual silence of the media with regard to the twenty-eight other cases of first-degree rape or attempted rape" that were reported in New York that same weekmany of which were as horrific as the rape in Central Park," but most of which included victims who were women of color. Similarly, the great attention paid to a more recent and perhaps equally famous casethe June 2002 abduction of Elizabeth Smart, a White teenager from an affluent Utah familycontrasted sharply with the relative lack of coverage given a similar case that same spring: the disappearance of Alexis Patterson, a seven-year-old African American girl, in April 2002. By one account, the Smart story received ten times the media coverage given Patter-

Page 155 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

sons case: one thousand newspaper articles and television reports on Smart versus one hundred on Patterson.34 Reporters, editors, and producers denied that the victims race played any role in the amount of attention their cases received, pointing out that a number of factors distinguished them: Smart was abducted from her own bedroom in the middle of the night while Patterson disappeared during her walk to school, the police departments may have worked differently in sharing information with the media, and the Smart parents, with their "perfect" family, may have been perceived more sympathetically than the Pattersons. Aside from these circumstantial differences, however, a number of journalists and commentators noted that race probably did make a differencenot because the media consciously resist reporting stories with Black victims, but because of their sense of "what makes a compelling national story."3 What makes a compelling story, however, often correlates with race and class. As one veteran Black journalist put it bluntly, "whatever happens in a black neighborhood doesnt really surprise anybody. The public is conditioned to expect that. "37 In other words, the explanation may be simply that crime and violence are an accepted part of Black peoples "rough road in life."38 Their suffering is normal and therefore unremarkable. Furthermore, we take for granted not just who suffers but also how their suffering plays out. That is, we become inured to misfortunes that a story line with which we are familiar, because the victims experiences are hard to imagine otherwise. The more muted reactions to deaths from enemy versus friendly illustrate this point. Familiarity accustoms us to racial and other group-based discrimination as well, because that kind of misfortune often follows standard scripts. In their analysis of reactions to the bombing of a synagogue in France that injured several people, social psychologists Dale T Miller and William Turnbull pointed out that one need not embrace a discriminatory viewpoint in order to assimilate the expectation that certain harms are normal for some people but not for others: Frances then Prime Minister publicly denounced the attack and expressed his sympathy for both the jews who were inside the synagogue and the "innocent passersby." The Prime Ministers differentiation of the victims and innocent passersby provoked considerabl[e] outrage because many interpreted it as implying that he did not consider the jews to be as innocent as the passersby. Certainly the term innocent has a strong moral connotation, but should we assume that the Prime Ministers remarks reflect antiSemitism? Not necessarily. His failure to apply the term innocent to the jews inside the synagogue may reflect the fact that his mental representation of a synagogue enabled him to mentally remove passersby from the vicinity more easily than the attending jews. That the passersby were not the intended victims of the attack also makes their injuries less taken-for-granted and thus easier to undo mentally (although no more or less deserved) than those of the jews. What need not have been, ought not to have been.3 As this incident suggests, the more readily we recognize the patterns that discrimination follows, the harder it is for us to undo mentally the routine discrimination we expect and witness, the more congruous and less remarkable we find its victims losses, and the more acceptable they become. As a result, even extreme acts of discrimination such as bias-motivated violence can play a role in normalizing discrimination to the extent that they define the expected targets for aggression and ill treatment. Observers of bias, crimes understand immediately and viscerally why the victim was singled out because they recognize the pattern that such crime follows. As Iris Marion Young has explained, the social environment surrounding acts of violence, harassment, intimidation, and ridicule of particular groups makes those acts "possible and even acceptable. This pattern of acceptance also characterizes the less dramatic, more mundane types of discrimination that members of some groups experience routinely. Dorothy E. Roberts has pointed out, for example, that habitual racial profiling in law enforcement con- tributes to an environment in which both the imposition of physical suffering on members of certain groups and the infringement of their constitutional rights are expected and minimized. First, discriminatory targeting by law enforcement officers reinforces the perception that some groups are "second-class citizens" for whom police surveillance and even arrest are "perfectly natural." In turn, this belief promotes the view that those groups are entitled to fewer liberties and that their rights are "mere amenities that may be sacrificed to protect law-a biding people." Acceptance of this view results in an environment in which a pattern of discriminatory targeting seems benign, for "when social understandings are so uncontested that they become invisible, the social meanings that arise from them appear natural. Similarly, Deseriee A. Kennedy has explained that consumer discriminationthe commercial version of racial profiling in which retail establishments single out Black and Brown shoppers for heightened surveillance and other ill treatmentalso insinuates itself into our expectations of how people of color should be treated: "Everyday racism perpetuates itselfit becomes integrated into everyday

Page 156 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

situations and becomes part of the expected, of the unquestionable, and of what is seen as normal by the dominant group.""2 And as we shall see, a history of inferior care has led to the view that minorities inevitably will suffer worse health outcomes because those people" generally dont do well.43 In addition to being familiar and therefore normal, our scripts, schemas, and prototypes for discrimination incorporate other factors that make discriminatory outcomes seem inevitable and lead us to take them for granted. The standard discrimination schema includes a perpetrator who intentionally targets a member of a disfavored group for ill treatment and whose intentional wrong- doing is triggered by his "taste for discrimination"a force both irrational and outside his control. Both the assumptions that discrimination is intended and that its perpetrators are driven to it tend to make discrimination seem ineluctable, with all the implications that the appearance of immutability carries. As Miller and Turnbull suggested with reference to the synagogue bombing, when a victim is seen as an intended target, the victims fate is harder to undo mentally. As they also have explained, victims losses are more easily taken for granted when the harm they suffer was required in order for the perpetrator to achieve his goals"even when [those] goals [are] reprehensible.4 This tendency was confirmed in yet another victim compensation study, in which subjects showed less sympathy toward and recommended less compensation for a victim whose dog was killed by a burglar when the dogs barking "threatened the burglars mission" than when the dog was killed when no one was nearby to hear the barking. It is also harder to imagine a different outcome if an actors behavior is viewed as out of his control than when it is controllable. For example, to the extent that people accept the stereotype of a rapist as being "sex-starved, insane, or both," they have a hard time imagining him behaving differently and refraining from his attack on the victim."6 Taken as a whole--and as unrealistic and inaccurate as they may sometimes beour scripts, schemas, and prototypes of discrimination lead us to take for granted and thus to accept in- equitable outcomes. And by incorporating the assumptions implicit in these conceptions of discrimination, the legal model of intentional discrimination reinforces and institutionalizes this effect. We come, in other words, to view members of certain groups as appropriate or acceptable targets for the kinds of mistreatment that we are used to seeing them suffer. Even those of us who are vulnerable to common forms of discrimination may adopt this perspective to some degree, as we shall see below. Those who do not see themselves as likely targets of discrimination, on the other handthat is, members of typically dominant groupsmay even find comfort in these patterns. One of the less noble tendencies of human beings is to gauge our own vulnerability to negative events by comparison to othersand to prefer to compare "down- ward, to less fortunate others. Downward social comparison gives us a favorable, self-enhancing view of ourselves, thereby reducing anxiety and improving our sense of well-being.47 Accordingly, individuals who can distinguish themselves from potential targets are able to reap psychological benefits from drawing that distinction. To the extent that racially discriminatory patterns of mistreatment provide nontarget individuals with more vulnerable, less fortunate groups with which to compare themselves, these patterns also provide nontarget persons with a means of enhancing their positive views of themselves and the worldto see the world as safe and just and themselves as invulnerable and worthy. To the extent that viewing some groups as expected, even accepted, targets for mistreatment provides a nontarget individual with a way of differentiating herself from that victim, she may feel even more insulated from or immune to such treatment because her group identity protects her. The comfort that comes from seeing others as more vulnerable than ourselves in turn serves to reinforce the designation of those others as suitable victims.48

Extend Wang, 02 utilitarianism perpetuates the exclusion of the marginalized. This reinforces systematic bias based on race, class, and gender for the benefit of a privileged class. The normality of discrimination produces a feedback loop where our reaction to suffering is muted and our biased judgments reinforce the norms that contributed to discrimination in the first place. These biases distort perceptions of cause and effect and our evaluation of the events in question. Once we are accustomed to the systematic harm of disadvantaged individuals it makes it possible to ignore their suffering while overestimating the impact of events that threaten to change the social order.

Page 157 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Risk assessment is distorted by poverty trading on capital reserves exclude the poor Tim Hope, Professor of Criminology @ Keele University, 2000, Crime, disorder, and community
safety Pg 193-194 We live in both a risk society (Beck 1992) and an exclusive society (Young 1999). At the same time as we orient to ourselves around the risks and dangers which we see surrounding us in our everyday lives, so also do our social and political arrangements lend themselves to the magnification of inequalities in access to those goods which reassure, protect or expose ourselves to risk. As our perception of the bads increases, so do we seek to gamer the goods which would keep them at bay, trading on our capital reserves and capacities across the various spheres of economy, community and culture. The ontological insecurity which the condition of late modernity inspires in us (Giddens 1990; Young 1999) fuses with the apprehension of mundane insecurities, pressuring us to invest in the means of risk avoidance (Hope and Sparks 2000). As we feel increasingly that the public sphere alone can no longer guarantee sufficiently the public goods of everyday safety (see Garland 1996), so we are thrown upon our own individual and collective resources and strategies to acquire the private goods which would remedy our perceived security deficit. And our incapacity to protect ourselves from risk leads to frustration with government - still seen as the primary g provider of safety in modem society and with ourselves, as a reflection of our own powerlessness in the face of the risks and harms that surround us. Yet, access to capital in one sphere - for instance. through income and of such a process is at work in contemporary society we might expect to see consequences in observed structure of outcomes both of risk and of risk avoidance. Even if we have little access to the decision making processes of individuals, and little chance of observing their pursuit of strategies of risk avoidance in their everyday lives, we may still be able to infer their operation from the observed structural patterns of risk. In this vein, this chapter essays an actuarial analysis of the distribution of the risk to private citizens of household property crime victimization in England and Wales, as measured by the British Crime Survey.

Judge must recognize their complicity in reinforcing beliefs which justify a continuation of racism. Wendy Brown Scott 99, professor of @ Tulane Law School in New Orleans Transformative
desegregation: liberating hearts and minds, 315 Judges and college and university faculty members, the majority of whom are white and male, must be willing to cross borders and divest their hearts and minds of the belief in the superiority of Western culture. As Arthur Schlesinger put it, judges must "face the shameful fact: historically America has been a racist nation."" Judges must see that they are steeped in the very traditions and values inculcated by Eurocentric curriculum, and that the incantation of neutrality is not sufficient to overcome their inherent biases." Then they can weigh their own traditions and values, which have historically denigrated or denounced difference, against traditionally subordinated concepts (such as multiculturalism and Afrocentrism) in order to determine whether the failure to include these perspectives in curricula violates the Constitution. In this same vein, bell hooks argues that not only must the black life experience be "decolonized," but that whites must be "decolonized" themselves.216 hooks describes the problem which requires decolonization: During that time of my life when racial apartheid forbid possibilities of intimacy and closeness with whites, I was most able to forget about the pain of racism----Close to white folks, I am forced to witness firsthand their willful ignorance about the impact of race and racism. The harsh absolutism of their denial. Their refusal to acknowledge accountability for racist conditions past and present217 She defines decolonization as the process of whites "unlearning white supremacy by divesting of white privilege" and blacks divesting of the "vestiges of internalized racism."211 Those vestiges include: the belief among white Americans, which perpetuates the exercise of white privilege, that they are not responsible for racism; their belief that black people should be feared and dreaded; the belief among black and white people that

Page 158 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

racism is intractable and permanent, and that no meaningful bonds of intimacy can be formed between blacks and whites and therefore, white supremacy should not be resisted; and the economic necessity of the repression of black rage directed toward whites.219 She states that "[t]he political process of decolonization is. . . a way for us to learn to see [one another more] clearly. It is the way to freedom for both colonized and colonizer."220

Apocalyptic predictions are constructed by alarmists to advance personal interests Kurasawa, Associate Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Social and Political Thought at
York University in Toronto, 2004 (Fuyuki Karasawa, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and The Work of Foresight, NM, http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Kurasawa%20Articles/Constellations %20Article.pdf) Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that transnational socio-political relations are nurturing a thriving culture and infrastructure of prevention from below, which challenges presumptions about the inscrutability of the future (II) and a stance of indifference toward it (III). Nonetheless, unless and until it is substantively filled in, the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since farsightedness does not in and of itself ensure emancipatory outcomes. Therefore, this section proposes to specify normative criteria and participatory procedures through which citizens can determine the reasonableness, legitimacy, and effectiveness of competing dystopian visions in order to arrive at a socially self-instituting future. Foremost among the possible distortions of farsightedness is alarmism, the manufacturing of unwarranted and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and market institutions may seek to produce a culture of fear by deliberately stretching interpretations of reality beyond the limits of the plausible so as to exaggerate the prospects of impending catastrophes, or yet again, by intentionally promoting certain prognoses over others for instrumental purposes. Accordingly, regressive dystopias can operate as Trojan horses advancing political agendas or commercial interests that would otherwise be susceptible to public scrutiny and opposition. Instances of this kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful: the invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an imminent threat of use of weapons of mass destruction; the severe curtailing of American civil liberties amidst fears of a collapse of homeland security; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state as the only remedy for an ideologically constructed fiscal crisis; the conservative expansion of policing and incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime waves; and so forth. Alarmism constructs and codes the future in particular ways, producing or reinforcing certain crisis narratives, belief structures, and rhetorical conventions. As much as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is no less true.

Predictions out of debate may be good, but in debate they should be held to a very low standard. The probability of one small political change from the status quo causing nuclear war or extinction is not only infinitesimal, its also ridiculous. Moral conscience precedes rational decision making decisions are based off a moral backdrop Bauman, Emeritus Prof of Sociology at the University of Leeds, 1993
(Zygmunt, Postmodern Ethics, 246-250)

the moral crisis of the postmodern habitat requires first and foremost that politics - whether the politics of the politicians or the policentric, scattered politics which matters all the more for being so elusive and beyond control _ be an extension and institutionalization of moral responsibility. Genuine moral issues of the highBut tech world are by and large beyond the reach of individuals (who, at best, may singly or severally purchase the right not to worry about them, or buy a temporary reprieve from suffering the effects of neglect). The effects of technology are long-distance, and so must be the preventive and remedial action. Hans Jonas's 'long-range ethics' makes sense, if at all, only as a political

Page 159 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

programme - though given the nature of the postmodern habitat, there is little hope that any political party competing for state power would be willing, suicidally, to endorse this truth and act upon it. Commenting on Edgar Allan Poe's story of three fishermen caught in the maelstrom, of whom two died paralysed with fear and doing nothing, but the third survived, having noticed that round objects are sucked into the abyss less quickly, and promptly jumping into a barrel - Norbert Elias sketched the way in which the exit from a nonexit situation may be plotted. The survivor, Elias suggests, began to think more coolly; and by standing back, by controlling his own fear, by seeing himself as it were from a distance, like a chessman forming a pattern with others -on a board, he managed to turn his thoughts away from himself to the situation in which he found himself... Symbolically representing in his mind the structure and direction of the flow of events, he discovered a way of escape. In that situation, the level of self-control and the level of process-control were ... interdependent and complemen tary.'s Let us note that Poe's cool and clever fisherman escaped alone. We do not know how many barrels there were left in the boat. And barrels, after all, have been known since Diogenes to be the ultimate individual retreats. The question is - and to this question private cunning offers no answer -- to what extent the techniques of individual survival (techniques by the way, amply provided for all present and future, genuine and putative maelstroms, by eager-tooblige-and-profit merchants of goods and counsels) can be stretched to-embrace the-collective survival.--The-maelstrom-of the kind we are in - all of us together, and most of us individually - is so frightening because of its tendency to break down the issue of common survival into a sackful of individual survival issues, and then to take the issue so pulverized off the political agenda. Can the process be retraced? Can that which has been broken be made whole again? And where to find an adhesive strong enough to keep it whole? If the successive chapters of this book suggest anything, it is that moral issues cannot be 'resolved', nor the moral life of humanity guaranteed, by the calculating and legislative efforts of

Morality is not safe in the hands of reason, though this is exactly what spokesmen of reason promise. Reason cannot help the moral self without depriving the self of what makes the self moral: that unfounded, non-rational, un-arguable, no-excuses-given and noncalculable urge to stretch towards the other, to caress, to be for, to live for, happen what may. Reason is about making correct decisions, while moral responsibility precedes all thinking about decisions as it does not, and cannot care about any logic which would allow the approval of an action as correct. Thus, morality can be `rationalized' only at the cost of self-denial and self attrition.
reason. From that reason assisted self-denial, the self emerges morally disarmed, unable (and unwilling) to face up to the multitude of moral challenges and cacophony of ethical prescriptions. At the far end of the long march of reason, moral nihilism waits: that moral nihilism which in its deepest essence means not the denial of binding ethical code, and not the blunders of relativistic theory - but the loss of ability to be moral. As far as the doubts in the ability of reason to legislate the morality of human cohabitation are concerned, the blame cannot be laid at the doorstep of the postmodern tendency to dismiss the orthodox philosophical programme. The most pronounced manifestations of programmatic or resigned - moral relativism can be found in the writings of thinkers who reject and resent postmodern verdicts and voice doubts as to the very existence of a postmodern perspective, let alone the validity of judgements allegedly passed from its vantage point. Apart from value-signs added (often as an afterthought), there is little to choose between ostensibly 'anti-postmodern, scientific recordings of the ways and means of `embedded selves', and the enough space and enough time. There is little disagreement between them as to the assumption authenticated by the long managerial efforts of modern times and the realities of the social habitat these efforts managed to produce - that in order to act morally the person must first be disowned of autonomy, whether by coercive or purchasable expertise; and as to another assumption (which also reflects the realities of the contemporary modee of life), that the roots of action are likely to be assessed as moral, and the criteria to assess the morality of acts, must be extrinsic to the actor. There is little difference between two ostensibly opposite standpoints in the way they disallow or neglect the possibility that it may be precisely the expropriation of moral prerogatives and the usurpation of moral competence by agencies extrinsic to the moral self (multiple agencies, contestant and combative, yet equally vociferous in their claims to ethical infallibility) which stand behind the stubborn unassailability of ethical relativism and moral nihilism. There is little reason to trust the assurances of the expropriating/ usurping agencies that the fate of morality is safe with them; there is little evidence that this has been the case thus far, and little encouragment can be derived from the scrutiny of their present work for the hope that this will be more of the case in the future. At the end of the ambitious modern project of universal moral certainty, of legislating the morality of and for human selves, of replacing the erratic and unreliable moral impulses with a socially underwritten ethical code - the bewildered and disoriented self finds itself alone in the face of moral dilemmas without good (let alone obvious) choices, unresolved moral conflicts and the

Fortunately for humanity (though not always for the moral self) .and despite all the expert efforts to the contrary, the moral conscience - that ultimate prompt of moral impulse and root of moral responsibility ---has.only been anaesthesized not amputated, It is still there, dormant perhaps, often stunned, sometimes shamed into silence - but capable of being awoken, of that Levinas's feat of sobering up from
excruciating difficulty of being moral. inebriated torpor. The moral conscience commands obedience without proof that the command should be obeyed; conscience can neither convince nor coerce. Conscience wields none of the weapons recognized by the modern world as insignia of authority. By the standards which support the modern world, conscience is weak. The proposition that conscience of the moral self is humanity's only warrant and hope may strike the modern mind as preposterous; if not presposterous, then portentous: what chance_ for a morality having conscience (already dismissed by the authority-conscious mind as fickle, `merely subjective', a freak) for its sole foundation? And yet.. . Summing up the moral lessons of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt demanded that

human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all these around them... These few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by... because no rules existed for the unprecedented." What we know for sure is that curing ostensible feebleness of moral conscience left
the moral self, as a rule, disarmed in the face of the `unanimous opinion of all these around them', and their elected or selfappointed spokesmen; while the power which that unanimous opinion wielded was in no way a guarantee of its ethical value. Knowing this, we have little choice but to place our bet on that conscience which, however wan, alone can instil the responsibility

Page 160 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

there is no contradiction between the rejection of (or scepticism towards) the ethics of socially conventionalized and rationally `founded' norms, and the insistence that it does matter, and matter morally, what we do and from what we desist. Far from excluding each other, the two can be accepted or rejected only together. If in doubt - consult your conscience.
for disobeying the command to do evil. Contrary to one of the most uncritically accepted philosophical axioms,

The quest for survival destroys all human values Callahan, director of The Hastings Institute, 73

Daniel Callahan, Co-founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in philosophy from Harvard University, The Tyranny of Survival 1973, p 91-93 There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for the sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland, to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress, or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny of survival as a value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values, Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing . We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life- then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival, without in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival? To put it more strongly , if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if, because human beings could not properly manage their need to survive, they succeeded in not doing so.

Utilitarianism inherently only favors a privileged few Liu PHD University of Pennsylvania 2000 (Dr. Liu, PHD @ University of Pennsylvania,
writes 2000 [Environmental Justice Analysis: theories, methods and practice, 2000 ISBN:1566704030, p.20-21])

Its quantifications techniques are far from being simple, straightforward, and objective . Indeed, they are often too
However, its strengths are also its weaknesses. complicated to be practical. They are also to flexible and subject to manipulation. They are impersonal and lack compassion. More importantly, they fail to deal the issue of equity and distributive justice. Seemingly, you cannot get fairer than this. In calculating benefits and costs, each person is counted as one and only one. IN other words, people are treated equally. For Mill, justice arises from the principle of utility. Utilitarianism in concerted

only the aggregate effect, no matter how the aggregate is distributed. For almost all policies, there is an uneven distribution of benefits and costs. Some people win, while others lose. The Pareto optimality would is almost nonexistent. A
policys outcome is Pareto optimal if nobody loses and at least one person gains.

Calculation reduces life to zero Dillon 99 (Michael, Professor of IR @ Lancaster, Another Justice Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2.
April, pp. 165)

Page 161 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability.3s Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure."

Utilitarianism causes species extinction Weber 93 [Darren Weber, post-doctoral fellow at UCSF, Environmental Ethics
and Species "To be or not to be?" November 1993 http://dnl.ucsf.edu/users /dweber/essays/env_tp2.pdf

A problem with utilitarian ethics is that the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number could entail that some species are disadvantaged or actively exterminated . Firstly, the utilitarian calculus of the greatest good for the greatest number is very difficult when it is restricted to humanit y. The present satisfaction of a portion of humanity, let alone all of humanity, is very difficult to evaluate and the different degrees of satisfaction to be had by various people from various sources of satisfaction is very difficult to predict, so
the determination of the greatest good for the greatest number after the distribution of limited resources is very, very difficult to evaluate. As applied to all sentient species, other than people. Secondly,

it is virtually impossible to evaluate, since it is very difficult to know the feelings of sentient animals utilitarianism can lead to significant inequalities in the distribution of limited

resources. For example, among a group of people with 50 units of satisfaction there could be a small group with about 80 units of satisfaction
satisfaction into 20 units of added value satisfaction.

and another larger group with about 40 units of satisfaction, since the small group have exclusive control of some equipment. According to utilitarianism, another 10 units of satisfaction should be distributed to the small group when it can use its equipment to transform 10 units of simple

Assuming that it is possible to know the feelings of sentient animals, a sentient species (e.g., a predator) that inflicts pain on another sentient species should be disadvantaged or extinguished when the satisfaction of that species is less than the satisfaction of the species that suffer pain. Thus, although the utilitarian principle may apply to all sentient species, the difficulties of utilitarianism are insurmountable or the inequalities implied by utilitarianism are likely to promote the extinction of species.

Utilitarianism is unsustainable advocates ultimately revert back to morals to make decisions Economic Analysis, Common-Sense Morality and Utilitarianism Author(s): J. Moreh Source: Erkenntnis (1975-), Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jul., 1992), pp. 115-143 Published by: Springer Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20012427 Accessed: 22/07/2009 13:24 Not only does Utilitarianism lack a device for reducing the infringement of its rules, but because its rules are very demanding, many utilitarian writers go in the opposite direction and accord moral agents some freedom in the implementation of its rules. According to Harsanyi (1985, p. 46) supererogation may be accommodated into Rule Utilitarianism by permitting the moral agent free choice between two acts A and B. The moral agent may carry out the act with the lower total utility as long as the difference between the ensuing utilities does not exceed a given amount (Cf. Scheffler's idea referred to below).10 Some utilitarian writers have advocated permissiveness following Williams's incisive criticism of Utilitarianism. According to Williams (1973) Utilitarianism is too demanding in that it fails to give adequate recognition to a person's own projects which give meaning to his life, and impose upon him responsibility for maximizing the good. Because of the need to make Utilitarianism more permissive, it would be contradictory to require that at the same time it be made more severe.

Prediction destroys human agency

Bleiker 2K
(Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland. Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics. 2000. Pub. Cambridge University Press)

Page 162 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The very notion of prediction does, by its own logic, annihilate human agency. To assert that international relations is a domain of political dynamics whose future should be predictable through a convincing set of theoretical propositions is to assume that the source of global politics is to a certain extent predetermined. From such a vantage-point, there is no more room for interference and human agency, no more possibility for politics to overtake theory. A predictive app roach thus runs the risk of ending up in a form of inquiry that imposes a static image upon a far more complex set of transversal political practices. The point of a theoretical inquiry, however, is not to ignore the constantly changing domain of internationals relations. Rather, the main objective must consists of facilitating and hindering of transversal struggles that can grapple with those moment when people walk through walls precisely when nobody expects them to do so. Prediction is a problematic assessment tool even if a theory is able to anticipate future events. Important theories, such as realist interpretations of international politics, may well predict certain events only because their theoretical premises have become so objectivised that they have started to shape decision makers and political dynamics. Dissent, in this case, is the process that reshapes these entrenched perceptions and the ensuing political practices. Describing, explaining and prescribing may be less unproblematic processes of evaluation, but only at first sight. If one abandons the notion of Truth, the idea that an event can be apprehended as part of a natural order, authentically and scientifically, as something that exists independently of the meaning we have given it if one abandons this separation of object and subject, then the process of judging a particular approach to describing and explaining an event becomes a very muddles affair. There is no longer an objective measuring device that can set the standard to evaluate whether or not a particular insight into an event, such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, is true or false. The very nature of a past event becomes indeterminate insofar as its identification is dependent upon ever-changing forms of linguistic expression that imbue the event with meaning. 56

Utilitarianism = Killing Saving lives isnt enough of a justification for actions Utilitarianism justifies the killing of the minority in order to save the majority Normative Ethics by Shelley Kagan, Westview Press 1997, Page 61, http://books.google.com/books?
id=YllnYJ9R0q0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=deontology+vs.+consequentialism&client=firefoxa&source=gbs_similarbooks_s&cad=1

Page 163 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Page 164 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The calculation of utilitarianism is the foundation of totalitarianism

George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 11

I do not mean to take seriously the idea that utilitarianism is a satisfactory replacement for the theory of rights. The well-being (or mere preferences) of the majority cannot override the rightful claims of individuals. In a time when the theory of rights is global it is noteworthy that some moral philosophers disparage the theory of rights. The political experience of this century should be enough to make them hesitate: it is not clear that, say, some version of utilitarianism could not justify totalitarian evil. It also could be fairly easy for some utilitarians to justify any war and any dictatorship, and very easy to justify any kind of ruthless-ness even in societies that pay some attention to rights. There is no end to the immoral permissions that one or another type of utilitarianism grants. Everything is permitted, if the calculation is right. No, an advocate of rights cannot take utilitarianism seriously as a competing general theory of political morality, nor any other competing general theory. Rather, particular principles or considerations must be given a place. A theory of rights may simply leave many decisions undetermined or have to admit that rights may have to be overridden (but never for the sake of Social well-being or mere policy preference). Also, kinds of rights may sometimes conflict, and it is not always possible to end that conflict either by an elaboration of the theory of rights or by an appeal to some other Every alternative to rights leads to tyranny George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 5 At the same time, there are other theories that seem to affirm human dignity yet give rights only a lesser or probationary or instrumental role. Examples are utilitarianism, recent communitarianism, recent republicanism, and radical egalitarianism. The first and last 1 will return to shortly; my response to the others appears here and there in this volume. (All I wish to say now is that unless rights come first they are not rights. They will tend to be sacrificed to some purpose deemed higher than the equal dignity of every individual. There will be little if any concept of the integrity or inviolability of each individual. The group or the majority or the good or the sacred or the vague future will be preferred. The beneficiaries will be victimized along with the victims because no one is being treated as a person who is irreplaceable and beyond value. To make rights anything but primary, even though in the name of human dignity, is to injure human dignity. Government coercion must be morally rejected Dr. Edward Younkins, business professor, Wheeling Jesuit, CIVIL SOCIETY: THE REALM OF FREEDOM, June 10, 2000, p. http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000610-11.htm Recently (and ironically), government projects and programs have been started to restore civil society through state subsidization or coercive mandates. Such coercion cannot create true voluntary associations. Statists who support such projects believe only in the power of political society they don't realize that the subsidized or mandated activity can be performed voluntarily through the private interaction of individuals and associations. They also don't understand that to propose that an activity not be performed coercively, is not to oppose the activity, but simply its coercion. If civil society is to be revived, we must substitute voluntary cooperation for coercion and replace mandates with the rule of law. According to the Cato Handbook for Congress, Congress should: before trying to institute a government program to solve a problem, investigate whether there is some other government program that is causing the problem ... and, if such a program is identified, begin to reform or eliminate it; ask by what legal authority in the Constitution Congress undertakes an action ...; recognize that when government undertakes a program, it displaces the voluntary efforts of others and makes voluntary association in civil society appear redundant, with significant negative effects; and begin systematically to abolish or phase out those government programs that do what could be accomplished by voluntary associations in civil society ... recognizing that accomplishment through free association is morally superior to coercive mandates, and almost always generates more efficient outcomes. Every time taxes are raised, another regulation is passed, or another government program is adopted, we are acknowledging the inability of individuals to govern themselves. It follows that there is a moral imperative for us to reclaim our

Page 165 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

right to live in a civil society, rather than to have bureaucrats and politicians solve our problems and run our lives.

Consequentialism, by very nature, will fail in public policy to improve the well-being of others Scheffler, prof philosophy, Princeton, 94

(Samuel Scheffler, prof philosophy, Princeton, 11/24/94, The Rejection of Consequentialism, p. 14-16, http://books.google.com/books? hl=en&lr=&id=M95w6e9pzZsC&oi=fnd&pg=PA14&dq=reject+consequentialism&ots=hbQFBohbTL&sig =VgDh7pP6sAhJ1IKGaBA3BW7hi1Y) I will maintain shortly that a hybrid theory which departed from consequentialism only to the extent of incorporating an agent-centred prerogative could accommodate the objection dealing with personal integrity. But first it is necessary to give fuller characterization of a plausible prerogative of this kind. To avoid confusion, it is important to make a sharp distinction at the outset between an agent-centred prerogative and a consequentialist dispensation to

devote more attention to ones own happiness and well-being than to the happiness and well-being of others . Consequentialists often argue that a differential attention to ones own concerns will in most actual circumstances have the best overall results, and that such differential treatment of oneself is therefore required on consequentialist grounds. Two sorts of considerations are typically
appealed to in support of this view. First, it is said that one is in a better position to promote ones own welfare and the welfare of those one is closest to than to promote the welfare of other people. So an agent produces maximum good per unit of activity by focusing his efforts on those he is closest to, including himself. Second, it is said that human nature being what it is, people cannot function effectively at all unless they devote somewhat more energy to promoting their own well-being than to promoting the well-being of other people. Here the appeal is no longer to the immediate consequantialist advantages of promoting ones own well-being, but rather to the long-term advantages of having psychologically healthy agents who are efficient producers of the good. We find an example of the first type of argument in Sidgwicks remark that each man is better able to provide for his own happiness than for that of other persons, from his more intimate knowledge of his own desires and needs, and his greater opportunities of gratifying them. Mill, in the same vein, writes that the occasions on which any person (except one in a thousand) has it in his power to be a public benefactor are but exceptional; and on these occasions alone is he called on to consider public utility; in every other case, private utility, the interest or happiness of some few persons, is all he has to attend to. Sidgwick suggests an argument of the second type when he says that because it is under the stimulus of self-interest that the active energies of most men are most easily and thoroughly drawn out, it would not under actual circumstances promote the universal happiness if each man were to concern himself with the happiness of others as much as with his own.

Consequentialism is based on the greater good, not on self-interests Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, 84
(Philosophy and Public Affairs, Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer, 1984), pp. 239-254 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2265413.pdf) Consequentialism claims that an act is morally permissible if and only if it has better consequences than those of any available alternative act. This means that agents are morally required to make their largest possible contribution to the overall good- no matter what the sacrifice to them- selves might involve (remembering only that their own well-being counts too). There is no limit to the sacrifices that morality can require; and agents are never permitted to

favor their own interests at the expense of the greater good.

Page 166 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

There is a limit to what morality can require for us, which consequentialism fails to incorporate Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, 84
(Philosophy and Public Affairs, Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer, 1984), pp. 239-254 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2265413.pdf) Our ordinary moral intuitions rebel at this picture. We want to claim that there is a limit to what

morality can require of us. Some sacrifices for the sake of others are meritorious, but not required; they are super- erogatory. Common morality grants the agent some room to pursue his own
projects, even though other actions might have better consequences: we are permitted to promote the good, but we are not required to do so. The objection that consequentialism demands too much is accepted uncritically by almost all of us; most moral philosophers introduce per- mission to perform nonoptimal acts without even a word in its defense. But the mere fact that our intuitions support some moral feature hardly constitutes in itself adequate philosophical justification. If we are to go beyond mere intuition mongering, we must search for

deeper foundations. We must display the reasons for limiting the requirement to pursue the good.

Consequentialism can result in sacrifices on some for the sake of others Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, 84
(Philosophy and Public Affairs, Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer, 1984), pp. 239-254 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2265413.pdf) Furthermore, discussions of the claim that consequentialism demands too much are often undermined by failure to distinguish this claim from the widely discussed objection that

consequentialism permits too much- improperly permitting sacrifices to be imposed on some for the sake of others. Some theories include deontological restrictions, forbidding certain kinds of acts even when the consequences would be good. I will not consider here the merits of such restrictions. It is important to note,
however, that even a theory which included such restrictions might still lack more general permission to act nonoptimally-requiring agents to promote the good within the pennissible means. It is only the grounds for rejecting such a general requirement to promote the overall good that we will examine here.

Utilitarianism cant address the issues of equity and distributive justice Liu PHD University of Pennsylvania 2000 (Dr. Liu, PHD @ University of Pennsylvania, writes 2000 [Environmental Justice Analysis: theories, methods and practice, 2000 ISBN:1566704030, p.20-21]) Its quantifications techniques are far from being simple, straightforward, and objective . Indeed, they are often too
However, its strengths are also its weaknesses. complicated to be practical. They are also to flexible and subject to manipulation. They are impersonal and lack compassion. More importantly, they fail to deal the issue of equity and distributive justice. Seemingly, you cannot get fairer than this. In calculating benefits and costs, each person is counted as one and only one. IN other words, people are treated equally. For Mill, justice arises from the principle of utility. Utilitarianism in concerted

only the aggregate effect, no matter how the aggregate is distributed. For almost all policies, there is an uneven distribution of benefits and costs. Some people win, while others lose. The Pareto optimality would is almost nonexistent. A
policys outcome is Pareto optimal if nobody loses and at least one person gains.

Page 167 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Utilitarianism policies result in inequality Liu PHD University of Pennsylvania 2000 (Dr. Liu, PHD @ University of Pennsylvania, writes 2000 [Environmental Justice Analysis: theories, methods and practice, 2000 ISBN:1566704030, p.20-21])
Besides these ridiculous policy implications in the United States and in the world, the logic underlying Summers proposal represents cultural imperialism, the capitalist mode of production and consumption, and a particular kind of political-economic power and its discriminatory practices (Harvey 1996:368). Except for its beautiful guise of economic logic, the proposal is nothing new to those familiar with the history. The capitalistic powerhouses in Europe practiced material and cultural imperialism against countries in Africa, America, and Asia for years. They did it by raising the banner of trade and welfare enhancement. They did it through guns and powder. Of course, they had their logic for exporting opium to Canton (Guangzhou) in China through force. Now, we see a new logic. This time, it is economic logic and globalization. This time, the end is the same, but the means is not through guns and powder. Instead, it is political-economic power. This example illustrates clearly the danger of using the utilitarian perspective as the only means for policy analysis. Fundamentally, the

utilitarian disregards the distributive justice issue altogether and espouses the current mode of production and consumption and the political-economic structure, without any attention to the inequity and inequality in the current system. Even worse and more subtly, it delivers the philosophy of it exists, therefore its good. However, just because it sells, doesnt mean we have to worship it
(Peirce 1991).

Utilitarian thinking results in mass murder Cleveland Professor of Business Administration and Economics 2002 (Cleveland
2002 Paul A., Professor of Business Administration and Economics at Birmingham-Southern College, The Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy, The Journal of Private Enterprise, http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1602) A final problem with utilitarianism that ought to be mentioned is that it is subject to being criticized because of a potential fallacy of composition. The common good is not necessarily the sum of the interests of individuals. In their book, A History of Economic Theory and Method , Ekelund and Hebert provide a well-conceived example to demonstrate this problem. They write: It is presumably in the general interest of American society to have every automobile in the United States equipped with all possible safety devices. However, a majority of individual car buyers may not be willing to pay the cost of such equipment in the form of higher auto prices. In this case, the collective interest does not coincide with the sum of the

individual interests. The result is a legislative and economic dilemma. Indeed, individuals prone to political action, and held under the sway of utilitarian ethics, will likely be willing to decide in favor of the supposed collective interest over and against that of the individual. But then, what happens to individual human rights? Are they not sacrificed and set aside as unimportant? In fact, this is precisely what has happened. In democratic countries the destruction of human
liberty that has taken place in the past hundred years has occurred primarily for this reason. In addition, such thinking largely served as the justification for the mass murders of

millions of innocent people in communist countries where the leaders sought to establish the workers paradise. To put the matter simply, utilitarianism offers no cohesive way to discern between the various factions competing against one another in political debates and thus fails to provide an adequate guide for ethical human action . The failure of utilitarianism at this point is extremely
important for a whole host of policy issues. Among them, the issue of the governments provision of public goods is worth our consideration.

Page 168 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Utilitarianism is used to justify mass murder by governments Cleveland, Professor of Business Administration and Economics 2002 (Cleveland
2002 Paul A., Professor of Business Administration and Economics at Birmingham-Southern College, The Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy, The Journal of Private Enterprise, http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1602)
Indeed, the widespread confusion over this point is one of the primary reasons why western market economies have continued to drift towards the ready acceptance of socialist policies. Edmund Opitz has rightly observed that utilitarianism with its greatest happiness principle completely neglects the spiritual dimension of human life. Rather, it simply asserts that men are bound together in societies solely on the basis of a rational calculation of the private advantage to be gained by social cooperation under the division of labor. [2] But, as Opitz shows, this perspective gives

the utilitarian principle will tend to lead to the collective use of government power so as to redistribute income in order to gain the greatest happiness in society. Regrettably, the rent seeking behavior that is spawned as a result of this mind set will prove detrimental to the economy. Nevertheless, this kind of action will be justified as that which is most socially expedient in order to reach the assumed ethical end. Utilitarianism, in short, has no logical stopping place short of collectivism.[3] If morality is ultimately had by making the individuals happiness subservient to the organic whole of society , which is what Benthams utilitarianism asserts, then the human rights of the individual may be violated . That
rise to a serious problem. Since theft is the first labor saving device ,

means property rights may be violated if it is assumed to promote the utilitarian end. However, property rights are essential in securing a free market order. As a result , utilitarianism can then

be used to justify some heinous government actions. For instance, the murder of millions of human beings can be justified in the minds of reformers if it is thought to move us closer to paradise on earth. This is precisely the view that was taken by communist revolutionaries as they implemented their grand schemes of remaking society. All of this is not to say that matters of utility are
unimportant in policy decisions, but merely to assert that utilitarian ethics will have the tendency of promoting collectivist policies.

Medical utilitarian calculus ensures human dehumanization and annihilation Smith 2002 (Michael G Smith 2002, Leadership University, The Public Policy of Casey V. Planned Parenthood http://www.leaderu.com/humanities/casey/ch3.html)
Furthermore, abandoning the principle of human equality could lead to eugenics because eugenics is founded on the same philosophy that some people are of lesser value than others. Eugenics is founded on the utilitarian philosophy of German philosopher Hegel. Utilitarianism, also known as pragmatism, holds that "the end justifies the means." If a

means provides a solution to a practical problem, it is morally justifiable.{86} The Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany saw a problem in the existence of Jews, Gypsies, and mentally and physically handicapped people, was founded on Hegels pragmatic philosophy.{87} C.G. Campbell,{88} President of the American Eugenics Society
Inc. in 1931{89} has written: "Adolf Hitler ... guided by the nation's anthropologists, eugenicists and social philosophers, has been able to construct a comprehensive racial policy of population development and improvement ... it sets a pattern ... these ideas have met stout opposition in the Rousseauian social philosophy ... which bases ... its whole social and political theory upon the patent fallacy of human equality ... racial consanguinity occurs only through endogamous mating or interbreeding within racial stock ... conditions under which racial groups of distinctly superior hereditary qualities ... have emerged." (Emphasis added).{90} Mr. Campbell, a leader in the

eugenics movement,{91} has clearly rejected the idea of human equality. This rejection helped pave the way toward intellectual acceptance of Nazi Germanys

Page 169 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

"Final Solution." and has helped pave the way toward Americas final solution to problem
pregnancy. "Nazi Germany used the findings of eugenicists as the basis for the killing of people of inferior genetic stock."{92} Another leader in the eugenics movement, Madison Grant,{93} connected the purported inequality of the unborn to the goals of the eugenics movement. "...Indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often results in serious injury to the race ... Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community" (Emphasis added).{94} As recently as six years ago, two medical ethicists, Kuhse and Singer, have argued that no human being has any right to life.{95} Using a utilitarian approach, they have concluded that

"mentally defective" people, unborn people, and even children before their first birthday, have no right to life because these people are not in full possession of their faculties.{96} These utilitarian authors are fully consistent with other utilitarians in that they first reject the principle that are humans have equal moral status, then, using subjective criteria that appeals to themselves personally, they identify certain humans they find expendable. While Kuhse and Singer may be personally
comfortable with their conclusions, this approach leaves all of us less than secure from being dehumanized. If newborn infants can be found to lack equal moral status, then surely there are other innocent and vulnerable member of society who can be similarly found to lack equal moral status. The Nazis left few people in Germany safe from the gas chambers, and any other society that uses utilitarianism in medical ethics also leaves great portions of society at risk of death at the convenience of society at large. Clearly, the equal moral status of all humans must be recognized by the law.

Utilitarianism takes away all value to live Cleveland Professor of Business Administration and Economics 2002 (Cleveland
2002 Paul A., Professor of Business Administration and Economics at Birmingham-Southern College, The Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy, The Journal of Private Enterprise, http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1602)

utilitarianism is that it has a very narrow conception of what it means to be a human being. Within Benthams view, human beings are essentially understood to be passive creatures who respond to the environment in a purely mechanical fashion. As such, there are no bad motives, only bad calculations. In these terms, no person is responsible for his or her own behavior. In effect, the idea being promoted is that human action is essentially the same as that of a machine in operation. This notion reduces a human thought to nothing more than a series of bio-chemical reactions. Yet, if this is true, then there is no meaning to human thought or human action and all human reason is reduced to the point of being meaningless.[6]
Another problem with

Rights incompatible with utilitarianism. Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992 Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press. Pg 196.
The first thing to notice is that utilitarianism is a general normative theory either about what is desirable, or about what conduct is morally right, but in the first instance not a theory of rights at all, except by implication. A philosopher can be a utilitarian without offering any definition of "a right" and indeed without having thought about the matter. It is true that some definitions of "a right" are so manifestly incompatible with the normative theses of utilitarianism that it is clear that a utilitarian could not admit that there are rights in that sense. For instance, if someone says that to have a right (life, liberty) is for some sort of thing to be

Page 170 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

secured to one absolutely, though the heavens fall, and that this is a self-evident truth, then it is pretty clear that a utilitarian will have no place for rights in his sense. Again, if one follows Hobbes and says, "Neither by the word right is anything else signified, than that liberty which every man hath to make use of his natural faculties according to right reason," one is not going to be able to accept a utilitarian normative theory , for a utilitarian is not going to underwrite a man's absolute liberty to pursue his own good according to his own judgment.

Util ignores fundamental rights and creates a slippery slope until rights lose all significance

Bentley 2k [ Kristina A. Bentley graduate of the Department of government at the University of Manchester. Suggesting A Separate Approach To Utility and Rights: Deontological Specification and Teleogical Enforcement of Human Rights, September. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/pir/postgrad/vol1_issue3/issue3_article1.pdf] Utilitarian theories usually present the view that they are capable of accommodating the idea of legal rights, as well as providing a normative theory about such rights, which Lyons calls the legal rights inclusion thesis (Lyons, 1994: 150). On the other hand however, utilitarian theorists are sceptical of the idea of moral rights unsupported by legal institutions, as such rights would then in certain circumstances preclude the pursuit of the most utile course of action owing to their moral force, or normative force (Lyons, 1994: 150). Conversely, legal rights are seen as being compatible with utilitarian goals as they are normatively neutral, being morally defensible (which entails the idea of a moral presumption in favour of respecting them) only in so a far as they contribute to overall utility (Lyons, 1994: 150). The problem then, as conceived by Lyons, is whether or not utilitarians can account for the moral force of legal rights (which people are commonly regarded as having by rights theorists and utilitarians alike), as: although there are often utilitarian reasons for respecting justified legal rights, these reasons are not equivalent to the moral force of such rights, because they do not exclude direct utilitarian arguments against exercising such rights or for interfering with them (Lyons, 1994: 150). This being the case, the utilitarian finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why rights ought to be bothered with at all, as if they may be violated on an ad hoc basis to satisfy the demands of maximal utility, then they seem as confusing on this scheme as natural or moral rights are claimed to be. This then raises the question as to whether or not utilitarianism can accommodate any rights at all, even legal rights as its exponents claim it is able to do, in its rule formulation at least. However, leaving this debate aside as it exceeds the scope of this paper, an alternative approach, that of government house utilitarianism (see Goodin, 1995: 27) is worth considering as a possible means to a solution.

Morality is complex Blanket claims that we need to save people in poverty prevent us from making rational choices Stubbs, 81
(Anne, @ the U of Combridge, "The Pros and Cons of Consequentialism," Oct, Philosophy, Vol. 56, No. 218 (Oct., 1981), pp. 497-516, jstor, AD: 6/30/09) jl There is a common criticism of absolutism which, if sound, could be taken to demonstrate its irrationality. It is that the absolutist refuses to consider the details of particular cases and insists instead on the automatic application of a blanket rule; he thus fails, it is said, to 'take each case on its merits'. Now there may be absolutist positions which are vulnerable to this kind of objection; for example, the position that one is never justified in taking a human life, whatever the circumstances. Someone might reasonably object that there are moral distinctions to be made over which this view simply rides rough-shod. Someone may kill a fellow human being in many different circumstances and for many different reasons; for personal gain of some kind; to put a

Page 171 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

loved one out of his misery; in self-defence; in just war or revolution; as retribution; and so on. Surely it would be irrational, if not absurd, to insist on making the same moral judgment about all these cases. However, even if this is correct, it is a count against only some absolutist positions, not against all. It is commonly assumed that the absolutist must operate with some highly general, exceptionless rules; but this is not an accurate picture of the kind of absolutism of which I have been speaking throughout this paper. I have spoken, not so much of moral rules, but of specific moral notions, concepts, or categories-murder, courage, cowardice, honesty, loyalty, etc.; and I have maintained that these operate as fundamental in moral assessment, in the sense that their applicability to a particular action will often be morally decisive, and, for some of them, will always be so.14 Let us consider the example of murder, which is a notion the applicability of which to an action is always morally decisive. My absolutist claims, not that killing can never be justified, but that murder can never be justified; and he will not classify all cases of killing as cases of murder. Thus it is simply not true that he does not have to investigate the details of a particular case; indeed it is only through such an investigation that he can be in a position to decide whether or not the action in question is properly classifiable as 'murder'. Further-more, he will take into account many features of the situation not con-sidered relevant by the consequentialist, for example, the agent's motive for the killing. Indeed, it could be maintained that the consequentialist's claim to consider each case 'on its merits' is vitiated by his extremely restricted conception of where these merits must lie. I maintain that it is he, with his exclusive concentration upon consequences, who abstracts from morally relevant features of particular cases. Again, this is a point to which I will return. Thus, if readiness to pay attention to the details of individual cases be a test of rationality, my absolutist passes it with his colours flying rather more conspicuously than those of the supporters of consequentialism; they, after all, have theformula.

Page 172 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The utilitarian viewpoint is flawed. It is impossible for society to be viewed as a single

entity without sacrificing the human dignity of the individual. Will Kymlicka, 1988 (Prof. of Philosophy at Queens U, Press, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 3., pp. 172-190, Rawls on Technology and Deontology JSTOR)
According to Rawls, then, the debate over distribution is essentially a debate over whether we should or should not define the right as maximizing the good. But is this an accurate characterization of the debate? Utilitarians do, of course, believe that the right act maximizes happiness, under some description of that good. And that requirement does have potentially abhorrent consequences. But do utilitarians believe that it is right because it maximizes happiness? Do they hold that the maximization of the good defines the right, as teleological theories are said to do? Let us see why Rawls believes they do. Rawls says that utilitarianism is teleological (that is, defines the right as the maximization of the good) because it generalizes from what is rational in the oneperson case to what is rational in many-person cases. Since it is rational for me to sacrifice my present happiness to increase my later happiness if doing so will maximize my happiness overall, it is rational for society to sacrifice my current happiness to increase someone else's happiness if doing so maximizes social welfare overall. For utilitarians, utility-maximizing acts are right because they are maximizing. It is because they are maximizing that they are rational. Rawls objects to this generalization from the one-person to the many person case because he believes that it ignores the separateness of persons.? Although it is right

and proper that I sacrifice my present happiness for my later happiness if doing so will increase my overall happiness, it is wrong to demand that I sacrifice my present happiness to increase someone else's happiness. In the first case, the trade-off occurs within one person's life, and the later happiness compensates for my current sacrifice. In the second case, the trade-off occurs across lives, and I am not compensated for my sacrifice by the fact that someone else benefits. My good has simply been sacrificed, and I have been used as a means to someone else's 2. John Rawls, A Theory ofJz~stice(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, rg71), p. 31 3. Ibid., p. 27. Philosophy G Public Affairs happiness. Trade-offs that make sense within a life are wrong and unfair across lives. Utilitarians obscure this point by ignoring the fact that separate people are involved. They treat society as though it were an individual, as a single organism, with its own interests, so that trade-offs between one person and another appear as legitimate trade-offs within the social organism.

Utilitarians view society as a single entity, which devalues the rights and human dignity of
the individual. Will Kymlicka, 1988 (Prof. of Philosophy at Queens U, Press, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 3., pp. 172-190, Rawls on Technology and Deontology JSTOR) Scott Gordon echoes this interpretation of utilitarianism when he says that utilitarians adopt the view "that 'society' is an organic entity and contend that its utility is the proper objective of social policy." This view, he says, "permits flirtation with the grossest form of anti-individualistic social philosophy."4 This, then, is Rawls's major example of a "teleological" theory which gives priority to the good over the right. His rejection of the priority of the good, in this context, is just the corollary of his affirmation of the separateness of persons: promoting the well-being of the social organism cannot be the goal from which people's rightful claims are derived, since there is no socialorganism. Since individuals are distinct, they are ends in themselves, not merely agents or representatives of the well-being of the social organism. This is why Rawls believes that utilitarianism is teleological, and why he believes that we should reject it in favor of a deontological doctrine.

Utilitarianism views people as locations of utilities, whose purpose is to bring good to the
whole, even if that entails the lower standard or life for the individual. Will Kymlicka, 1988 (Prof. of Philosophy at Queens U, Press, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 3., pp. 172-190, Rawls on Technology and Deontology JSTOR) There is, however, another interpretation of utilitarianism, one that seems more in line with Rawls's characterization of the debate. On this second interpretation, maximizing the good is primary, and we

Page 173 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

count individuals equally only because that maximizes value. Our primary duty is not to treat people as equals, but to bring about valuable states of affairs. Rawls on Teleology and Deontology As Bernard Williams puts it, people are viewed merely as locations of utilities, or as causal levers for the "utility network": "the basic bearer of value for Utilitarianism is the state of affairs. . . . as a Utilitarian agent, I am just the representative of the satisfaction system who happens to be near
certain causal levers at a certain time."Io Utilitarianism, on this view, is primarily concerned not with persons, but with states of affairs. This second interpretation is not merely a matter of emphasizing a different facet of the same theoretical structure. Its distinctiveness becomes clear if we look at some utilitarian discussions of population policy, like those of Jonathan Glover and Derek Parfit. They ask whether we morally ought to double the population, even if it means reducing each person's welfare by almost half (since that will still increase overall utility). They think that a policy of doubling the population is a genuine, if somewhat repugnant, conclusion of utilitarianism. But it need not be if we view utilitarianism as a theory of treating people as equals. Nonexistent people have no claims-we have no moral duty to them to bring them into the world. As John Broome says, "one cannot owe anyone a duty to bring her into existence, because failing in such a duty would not be failing anyone."" So what is the

duty here, on the second interpretation? The duty is to maximize value, to bring about valuable states of affairs, even if the effect is to make all existing persons worse off than they otherwise would have been. To put the difference another way, if I fail to bring about the best state of affairs, by failing

to consider the interests of some group of people, for example, then I can be criticized, on both interpretations, for failing to live up to my moral duty as a utilitarian. But, on the second interpretation, those whose interests are neglected have no special grievance against me.

Adapting the consequentialist viewpoint justifies the deaths of millions of innocents in

order to bring about an ends. Thomas Donaldson, 1995 (Prof. of Business Ethics at Georgetown U, Ethics and International Affairs, International Deontology Defended: A Response to Russell Hardin, pg. 147-154)
The supposed unrealism of deontology also seems to lie behind Hardins concerns over nuclear deterrence. After noting that Kantians typically have condemned the indiscriminate destruction implicit in a policy of deterrence, he adds that it therefore seemed [to Kantians] profoundly immoral to destroy cities full of children merely for the sake of the theory of deterrence. The word seemed is surprising. Shouldnt most people, not only Kantians, be appalled by the prospect of destroying cities full of children? To not be appalled, I submit, is the result of either having been swept away by the morality of consequences or having studied too much political science. It is noteworthy that the reason we are appalled relies on a Kantian-style explanation . If we

were to adopt an exclusive consequentialist view, if the ends were always capable of justifying the means, then the death of millions of innocents should be trivialmere fluff in the face of moral truth. The idea that there are some things that should not be done is precisely a deontological notion. The idea that, no matter how powerful a deterrent it may be, the strapping of babies to the front of tanks is nonetheless wrong, cannot be understood entirely in consequentialist terms. It does not follow that the policy of nuclear deterrence is wrong from the viewpoint of
deontology. Some deontologists accept nuclear deterrence while others do not. But deontologists insist correctly that not only the assessment of the consequences, but an assessment of the means used to achieve consequences, must be factored into the moral evaluation of nuclear deterrence.

Utilitarianism taken alone allows unjustified war; full weight must be given to
deontological analysis in order to achieve the best policy option. Eric Heinze in 99 (assistant prof. of polisci @ University of Oklahoma, Human Rights & Human Welfare, Waging War for Human Rights: Towards a Moral-Legal Theory of Humanitarian Intervention, http://www.du.edu/gsis/hrhw/volumes/2003/heinze-2003.pdf, p. 5) By itself, this utilitarianism of rights test has serious problems when employed as a threshold level of human suffering that triggers a humanitarian intervention. This is because it suggests that aggregate human suffering is the only moral concern that should be addressed (Montaldi 1985: 135). If we are to accept the general presumption against war as enshrined in Article 2 of the UN Charter, we do so because of wars inherent destructiveness and its detrimental effect on international security. The use of force, including humanitarian intervention, will always result in at least some loss of life. The principle of utility ameliorates this effect of intervention, but once an intervention is employed to halt such widespread suffering, a pure utilitarian ethos would sanction the pursuit of this primary end (achieving the military and/or humanitarian objective) without exception, so long as fewer people are killed than are rescued in an intervention. Not only does this reduce the moral relevance of the individual, it opens up the door for aggression disguised as humanitarian intervention, as

Page 174 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

long as there are individuals who are suffering and dying within a stateeven if their suffering is entirely accidental. Taken as part and parcel of the utilitarian framework, therefore, military intervention must only be sanctioned when it is in response to violations that are intentionally perpetrated Thus, as Fernando Tesn eloquently explains in his chapter, The Liberal Case for Humanitarian Intervention, the best case for humanitarian intervention contains a deontological elementthat is, a principled concern for the respectful treatment of individuals (not intentionally or maliciously mistreating them)as well as a consequentialist onethe utilitarian requirement that interventions cause more good than harm (Holzgrefe and Keohane: 114). Consider NATOs intervention in Kosovo, where a significant number of Serbian civilians were killed by NATO bombs in the process of coercing the Milosevic regime to stop its ethnic cleansing of Kosovars. Regardless of whether more lives were saved than lost, in accidentally killing noncombatants, NATO was in essence accepting the notion that human rights are not absolute. This is despite the fact that such killing was done in order to save the lives of other innocent civilians.

Policy decisions directed at maintaining human survival through whatever means will encourage genocide, war, and the destruction of moral values
Callahan 73 Co-Founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in philosophy from Harvard University (Daniel, The Tyranny of Survival, p 9193)

the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The

survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of
South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is

The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for surviva l. For Jacques Monod,
not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-

is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress . It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and
control policies. For all these reasons it manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human

potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive single-mindedness that will stop at nothing. We
rights and values. The come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to lifethen how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories. Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if, because human beings could not properly manage their need to survive, they succeeded in not doing so.

Page 175 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and perpetuates societal inequality by evaluating utility as a whole
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

The inclusion of all sentient beings in the calculation of interests severely undermines the force of any claim that utilitarianism is an "egalitarian" doctrine, based in some notion of equal concern and respect for persons. But let us assume Kymlicka can restore his thesis by
insisting that it concerns, not utilitarianism as a general moral doctrine, but as a more limited thesis about political morality. (Here I pass over the fact that none of the utilitarians he relies on to support his egalitarian interpretation construe the doctrine as

utilitarianism is not seen as a political doctrine, to be appealed to by legislators and citizens, but a nonpublic criterion of right that is indirectly applied [by whom is a separate issue] to assess the nonutilitarian public political conception of justice.) Still, let us assume it is as a doctrine of political morality that utilitarianism treats persons, and only persons, as equals. Even in this form it cannot be that maximizing utility is "not a goal" but a "by-product," "entirely derived from the prior requirement to treat people with equal consideration" (CPP, p. 31) Kymlicka says, "If utilitarianism is
purely political. The drift of modern utilitarian theory is just the other way:

best seen as an egalitarian doctrine, then there is no independent commitment to the idea of maximizing welfare" (CPP, p. 35, emphases added). But how can this be? (i) What is there about the formal principle of equal consideration (or for that matter occupying a universal point of view) which would imply that we maximize the aggregate of individuals' welfare? Why not assume, for example, that equal consideration requires maximizing the division of welfare (strict equality, or however equal division is to be construed); or, at least maximize the multiple (which would result in more equitable distributions than the aggregate)? Or, why not suppose equal consideration requires equal proportionate satisfaction of each person's interests (by for example, determining our resources and then satisfying some set percentage of each person's desires) . Or finally we might rely on some Paretian principle: equal consideration means adopting measures making no one worse off. For reasons I shall soon discuss, each of these

the utilitarian aggregative method, which in effect collapses distinctions among persons. (2) Moreover, rather than construing
rules is a better explication of equal consideration of each person's interests than is

individuals' "interests" as their actual (or rational) desires, and then putting them all on a par and measuring according to intensity, why not construe their interests lexically, in terms of a hierarchy of wants, where certain interests are, to use Scanlon's terms, more "urgent" than others, insofar as they are more basic needs? Equal consideration would then rule out satisfying less urgent interests of the majority of people until all means have been taken to satisfy everyone's more basic needs. (3) Finally, what is there about equal consideration, by itself, that requires maximizing anything? Why does it not require, as in David Gauthier's view, optimizing constraints on individual utility maximization? Or why does it not require sharing a distribution? The point is just that,

to say we ought to give equal consideration to everyone's interests does not, by itself, imply much of anything about how we ought to proceed or what we ought to do. It is a purely formal principle , which requires certain added, independent assumptions, to yield any substantive conclusions. That (i) utilitarian procedures maximize is not a "by-product" of equal consideration. It stems from a particular conception of rationality that is explicitly incorporated into the procedure. That (2) individuals' interests are construed in terms of their (rational) desires or preferences, all of which are put on a par, stems from a conception of individual welfare or the human good: a person's good is defined subjectively, as what he wants or would want after due reflection. Finally (3), aggregation stems from the fact that, on the classical view, a single individual takes up everyone's desires as if they were his own, sympathetically identifies with them, and chooses to maximize his "individual" utility. Hare, for one, explicitly makes this move. Just as Rawls
says of the classical view, Hare "extend[s] to society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflat[es] all persons into one through the imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator" (TJ, p. 27). If these are

maximizing aggregate utility cannot be a "by-product" of a procedure that gives equal consideration to everyone's interests. Instead, it defines what that procedure is. If anything is a by-product here, it is the appeal to equal consideration . Utilitarians appeal to
independent premises incorporated into the justification of utilitarianism and its decision procedure, then

impartiality in order to extend a method of individual practical rationality so that it may be applied to society as a whole (cf. TJ,

Page 176 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

pp. 26-27). Impartiality, combined with sympathetic identification, allows a hypothetical observer to experience the desires of others as if they were his own, and compare alternative courses of action according to their conduciveness to a single maximand,

The significant fact is that, in this procedure, appeals to equal consideration have nothing to do with impartiality between persons. What is really being given equal consideration are desires or experiences of the same magnitude. That these are the desires or experiences of separate persons (or, for that matter, of some other sentient being) is simply an incidental fact that has no substantive effect on utilitarian calculations. This becomes apparent from the fact that we can more accurately describe the utilitarian
made possible by equal consideration and sympathy. that

principle in terms of giving, not equal consideration to each person's interests, but instead equal consideration to equally intense interests, no matter where they occur. Nothing is lost in this redescription, and a great deal of clarity is gained. It is in this sense

persons enter into utilitarian calculations only incidentally. Any mention of them can be dropped without loss of the crucial information one needs to learn how to apply utilitarian procedures. This indicates what is wrong with the common claim that utilitarians emphasize procedural equality and fairness among persons, not substantive equality and fairness in results. On the contrary, utilitarianism, rightly construed, emphasizes
neither procedural nor substantive equality among persons. Desires and experiences, not persons, are the proper objects of equal concern in utilitarian procedures. Having in effect read persons out of the picture at the procedural end, before decisions on

it is little wonder that utilitarianism can result in such substantive inequalities. What follows is that utilitarian appeals to democracy and the democratic value of equality are misleading. In no sense do utilitarians seek to give persons equal concern
distributions even get underway, and respect.

Although utilitarianism claims to result in equality, its nature to only regard people as one entity rather than a group of individuals inherently contradicts the principle of equality
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

To sum up, though utilitarianism incorporates equality as a property of the justification of the principle of utility, and of the decision process through which that principle gets applied, it does not leave any place for equality in the content of that principle . On its face, this standard of right conduct directs that we maximize an aggregate. As a result neither equality or any other distributive value is assigned independent significance in resulting
distributions of goods. Kymlicka claims that, because Rawls sees utilitarianism as teleological, he misdescribes the debate over

the distribution debate Rawls is concerned with is a (level 2) debate over how what is deemed good (welfare, rights, resources, etc.) within a moral theory is to be divided among individuals. It is not a (level 3) debate over the distribution of consideration in a procedure which decides the
distribution by ignoring that utilitarians allow for equality of distribution too. But distribution of these goods. Nor is it a (level 1) debate over the principles of practical reasoning that are invoked to justify the fundamental standard of distribution.

Owning oneself is a moral imperative utilitarianism imposes interpersonal obligations to society, which destroys morality
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

Page 177 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

According to Rawls's teleological interpretation, the "fundamental goal" (LCC, p. 33) of utilitarianism is not persons, but the goodness of states of affairs .
Kymlicka distinguishes two interpretations of utilitarianism: teleological and egalitarian. Duty is defined by what best brings about these states of affairs. " [M] aximizing the good is primary, and we count individuals

Our primary duty isn't to treat people as equals, but to bring about valuable states of affairs" (LCC, p. 27). It is difficult to see, Kymlicka says, how this reading of utilitarianism can be viewed as a moral theory. Morality, in our everyday view at least, is a matter of interpersonal obligations-the obligations we owe to each other. But to whom do we owe the duty of maximizing utility? Surely not to the impersonal ideal spectator . . . for he doesn't exist. Nor to the maximally valuable state of affairs itself, for states of affairs don't have moral claims." (LCC, p. 28-29)
equally only because that maximizes value. Kymlicka says, "This form of utilitarianism does not merit serious consideration as a political morality" (LCC, p. 29). Suppose we see utilitarianism differently, as a theory whose "fundamental principle" is "to treat people as equals" (LCC, p. 29). On this egalitarian reading, utilitarianism is a procedure for aggregating individual interests and desires, a procedure for making social choices, specifying which trade-offs are acceptable. It's a moral theory which purports to treat people as equals, with equal concern and respect. It does so by counting everyone for one, and no one for more than one. (LCC, p. 25)

Aims to maximize overall utility despite competing interests in the public is utilitarianism destroys individualism
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, Rights Against Risks, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

any proposal to compare or balance competing interests can be criticized as leading ineluctably back to some form of utilitarianism (perhaps
At first glance, this structure may seem vulnerable to two different objections. First, a "utilitarianism of rights").72 If the adverse consequences of a right must be weighed in some manner against the

There will always be some concatenation of consequences that those bent on overcoming the right will assert outweighs the claim of the individual. Does not this kind of relativism ultimately degenerate into some reconstituted version of utilitarianism,
benefits of the right, how can any barriers against loss of autonomy survive? effectively leveling the moral landscape into continual balancing exercises?

Utility maximization destroys individualism

Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

autonomous individual require protection from consideration of utility maximization. The rights in the system constrain the behavior of others that might harm these aspects of the individua l. One might begin with the idea of preservation. Securing the moral significance of the individual should at least center on preserving that individual's life. Preservation ought then
In defining those rights, it seems natural to begin by stating clearly which aspects of an to be extended to include the broader concept of physical or bodily integrity, because many physical assaults short of death can so damage or injure an individual as to reduce dramatically the quality of that individual's life.

Rights should at least

prevent substantial invasions of bodily integrity. Utilitarianism forces individuals to sacrifice their own goals in order to increase utility
Odell 04 Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois (Jack, On Consequentialist Ethics, Wadsworth, Thomson Learning, Inc., pp. 98-103)

Page 178 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

This objection can, as Samuel Scheffler has pointed out, be integrated with objection . Remember that Rawls claimed that

utilitarianism fails to ''take seriously the distinction between persons." One person can be forced by utilitarianism to give up far too much, including the life plan that he or she has formulated for himself or herself. Rational agents who are fully aware
of what they would be putting on the line if they were to agree to a utilitarian society would never adopt utilitarianism. They would perceive that such a society could require them to sacrifice their individual projects , their freedom, and even their lives for the sake of the aggregate or total satisfaction of the group. To agree to such a collective approach would be to degrade their autonomy, and this is a matter of integrity. As Scheffler observes regarding the integration of (H) and (J), "the two objections focus on two different ways of making the same supposed mistake: two different ways of failing to take sufficient account of the separateness and nature of persons."

Risks taken by the government to increase overall utility will severely compromise the individual which will result in fatality
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

Equity has provided a limited answer to the question of acceptable risk. The traditional doctrine of injunctions against tortious behavior holds that courts may enjoin behavior that is virtually certain to harm an identifiable individual in the near future .'2 This body of law, however, focuses more on avoidance of harm to specific persons than on regulation of risk.'3 It is thus inapposite to the questions of modern technological risk, risk that is quite unlikely to injure any identifiable individual in the short-term, but that carries severe consequences that are certain to occur to someone in the medium to distant future. Consider the paradigm of the Acme Chemical Company: Acme Chemical Company is discovered to
be storing chemical wastes on its land in such a way that seepage containing traces of those wastes are entering an underground water system that serves as the sole drinking water supply for a town several miles away. One of the chemicals has been classified as a carcinogen in laboratory experiments on mice. Although extrapolating from these results to predictions of human carcinogencity is somewhat controversial, federal agencies routinely do so. Under one of a number of plausible sets of assumptions, a concentration of ten parts per billion (ppb) in drinking water is estimated to increase a human's chance of contracting cancer by one in one hundred thousand if the human is assumed to consume a normal intake over the course of twenty years. Analyses show that the current concentration in the underground aquifer near Acme's plant is ten ppb. This case

The probability of risk to any individual is relatively small while its severity is substantial, perhaps fatal. Risk is being imposed on individuals who have not consented to it in any meaningful sense . Finally, risk is unintentional in the sense that imposing risk on others is not an
exhibits the typical features of risky actions associated with modern technology. objective of Acme's plan.'4 We may assume its executives in fact would be tremendously relieved if they could avoid the risk.

Government coercion threatens individual freedom and renders morality meaningless

Gauthier 2K (Candace, PhD Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal)

Coercion and constraint, as used here, should be understood as the imposition of some external force that compels or precludes a particular choice or a particular action itself . Certainly there are degrees of coercion and constraint, and consideration of the form and degree of external force imposed can affect the extent to which one considers an action to have been less than voluntary. The greater the threat imposed by some external force, the more it eliminates or controls choice . Some external threats are so
Instances of coercion and constraint also may exempt agents from judgments of moral responsibility. great as to totally bypass choice, leading directly to action, while others may control choice to the extent that a particular action

Finally, some threats reduce the voluntariness of an action by making any other choice extremely difficult for an individual to make in the face of the relevant threat . Thus, the greater the coercion or constraint, the less likely we will be to consider the action voluntary and the less moral responsibility we will assign to the agent . [End Page
is virtually ensured. 343] When the autonomy of those who have the capacity for rational agency is respected, they are permitted to make choices and act according to their beliefs and values, to the extent that their actions pose no risk of harm to individuals or to the community.

In the absence of overwhelming coercive factors or controlling constraints, we hold these autonomous

Page 179 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

individuals morally responsible for their choices and actions . This does not mean that those beliefs and values are themselves
totally chosen. Certainly, moral responsibility can be and is assigned with the understanding that the person who has voluntarily chosen and acted is the product of a family, a community, and all of the other societal influences that make individuals who they are. The assignment of moral responsibility is part of an important method of social control through which the community furthers common ends and interests (Smiley 1992, pp. 238-54). Although moral responsibility in the first sense discussed here is a neutral judgment, recognizing both causality and moral agency, it is the basis for praise and blame, reward and punishment. These are essential ways in which communities may effect personal change in their members toward behavior that is more in concert with communal values and ends. For example, if judgments of praise and blame are internalized, they create the "social emotions" of guilt, shame, and pride that contribute to the development of conscience (Gaylin and Jennings 1996, pp. 137-49). As part of the social control provided by praise and blame, the assignment of moral responsibility operates within a pluralistic democratic society by permitting areas of life in which the individual may choose and act, free of coercion and constraint, but with the understanding that these choices and actions are subject to judgment and criticism by others in the community. However,

communitarians sometimes appear to go even farther, to seek even more social control based on a shared vision of the good life that is determined either by the majority or by the elites. This tendency is an "excess" of the communitarian movement that may lead to a "tyranny of the majority." Pushing the laudable communitarian concern with shared values and the common good to this extreme would destroy the individual , create persons "constituted by the group's shared aims," and "leave little or no room for criticism of the group will" (Kuczewski 1997, pp. 106-8). Moreover, without individuals who are free to make choices based on their traditions, histories, and a variety of communal influences as well as their own consideration of all of these factors, moral responsibility has no meaning. Once the force of law is behind shared values and how they are to be honored in individual lives and decisions, we would have a level of control through legal coercion that would leave little room for moral responsibility based on the voluntarily chosen actions of moral agents. Thus, the
imposition of communal values, in all areas of life, would jeopardize the social practice of assigning moral responsibility for individual action.

Utilitarianism promotes inequity and inherently discriminates against minority like slavery
Odell, 04 University of Illinois is an Associate Professor of Philosophy (Jack, Ph.D., On Consequentialist Ethics, Wadsworth, Thomson Learning, Inc., pp. 98-103)

A classic objection to both act and rule utilitarianism has to do with inequity, and is related
to the kind of objection raised by Rawls, which I will consider shortly. Suppose we have two fathers-Andy and Bob. Suppose further that they are alike in all relevant respects, both have three children, make the same salary, have the same living expenses, put aside the same amount in savings, and have left over each week fifteen dollars. Suppose that every week Andy and Bob ask themselves what they are going to do with this extra money, and Andy decides anew each week (AU) to divide it equally among his three children, or he makes a decision to always follow the rule (RU) that each child should receive an equal percentage of the total allowance money. Suppose further that each of his children receive five degrees of pleasure from this and no pain. Suppose on the other hand, that Bob, who strongly favors his oldest son, Bobby, decides anew each week (AU) to give all of the allowance money to Bobby, and nothing to the other two, and that he instructs Bobby not to tell the others, or he makes a decision to follow the rule (RU) to always give the total sum to Bobby. Suppose also that Bobby gets IS units of pleasure from his allowance and that his unsuspecting siblings feel no pain. The end result of the actions of both fathers is the same-IS units of pleasure. Most, if not all, of us would agree that although Andy's conduct is exemplary, Bob's is culpable. Nevertheless, according to both AU and RU the fathers in question are morally equal. Neither father is more or less exemplary or culpable than the other. I

Both act and rule utilitarianism violate the principle of just distribution. What Rawls does is to elaborate objection (H). Utilitarianism, according to Rawls, fails to appreciate the importance of distributive justice, and that by doing so it makes a mockery of the concept of "justice." As I pointed out when I discussed Russell's views regarding partial goods, satisfying the interests of a majority of a given population while at the same time thwarting the interests of the minority segment of that same population (as occurs in societies that allow slavery) can maximize the general good, and do so even though the minority group may have to suffer great cruelties. Rawls argues that the utilitarian commitment to maximize the good in the world is due to its failure to ''take seriously the distinction between persons." One person can be forced to give up far too much to insure the maximization of the good, or the total aggregate satisfaction, as was the case for those young Aztec women chosen by their
will refer to the objection implicit in this kind of example as (H) and state it as: ' (H) society each year to be sacrificed to the Gods for the welfare of the group.

Page 180 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Utilitarianism destroys value to life by forcing the individual to take risks on a cost-benefit basis in an effort to increase overall utility of an entity, while demoralizing the individuals own system of values
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

From the individual's point of view, the balancing of costs and benefits that utilitarianism endorses renders the status of any individual risk bearer profoundly insecure. A risk bearer cannot determine from the kind of risk being imposed on him whether it is impermissible or not. The identical risk may be justified if necessary to avoid a calamity and unjustified if the product of an act of profitless carelessness, but the nature and extent of the underlying benefits of the risky action are fre quently unknown to the risk bearer so that he cannot know whether or not he is being wronged. Furthermore, even when the gain that lies behind the risk is well-known, the status of a risk bearer is insecure because individuals can justifiably be inflicted with ever greater levels of risk in conjunction with increasing gains . Certainly, individual risk bearers may be entitled to more
protection if the risky action exposes many others to the same risk, since the likelihood that technological risks will cause greater harm increases as more and more people experience that risk. This makes the risky action less likely to

that insight seems scant comfort to an individual, for it reinforces the realization that, standing alone, he does not count for much . A strategy of weighing gains against risks thus
be justifiable. Once again, however, renders the status of any specific risk victim substantially contingent upon the claims of others, both those who may share his victim status and those who stand to gain from the risky activity. The anxiety to preserve some fundamental place for the individual that cannot be overrun by larger social considerations underlies what H.L.A. Hart has aptly

despite its famous slogan, "everyone [is] to count for one,"59 utilitarianism ultimately denies each individual a primary place in its system of values .
termed the "distinctively modern criticism of utilitarianism,"58 the criticism that, Various versions of utilitarian ism evaluate actions by the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the net of pleasure over pain, or the satisfaction of desires.60 Whatever the specific formulation, the

goal of maximizing

some mea sure of utility obscures and diminishes the status of each individual .
monitoring function.61

It reduces the individual to a conduit, a reference point that registers the appropriate "utiles," but does not count for anything independent of his

It also produces moral requirements that can trample an individual, if necessary, to maximize utility, since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken into account, the individual is expendable. Counting pleasure and pain equally across individuals is a laudable proposal, but counting
only plea sure and pain permits the grossest inequities among individuals and the trampling of the few in furtherance of the utility of the many. In sum, utilitarianism makes the status of any individual radically contingent . The individual's status will be preserved only so long as that status con tributes to increasing total utility. Otherwise, the individual can be discarded.

The only way to preserve individualism is to allow all persons to have the right to own themselves regardless of any negative consequentialist impacts
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
2. Liberal Theories in the "Rights" Tradition. A

second group of theories avoids the modern criticism of utilitarianism by

making the individual central. Contemporary theorists as diverse as John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Richard Epstein, Charles Fried, and Ronald Dworkin continue a tradition variously described as the Kantian, natural rights, or "rights" tradition.62 They all define the requirements of justice in terms of recognizing and preserving the essential characteristics of individuals as free and autonomous moral agents.63 In this approach, the individual is defined prior to articulating the terms under which that individual can be acted upon or interacted with, and those terms are consequently specified so as to protect and

Page 181 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

preserve what is essential to the individual . In this context, rights have been called "trumps" since they constrain what society can do to the individual.64 These theories all aspire to make the individual more secure than he is under utilitarianism. In the rights tradition, the crucial criteria for assessing risks derive from the impact of those risks on risk victims,
and the criteria are defined independently of the benefits flowing from risk creation. To be plausible, such a program cannot totally prohibit risk creation, but the ostensible advantage of this program over utilitarianism is that risk creation is circumscribed by criteria exclusively derived from considerations of the integrity of the individual, not from any balancing or weighing process.65 The root idea is that nonconsensual risks are violations of "individual entitlements to personal security and autonomy."66 This idea seems highly congruent with the ideology of environmentalism expressed in our national legislation regulating technological risk. Indeed, two scholars have recently suggested a modern rendering of Kant's categorical imperative: "All amounts to using another, this tradition seems to be the place to look

rational persons have a right not to be used without their consent even for the benefit of others ."67 If imposing risk to secure the status of the individual.

Utilitarianism allows larger powers like the government to control the individual as long a greater utility is achieved. It is immoral to violate the sanctity of human life.
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, Rights Against Risks, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

In modern society, the overwhelming power of centralized authority, whether of the state or of other large institutions, looms over every individual. Utilitarianism is a philosophy that legitimizes that power and countenances the anxiety that comes with it so long as total utility is increased. In the process of that legitimization, utilitarianism fails to accommodate society's deeply held moral ideals concerning the special sanctity of human life. "[W]e prefer to think of [lives] as beyond price. . . . To the extent that our lives and institutions depend on the notion that life is beyond price . . . a refusal to save lives is horribly costly."68 Cost-benefit analysis flaunts the legitimacy of placing a price on life. The depth of hostile reactions to the utilitarian tradition that has been
displayed in the environmental era cannot fully be comprehended until the antipathy to this aspect of that tradition is understood.

Utilitarianism suppresses individual choice-making freedom gives value to life

Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Rights Against Risks, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
Under this concept of rules,

rules may intervene to preclude or limit the consideration of

consequences, and thus such consideration will not inevitably collapse all issues of moral choice into a case-by-case costbenefit analysis. Any theory intent on maintaining individual integrity and autonomy will likely generate some rules that protect

moral space within which an individual can make choices even if those choices do not maximize utility.
individuals from the radical contingency associated with utilitarianism. Autonomy implies some

"Rights" in theories emphasizing individual autonomy function as rules providing individuals with moral space. They eliminate from consideration of the justness of an action some arguments and factual aspects that might otherwise bear on that judgment. Notice that this idea of rights is consistent with taking consequences into account. Consequences can be taken into account at the rule formulation stage. If a rule then makes certain consequences irrelevant to its subsequent application, these "rights regardless of consequences" ignore consequences only because the consequences of granting those rights had been taken into account

Within a nonutilitarian theory, then, there is a valid distinction between weighing the consequences of a risky action and weighing the consequences of a rule regulating risky actions. One point this section makes is that this distinction cannot plausibly result in a
when the rights were formulated.

rule that risks should be regulated regardless of consequences, but that fact alone does not demonstrate that either the structure of the arguments supporting this conclusion or the norms of behavior derived from them are simply reformulations of utilitarianism.76 Even if the proposal to take consequences into account does not reproduce a form of utilitarianism, a second objection may be voiced. It might be thought that the proposal embodies the same fundamental mistake that has resulted in criticism of utilitarianism. Once again an individual's security will become contingent upon the consequential value to others of

Page 182 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

actions affecting that individual's vital interests. Although the problem of contingency is real, the criticism of utilitarianism outlined above cannot be leveled against the manner in which contingency has been reintroduced. This is because, notwithstanding the current fashion of equating "consequentialism" with "utilitarianism,"77 utilitarianism is a unique subset of consequentialism, and arguments aimed at it cannot simply be appropriated to indict all theories that consider consequences to be relevant.

Utilitarianism's special use of consequences isolates a single consequential aspect of actions contribution to the maximand-and assesses the propriety of action exclusively by that measure. It is this feature of utilitarianism, not the simple ingredient of considering consequences, that makes it vulnerable to the charge of ignoring individuals.78 It is perfectly feasible to construct moral theories that employ consequences in their evaluation of the rightness of actions without thereby endorsing utilitarian reductionism.79 In specific cases, one individual might be given his "rights" by a second individual only at
the second individual's great discomfort, inconvenience, and perhaps even risk of life.

Governments have a responsibility to maintain human rights and individualism utilitarianism undermines human rights
Kateb 92 Professor of Politics at Princeton University (George, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture, p. 5)

To tie dignity to rights is therefore to say that governments have the absolute duty to treat people (by actions and abstentions) in certain ways, and in certain ways only. The states characteristic
domination and insolence are to be curbed for the sake of rights. Public and formal respect for rights registers and strengthens awareness of three constitutive facts of being human:

every person is a creature capable of feeling pain, and is a free agent capable of having a free being, of living a life that is ones own and not somebody elses idea of how a life should be lived, and is a moral agent capable of acknowledging that what one claims for oneself as a right one can claim only as an equal to everyone else (and relatedly that what one wants done to oneself one should do to others). Respect for rights recognizes
these capacities and thus honors human dignity. I know that adequate recognition of these human capabilities does not entail respect for rights as the sole and necessary conclusion. This respect is not a matter of logical inference. Rather, given initial sentiments say, fellow feeling or special sensitivity to pain or dislike of power recognition can lead to or add up to a theoretical affirmation of rights. The most important sentiment by far is for the idea that

every individual is equally a world, an infinity, a being who is irreplaceable. At the same time, there are other theories that seem to affirm human dignity yet give rights only a lesser or probationary or instrumental role. Examples are utilitarianism, recent communitarianism, recent republicanism, and radical egalitarianism. The first and last I will return to shortly; my response to the others appears her and there in this volume. All I wish to say now is that unless rights come first, they are not rights. They will tend to be sacrificed to some
purpose deemed higher than the equal dignity of every individual. The group or the majority or the good or the sacred or the vague future will be preferred. The beneficiaries will be victimized along with the victims because no one is being treated as a person who is irreplaceable and beyond value. To make rights anything but primary, even though in the name of human dignity, is to injure human dignity.

Theories of right preserve value to life government politics with the intention of increasing overall utility through environmentalism destroy morality and deceives the individual
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke, Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

Theories in the rights tradition resonate with ideals regarding life and its sanctity. These theories, however, can provide a reliable guide to risk regulation only if they can fit their analysis of rights against risk with other legitimate values to comprise a coherent
theory of government. It is the thesis of this Article that the notion of a right against risk that trumps all considerations of countervailing values cannot be so validated by any theory in the rights tradition. Despite the appealing absolutist language of

Page 183 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

the countervailing benefits of risky actions persistently return and demand consideration. This is so at the level of practical politics, where the years after passage of our major environmental statutes have witnessed creative maneuvers by courts, agencies, and Congress to avoid actually implementing absolute rights against risk whenever the substantial costs of achieving extremely low levels of risk become undeniable.69 It is also true at the level of theory. Once one looks beyond the glitter of catchphrases to examine their accounts, seemingly absolutist nonutilitarian theories do not support absolute rights against risk. Any defensible theory of risk regulation must acknowledge the relevance of countervailing interests and values. Given the
nonutilitarian theories, modern attack on utilitarianism,70 a proposed theory must also avoid comparing benefits and risks in a way that collapses the theory into utilitarianism. Unfortunately, "absolutist" rhetoric applied to risk regulation

is so obsessed with avoiding the error of utilitarianism that it commits an opposite mistake by obscuring the interests of risk creators. Environmentalists, as well as others concerned about risk regulation, ought to divorce themselves from much of the popular language of rights as absolutes because the terminology evokes a misleading expectation of a theoretical justification for risk rules
that cannot in fact be supplied. An attempted justification fails if it ignores the legitimate interests of risk creators and others who

nonabsolutist understanding of risk must preserve the essential moral insight of the rights tradition that individuals matter as autonomous moral agents worthy of respect. This Article moves in the direction of such an understanding by examining the
benefit from the creation of risk. Still, a

nature of the conflict between the interests of risk creator and risk bearer, and how modern rights theories deal with that conflict. lth Care

Utilitarianism inevitable even in deontological frameworks

Green, 02 Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University (Joshua, November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It", 314)
Some people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which rights take priority over which. If

Attempting to solve moral problems using a complex deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but dogmatism all the same. However, its likely that when some people talk about balancing competing rights and obligations they are already thinking like consequentialists in spite of their use of deontological language . Once again, what deontological language does best is
thats what we mean by 302 balancing rights, then we are wise to shun this sort of talk. express the thoughts of people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: It doesnt matter that you can save five people by

That is why angry protesters say things like, Animals Have Rights, Too! rather than, Animal Testing: The Harms Outweigh the Benefits! Once again, rights talk captures the apparent clarity of the issue and absoluteness of the answer . But sometimes rights talk persists long after the
pushing him to his death. To do this would be a violation of his rights!19 sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded. One thinks, for example, of the thousands of children whose lives are saved by drugs

One finds oneself balancing the rights on both sides by asking how many rabbit lives one is willing to sacrifice in order to save one human life, and so on, and at the end of the day ones underlying thought is as thoroughly consequentialist as can be, despite the deontological gloss. And whats
that were tested on animals and the rights of those children. wrong with that? Nothing, except for the fact that the deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the myth that there really are

Best to drop it. When deontological talk gets sophisticated, the thought it represents is either dogmatic in an esoteric sort of way or covertly consequentialist.
rights, etc.

Compromising moral values and trading off for other injustices proves deontology is impossible
Spragens 2K Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University (Thomas A., Political Theory and Partisan Politics- "Rationality in Liberal Politics" pg 81-2)

Page 184 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

My thesis that all three layers/forms of political association are important in a well-ordered liberal democracy also implies the untenability of Rawls's argument that agreement regarding norms of social justice is a possible and sufficient way to overcome

the fundamental unfairness of life and the presence of gratuitous elements in the moral universe make it impossible to settle rationally upon a single set of distributive principles as demonstrably fair (See also, Spragens 1993). Simply put, the problem is that the contingencies of the world ineluctably allocate assets and sufferings quite unfairly. We can cope with and try to compensate for these "natural injustices," but only at the price of introducing other elements of unfairness or compromising other moral values. The other major problem in this context is that real world human beings are not deontologists: their moral intuitions about distributive justice are permeated and influenced by their moral intuitions about the' good . The empirical consequence of these two difficulties is the falsification of Rawls's hermeneutic claims about an overlapping consensus. Rational people of good will with a liberal democratic persuasion will be able to agree that some possible distributive criteria are morally unacceptable. But, as both experience and the literature attest, hopes for a convergence of opinion on definitive principles of distributive justice are chimerical .
the deficiencies of the modus vivendi approach. In the first place, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere,

Age of nuclear deterrence makes preventative measures necessary. Its too late to consider otherwise.
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; Nuclear Ethics pg. 62-63)

Antinuclear consequentialists often object to the whole approach to deterrence in terms of probability. For example, the sociologist Todd Gitlin argues that "since deterrence works only if it works forever, it is an all-or-nothing proposition, so applying the language of probability to it is misleading. "112 But his argument is not compelling. Gitlin seems to assume that failures of deterrence or inevitable accidents must lead to all-out nuclear war, but that is far from self-evident. Indeed, a case can be made that an accident or partial failure of deterrence may be the
prelude to substantial changes that reduce risks or reliance on nuclear deterrence in the long term. But even if he were right about catastrophe, it is odd for Gitlin to discount "microscopic probability" by asking, " Do

we feel secure playing Russian roulette if the revolver has a hundred chambers?" Perhaps not, but if we had to play, I doubt that we really would not care if a revolver had one hundred chambers rather than six! And if he readmits probabilistic reasoning, then it can also be applied to the question of relative risks between unilateral disarmament ("refusing to play") and trying to increase the number of chambers in a world where the game of nuclear deterrence already exists .

Page 185 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Deon Good**

Consequences can only be evaluated AFTER morals Rights come first Kamm 2003 Deontology by Stephen Darwall, page 164, 2003, Published By Wiley-Blackwell ,
Harming Some to Save Others, Frances Myrna Kamm, http://books.google.com/books? id=tzrrwH5HzwQC&pg=PA116&dq=deontology+vs.+consequentialism&client=firefox-a

Deontology Inevitable It is grounded in human behavior Economic Analysis, Common-Sense Morality and Utilitarianism Author(s): J. Moreh Source: Erkenntnis (1975-), Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jul., 1992), pp. 115-143 Published by: Springer Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20012427 Accessed: 22/07/2009 13:24 Common-sense morality is grounded in the consciousness of ordinary human beings and the stringency of moral rules is a device based on psychological grounds meant to prevent the erosion of moral rules. In other words, the tendency for self-deception in order to reduce cognitive dissonance gives rise to high information costs and causes Conscience to set up a fence around moral rules. By contrast, Utilitarianism has been thought out by moral philosophers as an ethical system which people are advised to adopt. Because of the intellectual character of Utilitarianism, it has evolved no processes for hedging around its rules. One therefore understands Harsanyi (1985, p. 49) when he describes utilitarian rules as 'conditional imperatives', that is, people should fol? low them because in this way they will maximize expected social utility. Of course, he expects all rational people to have an interest in promot? ing the common good and therefore to be utilitarians. (By contrast, many people regard moral rules as unconditionally binding or 'categori cal imperatives').

Deontology precludes util- the values of deontology come first Mcnaughton and Rawling 98 [David McNaughton and Piers Rawling are professors of
philosophy at Keele University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Ratio, On Defending Deontology, issue 11, p. 48-49 Ebsco]

Nagel effectively accepts the consequentialist view that a system of moral rules can only be defended by showing that their adoption brings about some good that could not otherwise be realized, and then seeks to show that

Page 186 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

deontology is such a system. The claim is not, of course, that agent-relative reasons rest
directly on considerations of value in a manner obviously susceptible to the CVC; rather, the grounding is indirect the notion is that worlds in which there are agent-relative reasons are better than worlds in which there are not. Nagel argues that an agent relative morality, qua moral system, is intrinsically valuable. Thus we concur with Hooker (1994), then, pace Howard-Snyder (1993), that rule consequentialism is not a 'rubber duck'. Thus rights

(the obverse of constraints) have value, and are, therefore, part of the basic structure of moral theory. A right is an agent-relative, not an agent-neutral, value, says Nagel (1995, p.88). This is precisely because it is supposed to resist the CVC (one is forbidden to violate a right even to minimize the total number of such violations). So Nagel faces the Scheffler problem: How could it be wrong to harm one person to prevent greater harm to others? How are we to understand the
value that rights assign to certain kinds of human inviolability, which makes this consequence morally intelligible? (p.89, our emphasis note the presumption inherent in the question). The

answer focuses on the status conferred on all human beings by the design of a morality which includes agent-relative constraints (p.89). That status is one of being inviolable (which is not, of course, to say that one will not be violated, but that one may not be violated even to minimize the total number of such violations). A system of morality that includes inviolability encapsulates a good that its rivals cannot capture. For, not only is it an evil for a person to be harmed in certain ways, but for it to be permissible to harm the person in those ways is an additional and independent evil (p.91). So there is a sense in which we are
better off if there are rights (they are a kind of generally disseminated intrinsic good (p.93)). Hence there are rights. In short, we are inviolable because

Deontology comes first, the means must justify themselves utilitarianism justifies the Holocaust. Anderson, 2004 (Kerby Anderson is the National Director of Probe Ministries International, , Probe Ministries Utilitarianism: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number http://www.probe.org/theologyand-philosophy/worldview--philosophy/utilitarianism-the-greatest-good-forthegreatest-number.html) One problem with utilitarianism is that it leads to an "end justifies the means" mentality. If any worthwhile end can justify the means to attain it, a true ethical foundation is lost. But we all know that the end does not justify the means. If that were so, then Hitler could justify the Holocaust because the end was to purify the human race. Stalin could justify his slaughter of millions because he was trying to achieve a communist utopia. The end never justifies the means. The means must justify themselves. A particular act cannot be judged as good simply because it may lead to a good consequence. The means must be judged by some objective and consistent standard of morality. Second, utilitarianism cannot protect the rights of minorities if the goal is the greatest good for the greatest number. Americans in the eighteenth century could justify slavery on the basis that it provided a good consequence for a majority of Americans. Certainly the majority
benefited from cheap slave labor even though the lives of black slaves were much worse. A third problem with utilitarianism is predicting the consequences. If morality is based on

results, then we would have to have omniscience in order to accurately predict

Page 187 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

the consequence of any action. But at best we can only guess at the future, and often these educated guesses are wrong. A fourth problem with utilitarianism is that consequences themselves must be judged. When results occur, we must still ask whether they are good or bad results. Utilitarianism provides no objective and consistent foundation to judge results because results are the mechanism used to judge the action itself.inviolability is intrinsically
valuable.

Deontology precludes util- the values of deontology come first Mcnaughton and Rawling 98 [David McNaughton and Piers Rawling are professors of
philosophy at Keele University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Ratio, On Defending Deontology, issue 11, p. 48-49 Ebsco]

Nagel effectively accepts the consequentialist view that a system of moral rules can only be defended by showing that their adoption brings about some good that could not otherwise be realized, and then seeks to show that deontology is such a system. The claim is not, of course, that agent-relative reasons rest
directly on considerations of value in a manner obviously susceptible to the CVC; rather, the grounding is indirect the notion is that worlds in which there are agent-relative reasons are better than worlds in which there are not. Nagel argues that an agent relative morality, qua moral system, is intrinsically valuable. Thus we concur with Hooker (1994), then, pace Howard-Snyder (1993), that rule consequentialism is not a 'rubber duck'. Thus rights

(the obverse of constraints) have value, and are, therefore, part of the basic structure of moral theory. A right is an agent-relative, not an agent-neutral, value, says Nagel (1995, p.88). This is precisely because it is supposed to resist the CVC (one is forbidden to violate a right even to minimize the total number of such violations). So Nagel faces the Scheffler problem: How could it be wrong to harm one person to prevent greater harm to others? How are we to understand the
value that rights assign to certain kinds of human inviolability, which makes this consequence morally intelligible? (p.89, our emphasis note the presumption inherent in the question). The

answer focuses on the status conferred on all human beings by the design of a morality which includes agent-relative constraints (p.89). That status is one of being inviolable (which is not, of course, to say that one will not be violated, but that one may not be violated even to minimize the total number of such violations). A system of morality that includes inviolability encapsulates a good that its rivals cannot capture. For, not only is it an evil for a person to be harmed in certain ways, but for it to be permissible to harm the person in those ways is an additional and independent evil (p.91). So there is a sense in which we are
better off if there are rights (they are a kind of generally disseminated intrinsic good (p.93)). Hence there are rights. In short, we are inviolable because

Deontology comes before util- utilitarianism can be a last resort to preserve fundamental rights Kateb 1992 [George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University The Inner Ocean http://books.google.com/books?id=MtGJdmzqLZoC&dq=kateb+ %22what+does+a+theory%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s]

Page 188 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

What does a theory of rights leave undecided? Many issues of public policy do not affect individual rights, despite frequent ingeniuous efforts to claim that they do. Such issues pertain to the promotion of a better life, whether for the disadvantaged or for everyone, or involve the clash of interests. So long as rights are not in play, advocates of rights can rightly allow a loose utilitarianism as the proper guide to public policy, though they should always be eager to keep the states energy under suspicion. One can even think, against utilitarianism, that any substantive

outcome acheived by morally proper procedure is morally right and hence acceptable (so long as rights are not in play). The main point, however, is that utilitarianism has a necessary place in any democratic countrys normal political deliberations. But its advocates must know its place, which ordinarily is only to help to decide what theory of rights leave alone . When may rights be
overridden by the government? I have two sorts of cases in mind: overriding a particular right of some persons for the sake of preserving the same right of others, and overriding the same right of everyone for the sake of what I will clumsily call civilization values. An advocate of rights could countenance, perhaps must countenance, the states overriding of rights for these two reasons. The subject is painful and liable to dispute every step of the way. For the state to

override-that is, sacrifice- a right of some so theat others may keep it, the situations must be desperate. I havein mind, say, circumstances in which the choice is between sacrificing a right of some and letting a right of all be lost . The state (or some other agent) may kill some or allow them to be killed), if the only alternative is letting everyone die. It is the right to life which most
prominently figures in thinking about desperate situations. I cannot see any resolution but to heed the precept that numbers count. Just as one may prefer saving ones own life to saving that of another when both cannot be saved, so a third party-let us say, the state- can (perhaps must) choose to save the greater number of lives and at the cost of the lesser number, when there is otherwise no hope for either group. That choice does not mean that those to be sacrificed are immoral if they resist being sacrificed. It follows, of course, that if a third party is

right to risk or sacrifice the lives of the lesser for the lives of the greater number when the lesser would otherwise live, the lesser are also not wrong if they resist being sacrificed. To accept utilitarianism (in some loose sense) as a necessary supplement. It thus should function innocently, or when all hope of innocence is gone. I emphasize, above all, however, that every care must be taken to ensure that the precept that numbers of lives count does not become a license for vaguely conjectural decisions about inflicting death and saving life and that desperation be as strictly and narrowly understood as possible. (But total numbers killed do not count if members of one group have to kill members of another group to save themselves from threatened massacre of enslavement or utter degradation or misery; they may kill their attackers in an attempt to end the threat.) Deontology preserves fundamental rights and still accesses the ultimate good, accessing the same things as util

Bentley No Date [ Kristina A. Bentley graduate of the Department of government at the University of Manchester. Suggesting A Separate Approach To Utility and Rights: Deontological Specification and Teleogical Enforcement of Human Rights http://www.abdn.ac.uk/pir/postgrad/vol1_issue3/issue3_article1.pdf]

The second area of departure between utilitarianism and rights-based theories is that utilitarians advocate a simple maximising strategy as the aim is to maximise social utility and a society is justified in doing whatever enhances its aggregate utility (Jones, 1994: 52). Conversely, the opponents of this view hold that rights constitute an area which is beyond the reach of such calculations, as it would be pointless if rights could be set aside in a mere calculus of competing preferences (Jones, 1994: 53). This is because rights are regarded as being considerations which are special in the sense that they protect individuals from the potential excesses of such calculations. Consequently, to refer back to Gewirths example, according to the rights-based account, it would always be morally wrong to torture an innocent person, even if this would result in a large increase in aggregate utility in such a society, while a utilitarian approach would weigh up the evidence, such that if thousands of

Page 189 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

lives would be saved by the torture, then it ought to be done. This roughly reflects Dworkins notion of Rights as Trumps which override, or supersede ordinary notions of well-being. The difference however is that Dworkins theory occupies some middle ground, as it does not rule out rights being overridden by such considerations when other fundamental rights are threatened (Jones, 1994: 53). So while Dworkin would probably argue that to torture someone to give others in society pleasure at the sight would be trumped by the right not to be tortured, he would perhaps concede that to torture an individual to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb, as is the case in Gewirths example, may be justified, as the right to life of all others in society may, in this instance, trump the right of an individual not to be tortured. Dworkins formulation again places the domain of rights beyond the reach of ordinary considerations of utility, but he does make provision for rights to be balanced against one another (to trump one another) in cases of extreme gravity for rights themselves. Consequently, theories of rights quite simply consider respect for rights to be the primary consideration in the course of social deliberation, while utilitarians consider the ultimate good or utility on the balance to be the correct goal to pursue, even if this potentially infringes on individual rights. However, assertions that these conceptions of justice are incompatible are not always acknowledged by exponents of consequentialism. As Richard B. Brandt states: There is a fundamental incompatibility between utilitarianism and human rights. Most utilitarians of course have not thought there is such an incompatibility (Brandt, 1992: 196).

Evaluating the deontological aspects of a policy is critical to policy making Pinstrup-Andersen, 2005. [Ethics and economic policy for the food system. General
Sessions, 01DEC-05, American Journal of Agricultural Economics Ebsco Host.] Economists seldom address ethical questions as they infringe on economic theory or economic behavior. They (and I) find this subject complex and elusive in comparison with the relative precision and objectivity of economic analysis. However, if ethics is influencing our analyses but ignored, is the precision and objectivity just an illusion? Are we in fact being normative when we claim to be positive or are we, as suggested by Gilbert (p. xvi), ignoring social ethics and, as a consequence, contributing to a situation in which we know "the price of everything and the value of nothing?" The economists' focus on efficiency and

the Pareto Principle has made us less relevant to policy makers, whose main concerns are who gains, who loses, by how much, and can or should the losers be compensated. By focusing on the distribution of gains and losses and replacing the Pareto Principle with estimates of whether a big enough economic surplus could be generated so that gainers could compensate losers, the socalled new welfare economics (which is no longer new) was a step toward more relevancy for policy makers (Just, Hueth, and Schmitz). Another major step toward relevancy was made by the
more recent emphasis on political economy and institutional economics. But are we trading off scientific validity for relevancy? Robbins (p. 9) seems to think so, when he states that "claims of welfare economics to be

Page 190 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

scientific are highly dubious." But if Aristotle saw economics as a branch of ethics and Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, when did we, as implied by Stigler, replace ethics with precision and objectivity? Or, when did we as economists move away from philosophy toward statistics and engineering and are we on our way back to a more comprehensive political economy approach, in which both quantitative and qualitative variables are taken into account? I believe we are. Does that make us less scientific, as argued by Robbins?

I am not questioning whether the quantification of economic relationships is important. It is. In the case of food policy analysis, it is critically important that the causal relationship between policy options and expected impact on the population groups of interest is quantitatively estimated . But not at the expense of reality, context, and ethical considerations, much of which can be described only in qualitative terms. Economic analyses that ignore everything that cannot be quantified and included in our models are not likely to advance our understanding of economic and policy relationships . Neither will they be relevant for solving real world problems. The predictive ability is likely to be low and, if the results are used by policy makers, the outcome may be different from what was expecte. Deontology key to giving human life value Kamm 92 [ FM Kamm is Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy, Kennedy School
Non-consequentialism, the person as an end-in-itself, and the significance of status., Philosophy and Public Affairs, p. 390 JSTOR]

If we are inviolable in a certain way, we are more important creatures than violable ones; such a higher status is itself a benefit to us . Indeed, we are creatures whose interests as recipients of such ordinary benefits as welfare are more worth serving. The world is, in a sense, a better place, as it has more important creatures in it .3' In this sense the inviolable
status (against being harmed in a certain way) of any potential victim can be taken to be an agent-neutral value. This is a nonconsequential value. It does not follow (causally

or noncausally) upon any act, but is already present in the status that persons have. Ensuring it provides the background against which we may then seek their welfare or pursue other values. It is not our duty to bring about the agentneutral value, but only to respect the constraints that express its presence . Kagan claims that the only sense in which we can show disrespect for people is by using them in an unjustified way. Hence, if it is justified to kill one to save five, we will not be showing disrespect for the one if we so use him. But there is another sense of disrespect tied to the fact that we owe people more respect
than animals, even though we also should not treat animals in an unjustified way. And this other sense of disrespect is, I believe, tied to the failure to heed the greater inviolability of persons.

Deontology does not dismiss consequences, categorical imperative means deont still maximizes happiness
Donaldson 95 (Thomas Donaldson is Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown U, Ethics and International Affairs,International Deontology Defended: A Response to Russell Hardin, pg. 147-154) When discussing nuclear deterrence or intervention it is common to exaggerate the nonconsequential nature

Page 191 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

It is a false but all-too common myth that Kant believed that consequences were irrelevant to the evaluation of moral action . In his practical writings Kant explicitly
of Kantianism. states that each of us has a duty to maximize the happiness of other individuals, a statement that echoes Mills famous principle of utility. But Kants duty to promote beneficial consequences is understood to be derived from an

even higher order principle, namely, the categorical imperative that requires all of us to act in a way that respects the intrinsic value of other rational beings. Kant does not dismiss consequences. He simply wants them in their proper place. Callahan embraces reason and says it must be used in combination with a moral obligation to make decisions Callahan, fmr. Director of the Hastings Institute, 75 DANIEL CALLAHAN, Fmr. Director of the Hastings Institute, author of The Tyranny of Survival & Senior Fellow at Yale, February 1975,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3560956
correspondent, after praising the position I took in opposition to Garrett Hardin's "Life-boat Ethic" ("Doing Good by Doing Well," Dec. 1974), ended her letter with a complaint. I had, she implied, fallen into a fatal trap by trying to argue with Hardins thesis on "rationalistic rounds. The issue at stake is "humanitarianism" and the future of altruism, neither of which will be saved if they must be defended on the narrow base of reason and logic. Indeed, she seemed to be saying, there is an inherent conflict between humanitarianism and rationalism. As an unreconstructed rationalist, I balk at admitting such a dualism, just as I rebel at the general black-balling of reason and logic which seems to many to offer the only
A RECENT antidote to the generally insane, depressing state of the world. One can well understand how rationality has come to have a bad name. We have in the twentieth century been subjected to endless wars, ills and disasters carried out in the name of somebody or other's impeccable logic and assertedly rational deliberations. One can also understand the sense of distaste any feel in the face of articulate proponents of "triage" in our dealings with poor countries and a "lifeboat ethic" in deter-mining our own moral responsibilities toward the starving, particularly when such positions are advanced in the name of no-nonsense rational calculation. For all that , I am far more fearful of a

deliberate abandonment of reason than of the evils which can be done in its name. The fault with the latter form of attacking "reason" is that it takes those arguing in its name too much at their own word. Poke around a bit under the facade of carefully-honed rationality and precise logical moves and what does one usually discover? Pure mush. Those vast, intricate edifices rest on a bowl of porridge, made up of irrational self-interest, the worst forms of sentimentality (or pure cruelty), utterly unanalyzed assumptions about politics, or ethics, or human nature, tribalism, and god knows what else. None of that has much if anything to do with reason. A recent article by Robert L. Heilbroner, author of the much-acclaimed book, An Inquiry Into the Human Prospect, is indicative of the muddle created when one calls for an abandonment of rationality in favor of something more Illuminating . In "What has Posterity
Ever Done for Me?" (New York Times Magazine, January 19, 1975), Prof. Heilbroner tries to make the case that contemporary human beings will never learn to take responsibility for the future of mankind until they give up trying to find a compelling reason why they should. Only some fundamental revelatory experience-to wit, famine, war and the like-will bring people back to what is an essentially "religious" insight, that of "the transcendent importance of posterity for them." It is intriguing to see the way Heilbroner develops his case. "Why," he asks, "should I lift a finger to affect events that will have no more meaning for me 75 years after my death than those that happened 75 years before I was born? There is no rational answer to that terrible question. No argument based on reason will lead me to care for posterity or to lift a finger in its behalf. Indeed, by every rational consideration, precisely the opposite answer is thrust upon us with irresistible force." Going on, Heilbroner quotes an anonymous "Distinguished Younger Economist" who has concluded that he really doesn't "care" whether mankind survives or not. "Is this," Heilbroner queries, "an outrageous position? I must confess it outrages me. But this is not because the economist's arguments are 'wrong'-indeed, within their rational framework they are indisputably right. It is because their position reveals the limitations-worse, the suicidal dangers-of what we call 'rational argument' when we con-front questions that can only be decided by an appeal to an entirely different faculty from that of cool reason. " I find Heilbroner's despair at finding a rational basis to care about posterity , or the distant past, simply startling. Surely, to begin with the past, he can hardly believe (to stick to his own field of economics) that Adam Smith and the other "worldly

Page 192 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

philosophers" have no significance whatever any more, despite the fact that they had a critical place in shaping the world in which we live today. And surely, as an American, he must find some slight trace of present and personal meaning in the historical fact that some distant people once upon a time signed a "declaration of independence." My beginning with the past is no accident. If a case is to be made for caring about the fate of posterity, it will arise out of the highly rational recognition that (for better or worse) we are where we are because it seemed to our ancestors only sensible to worry about the fate of their descendants, just as (also for better or worse) still earlier generations had worried about their descendants. More deeply, unless one has decided that human life is, regardless of its condition, meaningless and terrible-in which case, what the hell-one will also recognize the moral interdependence of generations as one of the conditions for extracting whatever possibilities there are for human happiness. To love and believe in life at all is not just to love one's own life; it is to love both the fact and idea of life itself, including the life of those yet to be born. My point here, however, is not to make the rational case for obligations toward posterity. It is only to indicate there are rational ways of going about it (and if you don't like the reasons I've given, I can think of still others), just as

there are rational ways of establishing a variety of other moral duties. The truly hazardous part of despairing of reason, and longing for a return to something more primitive, can readily be seen in the texture of some of Heilbroner's other arguments. He is looking for what he calls the " survivalist" principle, by which he seems to mean some deep sense of
obligation toward the future, powerful enough to give us the courage and the toughness to take those immediate steps necessary to discharge our obligation. "Of course," he writes, "there are moral dilemmas to be faced even if one takes one's stand on the 'survivalist' principle.... [But] this essential commitment to life's continuance gives us the moral authority to take measures, per-haps very harsh measures, whose justification cannot be found in the precepts of rationality, but must be sought in the unbearable anguish we feel if we imagine ourselves as the executioner of mankind." Of course we may have to act harshly. But, to bring the circle full turn, how are we to act harshly, to whom and under what circumstances? Are we also meant to abandon reason in trying to answer that question? Are we

supposed to solve the evident "moral dilemmas" to which Heilbroner refers by a dependence, not on reason, but on a sense of "unbearable anguish "?I see no reason to hope
that even a fully shared sense of anguish would tell us how to resolve moral dilemmas. Moreover, Heilbroner himself cites at least one person who does not share his feelings, and unless we are to suppose that person to represent a class of one, the pillar to the center of the earth Heilbroner offers us begins to look like a piece of balsa wood. The amusing side of all this is that the two principal "survivalists" of our day, Garrett Hardin and Robert Heilbroner, seem to come out at opposite poles in the place they give to reason. Hardin appears the very paradigm of that cool rationality which Heilbroner believes to be our greatest threat to survival. And Heilbroner's quest for some deeper affective, "religious" motivation for survival seems the very model of that soft-hearted and woolly-headed humanitarianism which Hardin identifies as the villain. Neither is likely to carry the day, and for very healthy reasons. Heilbroner is

correct when he discerns that the appeal to reason has its limitations. It takes more than mere logic to move people deeply, especially to move them to act. More than that,
the frequently indignant reaction which greeted Hardin's "lifeboat ethic" indicates that many are not about to adopt a policy of calculating callousness, "logical" though that may seem. Hardin is correct when he says that we must think very hard about the question of survival, however much such thought may end by posing hard, even revolting, choices. But he seems not to have realized that, unless the drive for survival has a moral basis and a saving reference to something deeper than rational calculation, some and perhaps many people will decide that survival at any price is not a moral good. Nothing I have said here solves the vexing problem of the right relationship

between reason and feeling in the moral life. But it seems to me at least clear that the worst possible solution is to choose one at the expense of the other, or to think that we can make a flat choice between them. There is enough evidence from recent psychological research to indicate that our feelings and emotions are vigorously
tutored by our perceptions and cognition; reason has its say even in the way we feel. A no less important insight is that there is all the difference in the world between being "rational and being "logical."Almost anyone can work through a simple syllogism, presuming he is spared the ordeal of worrying about whether the premises are correct. It is a far more difficult matter to be rational, particularly where ethics is concerned

Policy makers cannot depend solely on economics, but need to apply ethics to make efficient policies

Pinstrup-Andersen, Per. 2005. (Ethics and economic policy for the food system. General Sessions, 01DEC-05, American Journal of Agricultural Economics.) Economists seldom address ethical questions as they infringe on economic theory or economic behavior. They (and I) find this subject complex and elusive in comparison with the relative precision and objectivity of economic analysis. However, if ethics is influencing our analyses but ignored, is the precision and objectivity just an illusion? Are we in fact being normative when we claim to be positive or are we, as suggested by Gilbert (p. xvi), ignoring social ethics and, as a consequence, contributing to a situation in which we know "the price of everything and the value of nothing?" The economists' focus on efficiency and the Pareto Principle has made us less relevant to policy makers, whose main concerns are who gains, who loses, by how much, and can or should the losers be compensated. By focusing on the distribution of gains and losses and replacing the Pareto Principle with estimates of whether a big enough economic

Page 193 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

surplus could be generated so that gainers could compensate losers, the socalled new welfare economics (which is no longer new) was a step toward more relevancy for policy makers (Just, Hueth, and Schmitz). Another major step toward relevancy was made by the more recent emphasis on political
economy and institutional economics. But are we trading off scientific validity for relevancy? Robbins (p. 9) seems to think so, when he states that "claims of welfare economics to be scientific are highly dubious." But if Aristotle saw economics as a branch of ethics and Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, when did we, as implied by Stigler, replace ethics with precision and objectivity? Or, when did we as economists move away from philosophy toward statistics and engineering and are we on our way back to a more comprehensive political economy approach, in which both quantitative and qualitative variables are taken into account? I believe we are. Does that make us less scientific, as argued by Robbins? I am not questioning whether the quantification of economic relationships is important. It is . In the case of food policy analysis, it is critically

important that the causal relationship between policy options and expected impact on the population groups of interest is quantitatively estimated. But not at the expense of reality, context, and ethical considerations, much of which can be described only in qualitative terms. Economic analyses that ignore everything that cannot be quantified and included in our models are not likely to advance our understanding of economic and policy relationships. Neither will they be relevant for solving real world problems. The predictive ability is likely to be low and, if the results are used by policy makers, the outcome may be different from what was expected.

Deontology is essential for the maintenance of international human rights because it restricts the practice of justifying the actions of the government by the ends achieved, creating what is essentially a humane international order.
Thomas Donaldson, 1995 (Prof. of Business Ethics at Georgetown U, Ethics and International Affairs, International Deontology Defended: A Response to Russell Hardin, pg. 147-154) It may appear that I am defending Kantian deontology as a comprehensive moral language to use in interpreting international events. But I mean not to assert that Kantian deontology is sufficient, only that it is necessary. Such a perspective contributes fundamental, often neglected, insights. First it provides a moral grounding for any rights-based approach to international affairs. This includes not only the general interpretation of international policy through broad notions of human rights, but also the application of specific rights such as those found in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Indeed, most contemporary rights-based theories are deontological theories.
Rights are principles that assign claims or entitlements to someone against someone and are usually interpreted as trumping or taking precedence over consequential claims made in the name of collective welfare.4 Hence, both in their similarity of form (as a principle universally applicable to relevantly similar situations) and in their similarity of function (as taking precedence over collective, consequential considerations), rights satisfy two key Kantian-deontological criteria. Second , Kantianism entails

clear restrictions on the general behavior of states. Of greatest importance is the fact that these restrictions alert us to the danger of letting the ends justify the means. Whatever the flaws of the Kantian deontological tradition, and no matter what verdict we finally reach on the comprehensiveness of deontological moral logic, the insistence on principle over mere calculation of future consequences stands as deontologys practical raison detre. Deontology may not be sufficient, but it is necessary for a humane international order.

Certain premises have an intrinsic moral value that comes before consequences of actions. Evaluating consequences first puts our fate and the fate of the masses in the hands of
belligerent others. Igor Primoratz in 05 (Principal Research Fellow @ Center for Applied Philosophy amd Public Ethics, The Philosophical Forum, Volume 36, No. 1, Civilian Immunity in War, Spring, p. 44-46) Consequentialist thinkers usually present their view on civilian immunity against the background of a critique of attempts of philosophers and legal thinkers to account for civilian immunity in deontological terms. Having satisfied themselves that those attempts have been unsuccessful, they put forward the claim that civilian immunity has nothing to do with civilians acts or omissions, guilt or innocence, responsibility or lack of it, but is merely a useful convention. It is useful since it rules out targeting a large group of human beings, and thus helps reduce greatly the overall killing, mayhem, and destruction in war. The consequentialist view of civilian immunity is exposed to two objections: the protection it offers to civilians is too weak, and the ground provided for it indicates a misunderstanding of the moral issue involved . The protection is too

Page 194 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

weak because civilian immunity is understood as but a useful convention. This makes it doubly weak. First, if it is merely a useful convention, if all its moral force is due to its utility, then it will have no such force in cases where it has no utility. This is a familiar flaw of consequentialism. It denies that moral rules have any intrinsic moral significance, and explains their binding force solely in terms of the good consequences of acting in accordance with them. Therefore it cannot give us any good consequentialist reason to adhere to a moral rule in cases where adhering to it will not have the good consequences it usually has, and where better consequences will be attained by going against the rule.6 This means that we should respect civilian immunity when, and only when, doing so will
have the good consequences adduced as its ground: when it will indeed reduce the overall killing, maiming, and destruction. On the other hand, whenever we have good reasons to believe that, by targeting civilians, we shall make a significant contribution to our war effort, thus shortening the war and reducing the overall killing and mayhem, that is what we may and indeed ought to do.

Civilian immunity is thus made hostage to the vagaries of war, instead of providing civilians with iron-clad protection against them. This is not a purely theoretical concern. As Kai Nielsen has pointed out, systematic attacks on civilians in the course of a war of national liberation can make an indispensable contribution to the successful prosecution of such a war. That was indeed the case in Algeria and South Vietnam, and may well have been the case in Angola and Mozambique as well. Then again, if civilian immunity is merely a useful convention, that weakens it by making it hostage to the stance taken by enemy political and military leadership. They may or may not choose to respect the immunity of our civilians. If they do not, on the consequentialist view of this immunity, we are not bound to respect the immunity of their civilians. Being a
convention, it binds only if, or as long as, it is accepted by both parties to the conflict. As an important statement of this view puts it, for convention-dependent obligations, what ones opponent does, what everyone is doing, etc., are facts of great moral importance. Such facts help to determine within what convention, if any, one is operating, and thus they help one discover what his moral duties are.8 To be sure, even if no such convention is in place, but we have reason to believe we can help bring about its acceptance by unilaterally acting in accordance with it and thereby encouraging the enemy to do the same, we should do that. But if we have no good reason to believe that, or if we have tried that approach and it has failed, our military are free to kill and maim enemy civilians whenever they feel they need to do that. Thus our moral choice is determined, be it

directly or ultimately, by the moral (or immoral) choice of enemy political and military leaders. So is the fate of enemy civilians. The fact that they are civilians, in itself, counts for nothing. This brings me to the second objection: The consequentialist misses what anyone else, and in particular any civilian in wartime, would consider the crux of the matter. Faced with the prospect of being killed or maimed by enemy fire, a civilian would not make her case in terms of disutility of killing or maiming civilians in war in general, or of killing or maiming her then and there. She would rather point out that she is a civilian, not a soldier; a bystander, not a participant; an innocent, not a guilty party. She would point out that she has done nothing to deserve, or become liable to, such a fate. She would present these personal facts as considerations whose moral significance is intrinsic and decisive, rather than instrumental and fortuitous, mediated by a useful convention (which, in different circumstances, might enjoin limiting war by targeting only civilians). And her argument, couched in personal terms, would seem to be more to the point than the impersonal calculation of good and bad consequences by means of which the consequentialist would settle the matter.

Recognizing rights and putting them before a utilitarian calculus is the only rational and
moral option. H. L. A. Hart in 79 (former principal of Oxford University, Tulane Law Review, The Shell Foundation Lectures, 1978-1979: Utilitarianism and Natural Rights, April, 53 Tul. L. Rev. 663, l/n) Accordingly, the contemporary modern philosophers of whom I have spoken, and preeminently Rawls in his Theory of Justice, have argued that any morally adequate political philosophy must recognise that there must be, in any morally tolerable form of social life, certain protections for the freedom and basic interests of individuals which constitute an essential framework of individual rights. Though the pursuit of the general welfare is indeed a legitimate and indeed necessary concern of governments, it is something to be pursued only within certain constraints imposed by recognition of such rights. The modern philosophical defence put forward for the recognition of basic
human rights does not wear the same metaphysical or conceptual dress as the earlier doctrines of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Rights of Man, which men were said to have in a state of nature or to be endowed with by their creator. Nonetheless, the most complete and articulate version of this modern critique of Utilitarianism has many affinities with the theories of social contract which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accompanied the doctrine of natural rights. Thus Rawls has argued in A Theory of Justice that though any rational person must know that in order to live

Page 195 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

even a minimally tolerable life he must live within a political society with an ordered government, no rational person bargaining with others on a footing of [*679] equality could agree to regard himself as bound to obey the laws of any government if his freedom and basic interests, what Mill called "the groundwork of human existence," were not given protection and treated as having priority over mere increases in aggregate welfare even if the protection cannot be absolute.

Page 196 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Deontological principles of rights should be considered first other interpretations are assigned no moral value if conflicting with the principles of rights because viewing the debate from a deontological perspective is the only way to guarantee freedom
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

The priority of right asserts then that the reasons supplied by moral motives-principles of right and their institutional requirements-have absolute precedence over all other considerations. As such, moral motives must occupy a separate dimension in practical reasoning. Suppose then a supplementary stage of practical reasoning, where the interests and pursuits that figure into ordinary deliberation and which define our conception of the good are checked against principles of right and justice. At this stage of reasoning, any ends that directly conflict with these moral principles (e.g., racist ends or the wish to dominate others ), or whose pursuit would
undermine the efficacy of principles of right (e.g., desires for unlimited accumulation of wealth whatever the consequences for

are assigned no moral value, no matter how intensely felt or important they may otherwise be . Being without moral value, they count for nothing in deliberation. Consequently, their pursuit is prohibited or curtailed by the priority given to principles of right. The priority of right then describes the hierarchical subordination in practical deliberation of the desires,
others), interests, and plans that define a person's rational good, to the substantive demands of principles of right.32 Purposes and pursuits that are incompatible with these principles must be abandoned or revised. The same idea carries through to social and political deliberations on the general good. In political deliberative procedures, the priority of right means that desires and interests of individuals or groups that conflict with the institutional requirements of principles of right and justice have no legitimate claim to satisfaction, no matter how intense peoples' feelings or how large the majority sharing these aims. Constitutional restrictions on majority rule exhibit the priority of right. In democratic procedures, majorities cannot violate constitutional rights and procedures to promote, say, the Christian religion, or any other aspect of their good that undermines others' basic rights and opportunities. Similarly, the institutional requirements of Rawls's difference principle limit, for example, property owners' desires for tax exemptions for capital gains, and the just savings principle limits current majorities' wishes to deplete natural resources. These desires are curtailed in political contexts, no matter how intense or widely held, because of the priority of principles of right over individual and general good.33 The priority of right enables Rawls to define a notion of admissible conceptions of the good: of those desires, interests and plans of life that may legitimately be pursued for political

Only admissible conceptions of the good establish a basis for legitimate claims in political procedures (cf. TJ, p. 449). That certain desires and pursuits are permissible, and political claims based on them are legitimate, while others are not, presupposes antecedently established principles of right and justice. Racist conceptions of the good are not
purposes. politically admissible; actions done in their pursuit are either prohibited or discouraged by a just social scheme, and they provide no basis for legitimate claims in political procedures. Excellences such as knowledge, creativity, and aesthetic contemplation are permissible ends for individuals so long as they are pursued in accordance with the constraints of principles of right. Suppose these perfectionist principles state intrinsic values that it is the duty of everyone to pursue. (Rawls leaves this question open. cf.

Still, they cannot supply a basis for legitimate political claims and expectations; they cannot be appealed to in political contexts to justify limiting others' freedom, or even the coercive redistribution of income and wealth (cf. TJ, pp.
TJ, p. 328.) 331-32). This is because of the priority of right over the good. Now return to Kymlicka's argument. Kymlicka says both Rawls and utilitarians agree on the premise of giving equal consideration to everyone's interests, and that because utilitarians afford equal consideration, "they must recognize, rather than deny, that individuals are distinct persons with their own rightful claims. That is, in Rawls's classification, a position that affirms the priority of the right over the good" (LCC, p. 26). Since "Rawls treats the right as a spelling-out of the requirement that each person's good be given equal consideration," there is no debate between Rawls and utilitarians over the priority of the right or the good (LCC, p. 40). Deontology Good Comparative

By guiding social choice, deontology ultimately achieves the same result as utilitarianism without compromising the individual
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

Page 197 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The rights tradition and utilitarianism, the two grand opponents in American jurisprudence, clash on many different issues and fronts.235 There are, however, many ways to classify ethical theories, and in one crucial respect these two belong together. They seek the same kind of answer to the question of conflicting values. For its part, utilitarianism aspires to clear and unique answers for every question of public choice. If only we can determine the various utility functions of individuals affected by those

Utilitarianism employs a method for producing that absolute answer that threatens to obliterate the individual, and hence rights theories reject that method. In affirming the primacy of the individual , however, those theories do not abandon utilitarianism's ultimate objective to identify absolutesclear and definite answers-to guide social choice or to determine the constraints of justice. In this respect, such theories still live in utilitarianism's shadow.
decisions-a heroic assumption-the absolutely correct action will be known.

An action taken to maximize utility by a powerful entity like the government is illegitimate and immoral. Deontological moral law guides the individual to realize obligations he has to society and will ultimately solve for societys problems
Gauthier 2K PhD Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (Candace P)
Mill is especially helpful in responding to the communitarian critique of respect for autonomy because he is careful to emphasize

conception of liberty is neither selfish nor indifferent to the self-regarding behavior of others. Mill (1978 [1859], pp. 74-75) identifies a number of ways in which members of the community should influence each other toward the "selfregarding virtues," which include education, conviction, persuasion, encouragement, and advice. However, he rejects the coercion of the law and the overwhelming power of public opinion as illegitimate forms of control over self-regarding conduct
that his (Mill 1978 [1859], p. 9). The practical application of these principles from Kant and Mill does not require a concept of the self as

Kant's concept of the person, with the capacity for rational [End Page 340] is based on human freedom from natural forces, not our freedom from attachments and commitments to other persons or the influence our histories, traditions, and families have on our values, choices, and actions. Kant is pointing out
unencumbered or isolated in its decision making. agency, that we are neither like chairs, without the capacity for choice or action, nor like nonrational animals, whose actions are determined by instinct and the forces of nature. As persons, we are the products of our families, traditions, and communities. Yet, because we are persons, our actions may be the result of more than these influences. They may also be the result of our rational

our choices and actions are not supposed to be based simply on our own goals and ends. Rather, Kant believes that the moral law will lead us to recognize duties and obligations we have to others , for example, to respect and further their ends. Such obligations could certainly be directed toward the shared goals of the community as a whole. For Mill, even self-regarding choices and actions are properly subject to influence from others, for example through their natural reactions to an individual's self-destructive behavior. In fact, he advocates our responsibility to help each other ". . . distinguish the better from the worse . . ." through conviction, encouragement, persuasion, and education
capacities. Moreover, according to Kant, (Mill 1978 [1859], pp. 74-76). Furthermore, in the category of other-regarding behavior Mill includes the risk of damage not only to specific others, but to the society, as well (p. 80).

The utility of a society only has value when its individuals are treated with dignity. A free society that sacrifices some of its own individuals to prevent human extinction is morally corrupt.
Shue 89 Professor of Ethics and Public Life, Princeton University (Henry, Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint, pp. 141-2)

Given the philosophical obstacles to resolving moral disputes, there are at least two approaches one can take in dealing with the issue of the morality of nuclear strategy .
One approach is to stick doggedly with one of the established moral theories constructed by philosophers to rationalize or

Page 198 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

make sense of everyday moral intuitions, and to accept the verdict of the theory, whatever it might be, on the morality of nuclear weapons use.

A more pragmatic alternative approach assumes that trade-offs in moral values and principles are inevitable in response to constantly changing threats , and that the emergence of novel, unforeseen challenges may impel citizens of Western societies to adjust the way they rank their values and principles to ensure that the moral order survives. Nuclear weapons are putting just such a strain on our moral beliefs. Before the emergence of a nuclear-armed
communist state capable of threatening the existence of Western civilization, the slaughter of millions of innocent human beings to preserve Western values may have appeared wholly unjustifiable under any possible circumstances.

Today, however, it may be that Western democracies, if they are to survive as guardians of individual freedom, can no longer afford to provide innocent life the full protection demanded by Just War morality. It might be objected that the freedoms of Western society have value only on the assumption that human beings are treated with the full dignity and respect assumed
by Just War theory. Innocent human life is not just another value to be balanced side by side with others in moral calculations. It is

A free society based on individual rights that sanctioned mass slaughter of innocent human beings to save itself from extinction would be morally corrupt, no better than soviet society, and not worth defending. The only morally right and respectable policy for such a society would be to accept destruction at the hands of tyranny, if need be. This objection is partly right in that a society based on individual rights that
the raison detre of Western political, economic, and social institutions.

casually sacrifices innocent human lives for the sake of common social goods is a contradiction in terms. On the other hand, even Just War doctrine allows for the unintentional sacrifice of some innocent human life under certain hard-pressing circumstances. It is essentially a consequentialist moral doctrine that ascribes extremely high but not absolute value to innocent human life. The problem for any nonabsolute moral theory, of course, is where to draw the line.

Maintaining proper moral values is the only way to obtain a free society, which outweighs nuclear extinction
Shue 89 (Henry, Professor of Ethics and Public Life, Princeton University, Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint, pp. 134-5)
But is it realistic to suppose that American citizens would risk not just their own lives but their families and their nation in using nuclear weapons to save Western Europe and other free societies from Soviet domination, especially if the United States allies are not willing to risk nuclear destruction themselves? According to one 1984 poll, 74 percent of Americans queried believe the U.S. should not use nuclear weapons if the Russians invade Western Europe. Nuclear Protectionists, however, would reply that further public debate might convince more Americans that deterrence cannot be had on the moral cheap.

If the United States is determined to deter a Soviet attack on Europe, it must have a moral nuclear strategy that it is willing to implement. Without effective population defenses, such a strategy could require that the United States accept an unequal risk of nuclear destruction to ensure the survival of free society. In the extreme, this could mean that the United States must be willing to sacrifice itself for values higher than its own national survival. Thus, Nuclear Protectionism
views both Just War morality and national self-centered as unworkable foundations for U.S. security policy.

Living without freedom transcends nuclear war

Mohan 93 Professor at LSU (Brij, Eclipse Of Freedom, p. 3-4)

The ordeal of existence transcends the thermonuclear fever because the latter does not directly impact the day-to-day operations of the common people. The fear of crime, accidents, loss of job, and health care on the one hand; and the scourges of racism, sexism, and agism on the other hand have created a counterculture of denial and disbelief that has shattered the faade of civility. Civilization loses its significance when its social institutions have become counterproductive . It is the aspect of the mega-crisis that

Page 199 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

we are concerned about. The ordeal of existence, as I see it, has three relevant facets: Crisis of modernity, Contradictions of paradigms, Complexity of social phenomenon. Reinventing civility calls for an exposition of these elements without a vituperative intent. Each of these aspects has normative and structural dimension involving a host of theories. The politics, metaphors, and rhetoric, however, color the shape and substance of each analytical output. Therefore ,

a value-neutral assessment cannot be a politically correct statement on the human condition. A deontological framing maximizes the good by emphasizing rights and acting on an individualist basis
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

Many moral views can admit that right acts in some sense promote the good. In Kant, for example, all have a duty to promote the Realm of Ends; each person's doing so is, we might say, instrumental to realizing this ideal community. But here the goodness of this end is not an independent variable that is being promoted; this

good is just defined as the state of affairs in which conscientious moral agents all freely act on and from the moral law. By acting and willing according to this principle, all treat the humanity of others as an end in itself. Moreover, to say this good is "maximized" when everyone does his or her duty really adds nothing; and it misleads us as to the structure and content of Kant's principle of right. By contrast teleological views (1) define the good independent of any moral concepts; and then (2) define the right purely in instrumental terms of principles of expedience, i.e., as what most effectively and probably realizes the greatest amount of good. Both utilitarians and non-utilitarians respect the moral principle of equality and freedom. However, only deontology can meet this principle because it allows for individual decisions
Freeman 94 (Samuel, Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, , http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
Phillipa Foot has said that what makes consequentialism so compeling is "the rather simple thought that it can never be right to prefer a worse state of affairs to a better."5 But deontological theories, suitably construed, can account for this "simple thought" just as well (for reasons I discuss in Section VI). The force of consequentialism must then ie elsewhere: it embodies a powerful conception of practical reason. If we assume that rationality consists in maximizing an aggregate, and that in ethics it involves maximizing overall good, then we are able to say that there is a rational choice between any two alternative actions, laws, or institutions. Therefore

under all conceivable conditions, there is a uniquely rational, hence right, thing to do. Granted, it may not be knowable by us, but the idea of maximizing the good provides a way to assign a truth value to any statement about what persons or groups ought to do. No other conception of rationality offers such practical completeness.
Sidgwick, well aware of the force of the idea of maximizing an aggregate, used it quite effectively to argue that hedonism must be true, and that rational egoism and utilitarianism were the only two "rational methods" in ethics.6 He could
not decide which of the two was more rational, but assuming that egoism is not a moral conception at all, then, given Sidgwick's premises, utilitarianism prevails without opposition. These introductory remarks supply background I later refer to. My aim is to elucidate the teleology/deontology distinction. I begin with the contention that teleological theories are not moral theories at all. Will Kymlicka argues that the teleological/deontological distinction relied on by Rawls and others is misleading. Not only does the morally right act not maximize the good; any view which defines the right in this way is not a moral conception.7 Right actions, Kymlicka says, concern our duties, and duties must be owed to someone. But if moral duty is defined as maximizing overall good, "Whom is it a duty to?" (LCC, p. 28). Kymlicka argues for the (Kantian) claim that morality concerns respect for persons, not the

Page 200 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

good impersonally construed. And the most credible moral conceptions, the only ones worth attending to, hold that "each person matters equally," and deserves equal concern and respect (LCC, p. 40). Kymlicka's aim here is not to attack teleological views, but to show that Rawls's teleological/deontological distinction cannot do the work Rawls wants; indeed it is "based on a serious confusion" (LCC, p. 21). For utilitarians, Kymlicka claims, are just as committed to equality, equal respect for persons, and fair distributions as everyone else. The difference is they interpret these abstract concepts differently. Here Kymlicka follows Ronald Dworkin's suggestion: "that Rawls and his critics all share the same 'egalitarian plateau': they agree that 'the interests of the members of the community matter, and matter equally"' (LCC, p. 21). Utilitarians like Hare and Harsanyi, non-utilitarians like

all accept that equal concern and respect is the fundamental moral principle. "All these theories are deontological in that they spell out an ideal of fairness or equality for distinct individuals " (LCC, p. 26). If so,
Rawls, Nozick, and Dworkin, and even many Perfectionists (Kymlicka mentions Marx), Kymlicka argues, the dispute between utilitarians and their critics cannot be depicted in terms of Rawls's misleading distinction, or in terms of the priority of the right or the good. At issue in these debates are different conceptions of the political value of equality. I shall argue (in Sections II and III) that Kymlicka, not Rawls, is culpable of "serious confusion." He

confuses deontology-a claim about the content of principles of right-with the principles that are invoked in justifying and applying the content of a moral view. Moreover, he confuses deontology
with a related idea, the priority of right. The priority of right has received a great deal of attention from Rawls's communitarian critics. This is surprising in view of the fact that Rawls has so little to say about it in Theory ofJustice.8

Deontology morality maximizes good to its fullest extent while utilitarianism is indifferent to distribution of good
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

It is perhaps a moral truism to say that people ought to do what they can to make the world as good a place as possible. But construed in a certain way, this becomes a highly controversial thesis
about morality: that the right act in any circumstance is one most conducive to the best overall outcome (as ascertained, say, from an impersonal point of view that gives equal weight to the good of everyone). This is Consequentialism.' More simply, it holds Right conduct maximizes the Good. G. E. Moore held this thesis self-evident. Non-consequentialists argue nothing could be

So far as they do, it appears (to consequentialists at least) they are committed to the indefensible idea that morality requires us to do less good than we are able to. John Rawls's teleological/deontological distinction is different. Teleo logical views affirm the consequentialist thesis that the Right maximizes the Good. But they hold an
further from the truth. additional thesis: "the good is defined independently from the right" (TJ, p. 24), or, as Rawls often says, independ ent of any moral concepts or principles.2 To see how this view differs from consequentialism, consider a thesis once proposed by T. M. Scanlon.3

A standard objection to consequentialist views like utilitarian ism is that they are indifferent to the distribution of the good; this is purportedly a necessary feature of such views, since they define right and justice as what maximizes overall, or aggregate, good . Scanlon argued there should be a way to incorporate distributive concerns into
a two-level consequentialist view. If we treat fairness or distributive equality as a good in itself, then it must be considered along with other goods like net aggregate satisfaction in determining the value of overall outcomes that are to be maximized. Rights could then be introduced at the level of casuistry, to promote the good of equitable states of affairs. The two-level consequentialist view Scanlon suggests would not be teleological on Rawls's account; it would be deontological. As Rawls says: If the distribution of goods is also counted as a good, perhaps a higher-order one, and the theory directs us to produce the most good (including the good of distribution among others) we no longer have a teleological view in the classical sense. The problem of distribution falls under the concept of right as one intuitively understands it, and so the theory lacks an independent definition of the good. (TJ, 27)

Evaluating morality through rights and justice is intrinsically good while utilitarianism denies humans of their basic rights
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

Page 201 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Rawls's thought may be this: in order to define the distributions (e.g., equal states of affairs) that are intrinsically good, and then practically apply this definition to determine what we ought to do, we must appeal to some process of distribution that can only be described by antecedent principles of right or justice. But once we do that, then it is no longer the case that the right is exclusively defined in terms of what maximizes the good . For example, suppose fairness or the equal capacity of persons to realize their good is among the intrinsic goods in a consequentialist view: we are to act in whatever ways best promote fairness or equality of capacity for all persons. It is difficult to see how such vague ends can be specified for practical purposes without appealing to principles or procedures defining peoples' equal basic rights, powers, and entitlements. But once this specification is incorporated into the maximand, the right is no longer simply a matter of maximizing the good . For the concept of the good itself, in this instance, cannot be described without an antecedent nonmaximizing moral principle of right: that people ought to be treated fairly, afforded certain basic rights and powers, and so on . Not only is such a view by Rawls's definition nonteleological; it is also not consequentialist if by this is meant that to maximize the good is the sole fundamental principle of right. Incorporating rights or other moral dictates into the maximand is incompatible with this very idea .4 Deontological morality promotes individualism, protecting humans from utilitarian obligations to society
Stelzig 98 Masters degree in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, obtained J.D. from University of Pennsylvania and is currently an attorney for the FCC (Tim, Deontology, Governmental Action, and the Distributive Exemption: How the Trolley Problem Shapes the Relationship between Rights and Policy, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 146, No. 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3312613)

Deontology is the theory of moral obligation, and, by connotation, encompasses moral theories that emphasize rights and duties. Put another way, deontological theories are those moral theories of a vaguely Kantian stripe. Kant held that one should "[a]ct in such a way that [one] always treat[s] humanity, whether in [one's] own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."22 It was not always so. When Jeremy Bentham,
one of utilitarianism's founders, first coined the word in 1814, "deontology" referred to the marshaling of self-interested reasons for agents to act for the general good. Essentially, this was a utilitarian theory of obligation, and was quite distinct from modern use. Modern-day deontologists focus much attention on rights .26 It might be thought that this focus is merely a preference, for rights are often taken to be correlative with duties. For example, where this relation holds, if I have a right not to be punched, you are under an obligation not to punch me, and conversely. Thus, deontology may be articulated through either related element. More generally, in theories holding that rights and duties are correlative, one may give an account of rights and then define duties by reference to rights; one may define rights in terms of an antecedent theoretic account of

Rights need not be completely correlative with duties.28 For example, take the notion of privileges, understood here as a subspecies of rights. The
duties; or one may give separate theoretic accounts of rights and duties.27

lone occupant of a small and isolated island presumably possesses a privilege to sing show-tunes at the top of her voice.2 This right, however, has no correlative obligation. It is not just that the island, being otherwise deserted, has no one in whom the obligation inheres. Rather, it is a structural feature of the example that no obligation not to interfere can exist. Introducing another person onto the island would destroy the privilege, for it would be immoral for the singer to subject another person to her showmanship without the other person's consent. Likewise, there may be obligations for which correlative rights do not exist. For example, one may be under an obligation to write letters to her grandfather without her grandfather having the right to receive letters written by his granddaughter.30 "Omissions" may also be understood as obligations for which there are no corresponding rights. If you may easily save somebody from great harm or death without substantial risk to yourself, a moral obligation exists to so help them.3l Most people, however, do not think that the victim has a right to your efforts.32 Although more could be said, my

whether or not one takes rights to be correlative with duties has implications for other aspects of moral theory. For the purposes of this Comment, there is no need to trace the contours of
point is that

deontology with precision. Thus, although it is a simplification, this Comment will focus only on rights. The ultimate goal, again, is

we may appeal to rights as a way of protecting ourselves against the demands of society. The next Part examines the nature of rights more closely.
to discover when

Page 202 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Humans should morally have a right to themselves and the right to their property the government is immoral to deny property rights regardless of their utilitarian intentions
Stelzig 98 Masters degree in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, obtained J.D. from University of Pennsylvania and is currently an attorney for the FCC (Tim, Deontology, Governmental Action, and the Distributive Exemption: How the Trolley Problem Shapes the Relationship between Rights and Policy, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 146, No. 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3312613)
Rights, for Dworkin, are understood functionally through their distributional character, and are distinguished from goals.40 Take first the distributional character of collective goals. These goals seek to achieve some particular, even if vaguely defined, distribution within the society.4' For example, Dworkin notes that economic efficiency is within a collective goal. Importantly, with respect to collective goals, "distributional principles are subordinate to some conception of aggregate collective good, so that offering less of some benefit to one [person] can be justified simply by showing that this will lead to a greater benefit overall."43

Rights, however, have a different distributional character. As Dworkin states: "If someone has a right to something, then it is wrong for the government to deny it to him even though it would be in the general interest to do so." 44 Put another way, the right is prior to the good. Thus, for Dworkin, "individual rights are political trumps held by individuals.
Hence, the collective goals of a community are appropriate fodder for consequentialist reasoning.

Page 203 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

*****MORALITY GOOD / BAD***** **Morality Good: Obligations, Moral Laws, etc** Moral justice vital sets us apart from animalistic tendencies Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003. Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, No. 3, Pg 12. Project MUSE.
Reasonableness, or the capacity for a sense of justice, is the ability to limit the pursuit of ones conception of the good out of a respect for the rights and interests of other people and out of a desire to cooperate with them on fair terms. A person who acts reasonably acts according to a principle of reciprocity: he seeks to give justice to those who can give justice in return (p. 447). The tight connection between reasonableness and autonomy is explained by Rawls in sec. 86 of Theory: the sense of justice . . . reveals what the person is, and to compromise it is not to achieve for the self free reign but to give way to the contingencies and accidents of the world (p. 503). When we act reasonably, says Rawls, we demonstrate an ability to subordinate the pursuit of our own good, which may be unduly influenced by the contingencies and accidents of the world, to those principles we would choose as members of the intelligible realmour reasonableness, in other words, is emblematic of our autonomy, our independence from natural and social contingencies. This explains our sense of shame when we fail to act reasonably: we behave then as if we were members of a lower order of animal , whose actions are determined by the laws of nature rather than the moral law (p. 225).

Moral law outweighs other considerations integral to human nature. Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003. Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, No. 3, Pg 13. Project MUSE.
The Priority of Right over the Good and the Priority of Justice over Welfare and Efficiency are both expressions of our nature as reasonable beings, i.e., beings able to act in conformity with, and out of respect for, the moral law. In Kants terms, to sacrifice justice for the sake of welfare or excellence of character would be to sacrifice what is of absolute value (the good will) for what is of merely relative value (its complements). Rawls himself makes the same strong connection between reasonableness and these two kinds of priority: But the desire to express our nature as a free and equal rational being can be fulfilled only by acting on the principles of right and justice as having first priority. . . . Therefore in order to realize our nature we have no alternative but to plan to preserve our sense of justice as governing our other aims. This sentiment cannot be fulfilled if it is compromised and balanced against other ends as but one desire among the rest (TJ, p. 503, emphasis added). Just as reasonableness is a key facet of our autonomy, so the priorities of right and justice are expressions of our reasonableness: we best indicate our commitment to guide our actions by the principles of justice by refusing to compromise those principles for the sake of our other ends.

Page 204 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Moral rationality key to sustainable decisionmaking avoids animalistic tendencies. Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003. Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31, No. 3, Pg 14. Project MUSE.
Rationality is our capacity for a conception of the good, which we pursue through a plan of life. We schedule, prioritize, temper, and prune our desires in accordance with this plan; rather than living from impulse to impulse, as other animals do, we arrange the pursuit of our interests and ends according to a coherent scheme (secs. 6364). Now, given what was said in the previous subsection, one may find it difficult to see the connection between rationality, so defined, and autonomy: if our desires are largely the product of natural and social contingencies, then how can acting in accordance with a plan to advance them be an aspect of our autonomy? In other words, if rationality is merely the slave of the passions, 11 and these passions are the result of such contingencies, then how can rationality possibly express our nature as free and equal beings? According to Rawls, however, rationality is much more than a slave of the passions. The exercise of rationality involves a clear distancing from ones immediate desires, as Rawls indicates in the following passage: The aim of deliberation is to find that plan which best organizes our activities and influences the formation of our subsequent wants so that our aims and interests can be fruitfully combined into one scheme of conduct . Desires that tend to interfere with other ends, or which undermine the capacity for other activities, are weeded out; whereas those that are enjoyable in themselves and support other aims as well are encouraged.12 The image of rationality here is active, not passive. Rather than being haplessly driven on by the dominant desires, rationality exercises authority over them: rationality elevates some desires and lays low others; it integrates retained desires into one scheme of conduct; and it even shapes the development of future desires. Far from being a slave of desire, rationality is its master. This conception of rationality is consistent with at least one reading of Kants idea of practical reason as applied to the pursuit of happiness: H. J. Paton notes that prudential reasoning in Kants moral theory involves a choice of ends as well as means and a subsequent maximum integration of ends. 13

Utilitarianism fails to take into account prima facie rights moral resolution of conflicts necessary. McCloskey, professor of philosophy. 1986. HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. Pg 133.
The theory of prima facie human rights that is outlined here is one in terms of prima facie rights, many of which are rights of recipience, in which the rights create obligations and claims that collide with one another and with the moral demands created by other values. Many of these conflicts are to be resolved without reference, or with only negative reference, to consequences. When the consequences do enter seriously into the resolution of the conflicts, the solution arrived at is often very different from that which would be dictated by utilitarian considerations. The points made in the preceding section may be illustrated by reference to conflicts of prima facie human rights such as the right to life, viewed as a right of recipience, the right to moral autonomy and integrity- and values such as pleasure and happiness, and the absence of pain and suffering. A consideration of the morally rightful resolution of such conflicts brings out the inadequacy of the utilitarian calculus as a basis for determining the morally right response to such situations and conflicts.

Failure to satisfy moral obligations leads to violent backlash. Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992 Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press. Pgs 188-189.

Page 205 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

How can we absorb this idea into the conceptual scheme developed so far? Morality, as I have described it, is a feature of agents - their motives, dispositions to fed guilt - and of the attitudes of the generality of other persons toward agents - approval or disapproval of them. In my account nothing has been said about the patients, the targets of the behavior of agents. I now suggest that we should extend our description of moral codes, to include something about patients. First. patients may have a disposition to resent infringements of the rules we have been talking about when these impinge on them, when they are the parties injured. or deprived. or threatened. Of course, people tend to resent any deliberate injury . so this reaction is not specific to rules of rights.10 Second, persons who resent it when they are injured or deprived in one of these ways or even when they are threatened because of the nonexistence of institutions able to protect them, may also be inclined not to feel ashamed or embarrassed to protest on their own behalf. This feature need not occur, and in societies in which individuals have felt it is their place to be downtrodden, ill-treated, and so on, it was not the case. Of course there are several levels of this. The first is expression of resentment to the injuring party. A second level is public protest, or joining in a public protest, calling attention to the situation and inviting sympathy and support, particularly for the institution of legal devices for prevention of what has occurred or redress or punishment when it already has occurred. A third level is that of passive disobedience, lack of cooperation, perhaps nonviolent economic pressure that causes inconvenience or discomfort on behalf of a cause. Finally there is violent action, willingness to cause personal or property damage, in order to bring about a change in those who are infringing moral obligations or to bring about legal institutions to prevent or punish such infringements. Presumably the level of protest will normally correlate with the strength of the obligation being infringed and the seriousness of the damage or threat. The practice of company stores might elicit one level of protest, the practice of lynch law on members of a racial minority quite another.

Page 206 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Morality Bad**

Ethics is structurally flawed, in that it implies a transgression Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics of the Real, p. 95-96)

This is why we propose to maintain the concept of the act developed by Kant, and to link it to the thematic of overstepping of boundaries, of transgression, to the question of evil. It is a matter of acknowledging the fact that any (ethical) act precisely in so far as it is an act, is necessarily evil. We must specify, however, what is meant here by evil. This is the evil that belongs to the very structure of the act, to the fact that the latter always implies a transgression, a change in what is. It is not a matter of some empirical evil, it is the very logic of the act which is denounced as radically evil in every ideology. The fundamental ideological gesture consists in providing an image for this structural evil. The gap opened by an act (i.e. the unfamiliar, out-of-place effect of an act) is immediately linked in this ideological gesture to an image. As a rule this is an image of suffering, which is then displayed to the public alongside this question: Is this what you want? And this question already implies the answer: It would be impossible, inhuman, for you to want this! Here we have to insist on theoretical rigour, and separate this (usually fascinating) image exhibited by ideology from the source of uneasiness from the evil which is not an undesired, secondary effect of the good but belongs, on the contrary, to its essence. We could even say that the ethical ideology struggles against evil because this ideology is hostile to the good, to the logic of the act as such. We could go even further here: the current saturation of the social field by ethical dilemmas (bioethics, environmental ethics, cultural ethics, medical ethics) is strictly correlative to the repression of ethics, that is, to an incapacity to think ethics in its dimension of the Real, an incapacity to conceive of ethics other than simply as a set of restrictions to yet another aspect of modern society: to the depression which seems to have became the social illness of our time and to set the tone of the resigned attitude of the (post)modern man of the end of history. In relation to this, it would be interesting to reaffirm Lacans thesis according to which depression isnt a state of the soul, it is simply a moral failing, as Dante, and even Spinoza, said: a sin, which means a moral weakness. It is against this moral weakness or cowardice [lachete morale] that we must affirm the ethical dimension proper. The ideology of good and evil is inherently flawed Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics of the Real, p. 90-91)

The first difficulty with this concept of diabolical evil lies in its very definition: that diabolical evil would occur if we elevated opposition to the moral law to the level of a maxim (a principle or law). What is wrong with this definition? Given the Kantian concept of the moral law which is not a law that says do this or do that, but an enigmatic law which only commands us to do our duty, without ever naming it the following objection arises: if the opposition to the moral law were elevated to a maxim or principle, it would no longer be an opposition to the moral law, it would be the moral law itself. At this level no opposition is possible. It is not possible to oppose oneself to the moral law at the level of the (moral) law. Nothing can oppose itself to the moral law on principle that is, for non-pathological reasons without itself becoming a moral law. To act without allowing pathological incentives to influence our actions is to do good. In relation to this definition of the good, (diabolical) evil would

Page 207 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

then have to be defined as follows: it is evil to oppose oneself, without allowing pathological incentives to influence ones actions, to actions which do not allow any pathological incentives to influence ones actions. And this is simply absurd. The real drive behind ethics is desire, not the will to do good Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics of the Real, p. 3-4) Kants second break with the tradition, related to the first, was his rejection of the view that ethics is concerned with the distribution of the good (the service of goods in Lacans terms). Kant rejected an ethics based on my wanting what is good for others, provided of course that their good reflects my own. It is true that Lacans position concerning the status of the ethics of desire continued to develop. Hence his position in Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis) differs on several points from the one he adopted in Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis). That the moral law, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state is a judgment which, had it been pronounced in Seminar VII, would have had the value of a compliment; clearly this is no longer the case when it is pronounced in Seminar XI. Yet even though the later Lacan claims that the analysts desire is not a pure desire, this does not mean that the analysts desire is pathological (in the Kantian sense of the word), nor that the question of desire has lost its pertinence. To put the matter simply, the question of desire does not so much lose its central place as cease to be considered the endpoint of analysis. In the later view analysis ends in another dimension, that of the drive. Hence as the concluding remarks of Seminar XI have it before this dimension opens up to the subject, he must first reach and then traverse the limit within which, as desire, he is bound.

Morality is a demand for the impossible as it is based on our desires Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics of the Real, p. 3) Kant is admired by Lacan above all for his break, at two crucial points, with traditional ethics. The first is his break with the morality that spelled out obligations in terms of the possibility of fulfilling them . According to Lacan, the crucial point here is that morality as such, as Kant well knew, is a demand for the impossible: the impossibility in which we recognize the topology of our desire. By

insisting on the fact that the moral imperative is not concerned with what might or might not be done, Kant discovered the essential dimension of ethics: the dimension of desire, which circles around the real qua impossible. This dimension was
excluded from the purview of traditional ethics, and could therefore appear to it only as an excess. So Kants crucial first step involves taking the very thing excluded from the traditional field of ethics, and turning it into the only legitimate territory for ethics. If critics often criticize Kant for demanding the impossible, Lacan attributes an incontestable theoretical value to this Kantian demand.

Page 208 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Ethics is merely a tool by which personal morals are imposed on others, which is the root of discontent in society Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics of the Real, p. 1) The Freudian blow to philosophical ethics can be summarized as follows: what philosophy calls the moral law and, more precisely, what Kant calls the categorical imperative is in fact nothing other than the superego. This judgment provokes an effect of disenchantment that calls into question any attempt to base ethics on foundations other than the pathological. At the same time, it places ethics at the core of what Freud called das Unbehagen in der Kultur. the discontent or malaise at the heart of civilization . In so far as it has its origins in the constitution of the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a

convenient tool for any ideology which may try to pass off its own commandments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and honourable inclinations of the subject. This thesis, according to which the moral law is nothing but
the superego, calls, of course, for careful examination, which I shall undertake in Chapter 7 below.

It is impossible to determine whether an action is truly ethical or not Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics of the Real, p. 16-17) By spelling things out in this way we can see clearly that the ethical is, in fact, essentially a supplement. Let us, then, begin with the first level (the legal). The content of action (its

matter), as well as the form this content, are exhausted in the notion of in conformity with duty. As long as I do my duty nothing remains to be said. The fact that the act that fulfils my duty may have been done exclusively for the sake of this duty would change nothing at level of analysis. Such an act would be entirely indistinguishable from an act done simply in accord with duty, since their results would be exactly the same. The significance of acting (exclusively) for the
sake of duty will be visible only on the second level analysis, which we will simply call the level form. Here we come across a form which is no longer the form of anything, of some content of other, yet it is not so much an empty form as form outside content, a form that provides form only for itself. In other words, we confronted here with a supply which at the same time seems to be pure waste, something that serves absolutely no purpose.

Ethics in terms of attempts to do something good only re-entrenches the presence of the omnipresent evil Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics of the Real, p. 86) The theme of radical evil is currently something of a hot topic, and Kant, as a theoretician of radical evil, is subject to very diverse and sometimes contradictory readings. In his book, LEthique Alain Badiou points out that the topic of radical evil has become a spectre raised by

ethical ideologists every time a will to do something (good) appears. Every positive project is capable of being undermined in advance on the grounds that it might bring about an even greater evil. Ethics would thus be reduced to only one function: preventing evil, or at least lessening it. It

Page 209 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

seems that such an ethics of the lesser evil is justified in its reference to Kant. The criticism of Kant according to which he defined the criteria of the (ethical) act in such a way that one can never satisfy them goes as far back as Hegel. From this point it follows that all our actions are

necessarily bad, and that one can remain pure only if one chooses not to act at all. In this perspective, good does not exist, whereas evil is omnipresent. People already realize they have a moral obligation but dont actually follow them or treat them as anything but another obligation
Leiter
1997

(Brian, Professor at the University of Chicago, Princeton University; JD, 1987, PhD (philosophy Nietzsche and the Morality Critics, Chicago Journals) MF
Morality's purportedly threatening notion of "obligation," for ex-ample, is constructed by Williams entirely from the works of Kant and Ross, with no gesture at showing what relation their philosophically refined notions of "obligation" bear to those in play in

people treat "moral obligations] [as] inescapable" (ELP, p. 177) and that they accept the idea that "only an obligation can beat an obligation" (ELP, p. 180)? Surely the evidence is not in the way people actually live, in the way they actually honor-or, more often, breach-their moral obligations, a point Nietzsche well understood.'7 What is the evidence that, in our relativistic culture, individuals think that "moral obligation applies to people even if they do not want it to" (ELP, p. 178)? Even Williams,
ordinary life. Yet where is the evidence, one might ask, that real

in leading up to the specter of morality dominating life, says that "the thought can gain a footing (I am not saying that it has to) that I could be better employed than in doing something I am under no [moral] obligation to do, and, if I could be, then I ought to be" (ELP, p. 181, emphasis added). But surely this "thought" might only gain a footing for Kant or Ross, or some other philosopher

It is a pure philosopher's fantasy to think that real people in the moral culture at large find themselves overwhelmed by this burdensome sense of moral obliga- tion. Like the other Morality
who followed out to its logical conclusion a deontological theory.

Critics, Williams writes as though he is attacking "morality," when what he is really attacking is "morality" as conceived, systematized, and refined by philosophers. Such a critique may be a worthy endeavor, but it is far different from worrying about the "dangers" of ordinary morality as understood-unsystematically and inchoately-by ordinary people. What, then, distinguishes a Morality Critic from a Theory Critic if both are ultimately talking about moral theory? Roughly, the idea is this: for the former,

Theory (in the technical sense) is the heart of the problem, not part of the solution. These points are well illustrated in Stocker's well-known paper "The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories."'8 Stocker argues that "if we ... embody in our motives, those various things which recent ethical theories hold to be ultimately good or right, we will, of necessity, be unable to have those motives" (p. 461) and thus be unable to realize the associated goods (e.g.,
there is always room, in principle, for a better theory to thwart the criticsm, while for the latter,

friendship, love, pleasure). Stocker claims, however, that a suitable ethical theory must be one in which reasons and motives can be brought into harmony, such that one can be moved to act by what the theory identifies as "good" or "right." Stocker's point isn't, then, that theorizing in ethics is a misguided enterprise; it's just that we need better theories, ones in which theoretical reasons can also serve as motives for action. Like a Morality Critic, Stocker holds that adherence to morality as it is (read: moral theory as it is) is incom-patible with having the motives requisite for certain personal goods ("love, friendship, affection, fellow feeling, and community," p. 461); unlike a Theory Critic, he allows, or at least implies, that a better (i.e., nonschizophrenic) theory could solve the problem.'9

Ethics fails to take into account human nature and therefore does not allow the individual to embrace oneself. Instead, it forces a model that is not grounded in humanity and actually alienates human life
(Christine, Associate Professor President, NASS Chair, Equity Committee, CPA Member of the Team CPA B.A. Concordia, M.A. Universit de Montral, Doctoral studies Brock University, Nietzsche: Virtue Ethics.. Virtue Politics,Project Muse) MF

Daiger 2006

Page 210 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Nietzsche does indeed share the critical program of virtue ethicists. His attacks against the traditional view of morality and the nihilism he proposes make clear that, for him, traditional morality is alienating to any human life. In The Gay Science he says: In
In this section, I will delineate Nietzsches own brand of virtue ethics. It should be clear that the main all those moral systems are distasteful to me which say: Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome thyself!On the other hand I am favorable to those moral systems which stimulate me to do something, and to do it again from morning till evening, to dream of it at night, and think of nothing else but to do it well, as well as is possible for me alone! [. . .] I do not like any of the negative virtues whose very essence is negation and self-renunciation (304). Elsewhere, in Twilight of the Idols,

he talks about a sin of morality: The most general formula at the basis of every religion and morality is: Do this and thisand you will be happy! Otherwise. . . . Every morality, every religion is this imperativeI call it the great original sin of reason, immortal unreason (Errors 2). Nietzsches view of traditional morality can
be found throughout his writings; however, I think these quotations are satisfactory for our purpose. These two clarify the spirit with which Nietzsche approaches morality.

The problem with traditional morality is that it does not take into consideration human nature. It does not look at the individual as he is and aim to embrace what he is but, rather, aims to impose a model on him that has no ground in the reality of the human. This model is of a transcendent nature and does not fit the immanent nature of the human being. Philosophers provided ethics as a rational foundation for thought and moral responsibility but never really quested or compared them, only when questioned can they actually be considered Walter Kaufmann 1980
From Shakespeare to Existentialism http://taimur.sarangi.info/text/kaufmann_nietzsche.htm One should own up in all strictness what is still necessary here for a long time to come, what alone is justified so far: to collect material, to conceptualize and arrange a vast realm of subtle feelings of value and differences of value which are alive, grow, beget, and perish - and perhaps attempts to present vividly some of the more frequent and recurring forms of such living crystallizations - all to prepare a typology of morals. To be sure: so far one has not been so modest. With a stiff seriousness that inspires laughter, all our philosophers demanded

something far more exalted, presumptuous, and solemn from themselves as soon as they approached the study of morality: they wanted to supply a rational foundation for morals; and every philosopher so far has believed that he has provided such a foundation. Moral ity itself, however, was accepted as "given." How remote from their coarse pride was that task which they considered insignificant and left in dust and dirt - the task of description, although the subtlest fingers and senses can scarcely be subtle enough for it. Because our moral philosophers knew the facts of morality only very approximately in arbitrary extracts or in accidental epitomes - for example, as the morality of their environment, their class,
their church, their time, their climate and part of the world - because they were poorly informed and not even very curious about different peoples, ages, and the past, they never laid eyes on the real problems of morality; for

these emerge only when we com pare many moralities. In all previous studies of morality one thing was lacking, strange as that may sound: the prob lem of morality itself; what was lacking was the suspicion that there was anything at all problematic here. What
the philosophers called "a rational foundation for morality" and tried to supply was, properly considered, only a scholarly variation of a common faith in the prevalent morality; a new means of expression of this faith; in short, itself simply another feature of, or rather another fact within, a particular morality; indeed, in the last analysis, a kind of denial that this morality might ever be considered problematic certainly the very opposite of an examination, analysis, questioning, and vivisection of this very faith.

Page 211 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Ethics is a faade, a back bone by which western philosophers could bounce contrived ideas, ethics as a whole must be questioned to critique the culture that creates it instead of the inconsequential rationalizations Walter Kaufmann 1980
From Shakespeare to Existentialism http://taimur.sarangi.info/text/kaufmann_nietzsche.htm Nietzsche revolutionized ethics by asking new questions. As he saw it, his predecessors had simply taken for granted that they knew what was good and what was evil. Moral judgments had been accepted as incontrovertible facts, and the philosophers had considered it their task to find reasons for them. In other words, traditional

moral philosophers made it their business to rationalize the moral idiosyncrasies of their environment. What F. H. Bradley was to say of metaphysics in his Preface
to Appearance and Reality (1891) is what Nietzsche said in effect of traditional ethics: it is "the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.'" But Nietzsche would not have added like Bradley that "to find these reasons is no less an instinct.'" Nor, indeed, did he consider moral idiosyncrasies instinctive in any literal sense. Far from construing them as part of our biological make-up, Nietzsche was struck by the great variety of moral views in different times and places.To cite Nietzsche's Zarathustra ("On Old and New Tablets," 2): "When I came

to men I found them sitting on an old conceit: the conceit that they have long known what is good and evil for man. All talk of virtue seemed an old and weary matter to man; and whoever wanted to sleep well still talked of good and evil before going to sleep." With Nietzsche, our common moral valuations are suddenly considered questionable, and ethics, instead of being a matter of inconsequential rationalizations, becomes a critique of culture, a vivisection of modem man. Morality is complex Blanket claims that we need to save people in poverty prevent us from making rational choices Stubbs, 81
(Anne, @ the U of Combridge, "The Pros and Cons of Consequentialism," Oct, Philosophy, Vol. 56, No. 218 (Oct., 1981), pp. 497-516, jstor, AD: 6/30/09) jl There is a common criticism of absolutism which, if sound, could be taken to demonstrate its irrationality. It is that the absolutist refuses to consider the details of particular cases and insists instead on the automatic application of a blanket rule; he thus fails, it is said, to 'take each case on its merits'. Now there may be absolutist positions which are vulnerable to this kind of objection; for example, the position that one is never justified in taking a human life, whatever the circumstances. Someone might reasonably object that there are moral distinctions to be made over which this view simply rides rough-shod. Someone may kill a fellow human being in many different circumstances and for many different reasons; for personal gain of some kind; to put a loved one out of his misery; in self-defence; in just war or revolution; as retribution; and so on. Surely it would be irrational, if not absurd, to insist on making the same moral judgment about all these cases. However, even if this is correct, it is a count against only some absolutist positions, not against all. It is commonly assumed that the absolutist must operate with some highly general, exceptionless rules; but this is not an accurate picture of the kind of absolutism of which I have been speaking throughout this paper. I have spoken, not so much of moral rules, but of specific moral notions, concepts, or categories-murder, courage, cowardice, honesty, loyalty, etc.; and I have maintained that these operate as fundamental in moral assessment, in the sense that their applicability to a particular action will often be morally decisive, and, for some of them, will always be so.14 Let us consider the example of murder, which is a notion the applicability of which to an action is always morally decisive. My absolutist claims, not that killing can never be justified, but that murder can never be justified; and he will not classify all cases of killing as cases of murder. Thus it is simply not true that he does not have to investigate the details of a particular case; indeed it is only through such an investigation that he can be in a position to decide whether or not the action in question is properly classifiable as 'murder'. Further-more, he will take into account many features of the situation not con-sidered relevant by the consequentialist, for

Page 212 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

example, the agent's motive for the killing. Indeed, it could be maintained that the consequentialist's claim to consider each case 'on its merits' is vitiated by his extremely restricted conception of where these merits must lie. I maintain that it is he, with his exclusive concentration upon consequences, who abstracts from morally relevant features of particular cases. Again, this is a point to which I will return. Thus, if readiness to pay attention to the details of individual cases be a test of rationality, my absolutist passes it with his colours flying rather more conspicuously than those of the supporters of consequentialism; they, after all, have theformula.

Page 213 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**Ethical Action & Legality Mutually Exclusive** Ethical action cant be based on the legal and illegal Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics of the Real, p. 12)

We might say that the ethical dimension of an action is supernumerary to the conceptual pair legal/illegal. This in turn suggests a structural connection with the Lacanian notion of the Real. As Alain Badiou has noticed, Lacan conceives of the Real in a way that removes it from the logic of the apparently mutually exclusive alternatives of the knowable and the unknowable. The unknowable is just a type of the knowable; it is the limit or degenerate case of the knowable; where the Real belongs to another register entirely. Analogously, for Kant the illegal still falls within the category of legality they both belong to the same register, that of things conforming or failing to conform with duty. Ethics to continue the analogy escapes this register. Even though an ethical act will conform with duty, this by itself is not and cannot be what makes it ethical. So the ethical cannot be situated within the framework of the law and violations of the law. Again, in relation to legality, the ethical always presents a surplus or excess. Ethical action and legality cannot be related Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics of the Real, p. 14-16) But then, what exactly is at stake, what is this pure form? First of all, it is clear that the form in question cannot be the form of the matter, simply because Kant situates the legal and the ethical in two different registers. Hence matter and form, the legal and the ethical, are not two different aspects of one and the same thing. Despite this, several commentators have suggested the following solution to the Kantian problem of form: every form has a content associated with it; we are always and only dealing with a form and a content. So, in this view, if

we are to decide whether an act is ethical or not, we simply have to know which in fact determines our will: if it is the form, our actions are pathological; if it is the form, they are ethical. This
indeed, would rightly be called formalism but it not what Kant is aiming at this his use of the concept of pure form. First of all we should immediately note that the label formalism is more appropriate for what Kant calls legality. In terms of legality, all that matters is whether or not an action conform with duty the content of such an action, the real motivated for this conformity, is ignored; it simply does not matter. But the ethical, unlike the legal, does in fact

present a certain claim concerning the content of the will. Ethics demands not only that an action conform with duty, but also that this conformity be the only content or motive of that action.
Thus Kants emphasis on form is in an attempt to disclose a possible drive for ethical action. Kant is saying that form has to come to occupy the position formerly occupied by matter, that form itself has to function as a drive. Form itself must be appropriated as a material surplus, in order for it to be capable of the will. Kants point, I repeat, is not that all traces materiality have to be purged from the determining ground of the moral will but, rather, that the form of the moral law has itself become material, in order for it to function as a motive force of action. As result of this we can see that there are actually two different problems to be resolved, mysteries to be cleared up, concerning the possibility of a pure ethical act. The

Page 214 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

first is the one we commonly associate with Kantian ethics. How is it possible to reduce or eliminate all the pathological motives or incentives of our actions? How can a subject disregard

all self-interest, ignore the pleasure principle, all concerns with her own well-being and the wellbeing of those close to her? What kind of a monstrous, inhuman subject does Kantian ethics
presuppose? This line of questioning is related to the issue of the infinite purification of the subjects will, with its logic of no matter how far you have come one more effort will always be required. The second question that must be dealt with concerns what we might call the ethical transubstantiation required by Kants view: the question of the possibility of converting a mere form into a materially efficacious drive. This second question is, in my view, the more pressing of the two, because answering it would automatically provide an answer to the first question as well. So how can something which is not in itself pathological (i.e. which has nothing to do with the representation of pleasure or pain, the usual mode of subjects casuality) nevertheless become the cause or drive of a subjects actions? The question here is no longer that of a purification of motives and incentives. It is much more radical : how can form become matter, how can something which, in the subjects universe, does not qualify as a cause, suddenly become a cause? This is the real miracle involved in ethics. The crucial question of Kantian ethics is thus not how can we eliminate all the pathological elements of will, so that only the pure form of duty remains? but rather, how can the pure form of duty itself function as a pathological element, that is, as an element capable of assuming the role of the driving force or incentive of our actions?. If the latter were actually to take place if the pure form of duty were actually to operate as a motive (incentive or drive) for the subject we would no longer need to worry about the problems of the purification of the will and the elimination of all pathological motives.This, however, seems to suggest that for such a subject, ethics simply becomes second nature, and thus ceases to be ethics altogether. If acting ethically is a matter of drive, if it is as effortless as that, if neither sacrifice, suffering, nor renunciation is required, then it also seems utterly lacking in merit and devoid of virtue. This, in fact, was Kants contention: he called such a condition the holiness of the will, which he also thought was an unattainable ideal for human agent. It could equally be identified with utter banality the banality of the radical good to paraphrase Hannah Arendts famous expression. Nevertheless and it is one of the fundamental aims of this study to show this this analysis moves too quickly, and therefore leaves something out. Our theoretical premiss here is that it will actually be possible to found an ethics on the concept of the drive, without this ethics collapsing into either the holiness or banality of human actions.

Page 215 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**State Ethics Bad**

A Government that drops political obligation in order to obtain correct moral or ethical responsibility has the ability to totalize into a destructive regime that strips human dignity (turn)
Diprose 08
(Philosophy Social Criticism 2008; 34; 617 Rosalyn Diprose, Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/6/617) The final point I want to highlight about Arendts account of responsibility is this: she asks the burning question, what provides the criterion of judgment if not moral norms one has inherited or explicit laws that may have been reversed by those who govern the public sphere? On the basis of the idea that judgment is a reflective self-relation in the form of a dialogue with oneself, Arendt argues that the criterion that limits what one permits oneself to do is set by what would allow one to live at peace with oneself (SQMP 108). Following Socrates, conscience, she argues, is governed by the desire to avoid self-contradiction or, following Kant, the desire to avoid self-contempt.13 Put simply it is better to suffer wrong than do wrong (a dictum that she claims, while originating with Socrates, underlies all moral philosophy) because you could not, logically and with dignity, live with that other part of yourself that you would kill or make suffer. As a lover of contradiction Nietzsche would not hold to this idea that making peace with oneself either inspires or provides the criteria for conscience. While I think he is right about that, I am not convinced that he succeeds in coming up with appropriate alternative criteria. That is what I will attempt to do. What is radical

about Nietzsches approach to responsibility, and what will be my focus in the next section, is that he locates the condition of conscience, normativity and responsibility, not first of all in reflective thinking or judgment, but in responsiveness based on what I will call somatic reflexivity. For him,

what opens that gap between past and future is the constitution of a corporeal and affective self-relation that manifests as a futural ability to respond to circumstances with conscience and in excess of existing law and custom. This is an important intervention into the meaning of being-responsible, for several reasons. First, it moves the debate about responsibility beyond the impasse between freedom and determinism by proposing that the relation between the self and the juridico-moral code is constitutive (and therefore habitual), but, as with Arendt, it must also be excessive, self-critical and potentially transformative of norms. Second, in a departure from Arendt, Nietzsches idea that this constitutive and transformative relation involves feeling, or the channeling of affect into action and thought, is crucial I think for explaining how political ideals of national identity that effect a reversal of moral norms in the public realm can have such a rapid and potentially destructive impact on a population . Third, in placing the
highest value in the uniqueness and opacity of this somatic reflexivity, rather than in, say, life itself14 or human dignity based on autonomous practical reason, Nietzsche revises the very basis of normativity in ethics and politics: this somatic reflexivity is that through and for which we are, most fundamentally, responsible whatever the other characteristics (sex, race, religion, age) that corporeality may signify. This responsiveness and, hence, responsibility, as Emmanuel Levinas later puts it, is what first enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value.15 Fourth, Nietzsches emphasis on the temporal dimension of somatic reflexivity reveals what is most at stake in a crisis of morality in politics. It is the body open to an undetermined future that is a condition of agency, normativity and responsibility and it is this futural inclination or futurity of the body that is most at risk in such a crisis. Where Arendt improves on Nietzsche is through implying another criteria of judgment besides the criterion she highlights, the supposed desire to avoid self-contradiction. This other criterion of judgment that would limit what we can do in good conscience is implied in her work on political community where it becomes apparent that we are not only responsible through our own futurity, we are also responsible for maintaining the world for the disclosure of the who and hence the futurity of others. And this is where morality meets politics. The political concern is not whether the act of striking somebody unjustly or being struck is more disgraceful. The concern is exclusively with having a world in which such acts do not occur. (SQMP 93)

morality, understood as fixed principles for guiding action that vary between individuals and groups, along with individual thought itself, have no place in politics, as politics is concerned with collective dialogue and action and the maintenance of law regarded as essential to the integrity of our common humanity (PRD 22). While one may concede that compromise lies at the heart of the political, there
Ordinarily, is a conceptual difficulty with the way Arendt always insists that thinking is individual, is distinct from and runs counter to the collective speech and action that characterizes the political.16 This is why she describes the moral I have been discussing as a borderline phenomenon: moral judgment is only relevant to politics in times of crisis, that is, when customary moral standards, which would ordinarily guide action without thinking, have been suspended or reversed in the public realm (SQMP 1045). It is

Page 216 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

also why she needs to posit judgment of particulars, experienced as conscience, as the bridge and arbiter between thinking and morality, on the one hand, and politics and law on the other.

Morality and law intersect, for example, insofar as they deal with persons rather than institutions and systems (SQMP 57) and they presuppose the same power of judgment of what is right and wrong (PRD 22). I suggest that morality is a borderline political issue also in the sense that when political initiatives of government precipitate a conflict then dampening of conscience within a citizenry what this exposes is that these initiatives have undermined, not just customary moral standards, but with that the basis of normativity that both liberal democratic politics and morality would ordinarily share, whatever particular moral values one holds . Taking into account the corporeal and affective basis of conscience , I will argue that the basis of normativity in both politics and morality in a secular democracy is not only the preservation of human dignity understood as the capacity for judgment in Arendts sense but, more
fundamentally, and as a precondition of judgment, maintenance of the collective exposure to each other of the uniqueness of the futurity of bodies. Government that puts this in jeopardy, by abandoning political responsibility for maintaining the conditions for this, is no longer anonymous in the Foucauldian sense it has separated itself from the collectivity of the polis that it would then totalize.

Ethico-politics gives governments the logocentric nature that leads to the worst atrocities in humanity such as the Holocaust (turn)
Sharpe 02 (Department of Philosophy and Ashworth Center for Social Theory, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, PHILOSOPHY &
SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 28 no 2 pp. 173189) I hope that this necessarily overbrief argument has served to lay down the coordinates for a thinking together of Camus and Derrida. For both authors, the possibility of an identity wholly insulated from [the] Other[s] is debarred to us as finite. Indeed, a

further parallel between their works consists in how both consider the lure of this possibility profoundly dangerous. In The Rebel,

Camus argued that the crimes of the Holocaust (like those of the Gulag) represented not outbreaks of chaos within the enlightened world, but the products of an inhumanity ever close to the enlightenments elevation of reason. What a clean up! Clamence likewise remarks of the Nazis spacing . . . out of the Jewish quarters of Amsterdam, where (significantly) Camus has him residing in The Fall: Seventy-five thousand Jews deported or assassinated; thats real vacuum cleaning. I admire that diligence, that methodical patience! When one has no character one has to apply a method (1963: 10). Havent you noticed that our society is organized for this kind of liquidation? (ibid.: 8).Derridas comparative Zeitdiagnose, defended in such pieces as The
Principle of Reason (1983), is more widely known. Indeed, what I will argue gives deconstruction its prophetic tone is how Derrida like Camus always argues that untainted Identity is not only impossible, but to be prohibited.

There is always a danger, Derrida argues, of a politics of the archive that deconstruction resists and decries (cf. Caputo, 1997:265). It is an ethic-politics that gives body to the logo centric desire which he has always argued organizes even the most apparently extra philosophical praxes and institutions. It has the form of the claim that we are the . . . uniquely chosen archive of the Truth , Caputo writes in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: In that sense, the mal darchive lies at the basis of every feverish racism, nationalism, fundamentalism, or messianism, at the root of every identitarianism.Burning with the desire to kill off, to incinerate, the memory and the trace of the other, archive fever is not a finite, limited threat, no tone threat among others. . . . Archive evil, mal darchive, is the root of all evil . (Caputo, 1997: 265) The question then becomes for both Camus and Derrida what viable alternative exists to such a fevered ethic politics. For the famed death of God in modernity has not quelled its radical evil,

Page 217 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

both agree. It has only given rise to refigurations of this evil .6

As Clamence again rejoins towards the end of The Fall: He who clings to a law does not fear the judgement that puts him in his place within an order he believes in. . . . [T]he keenest of human torments is to be judged without law. Yet we are in that torment [today]. Deprived of their natural curb, the judges, loosed at random, are racing through their job. Hence we have to try to go faster than they, dont we? And its a real madhouse. Prophets and quacks multiply: they hasten to get there with a good law or a flawless organization before the world is deserted. (1963: 867) How does Derrida respond to this madhouse? In Passions, in fact, he takes up the logic of responding tout court. The context is an invitation he has received to speak on the occasion of the publication of Derrida: A Critical Reader. How should he have taken up this invitation? Derrida asks himself. To speak authoritatively, he notes, would involve running the risk of claiming an exclusive patent over the signifier

Derrida and the texts which it names, as if he had the right and the capability to assume such an authority. To not respond, he notes, however, would be no less dangerous, since silence is a mode of discourse which can humiliate others more violently than anything said. As Caputo notes, then, here Derrida adduces a moral refiguring of the double bind. Either way, he says, Derrida . . . is sacrificed: this is a double bind in which his two hands are tied or nailed down (Caputo, 1997: 106).

Whenever ethics is reinforced through ideals and norms chosen by the state it results in a world where people are desensitized. Any universally imposed ethics will result in the destruction of man as people gain the conscience of a machine. (turn)
Rosalyn Diprose 2008 Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity With regard to this overarching concern for the bodys futurity, Nietzsche has three related criticisms of juridical selfresponsibility. First, insofar as the constitution of the responsive self is normalizing, with

reference to a morality of mores and the social straitjacket that guides future action, any responsibility the individual assumes for such action is not genuine (GM II 2 and HAH 105): responsibility cannot rest on blind obedience to ideals and norms that have been imposed rather than chosen. Second, and conversely, Nietzsche is critical of the fable of responsibility insofar as it
rests on the illusion of free will (HAH 39). Two aspects of his well-known critique of free will are relevant here. One is that the illusion of free will carries with it the illusion that we can choose and predict the future in advance (HAH 105). The other is Nietzsches claim that the individual is not responsible for anything arising from his nature because his nature is not freely chosen; it is to some extent inherited it is an outgrowth of the elements and influences of past and present things (HAH 39; see also GM I 13). While, for Nietzsche, we cannot choose the future or our inheritance, we can, through somatic reflexivity, transform our inheritance and so keep the future open. Nietzsches third criticism of juridical self-responsibility follows from the other two and is the one I wish to emphasize: in pre-empting a future, juridical self-responsibility dampens

responsiveness and forecloses futurity. 22 Insofar as the last man, for example, is the embodiment of a socially prescribed good, in him the future, ordained in advance, is actualized. He is the endpoint of a teleological conception of history where everything leads toward the realization of some ideal identity. But, if such an ideal could be realized, those who
embody it would be unable to create, unable to respond to elements and influences of concrete existence in a way that keeps the body open to the future and keeps affects and their interpretations open to revaluation. Any set of ideas or legal

order thought of as sovereign and universal . . . would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man (GM II 11).23 The last man is the end of history, the end of spatio-temporalization, and so would be as dyspeptic as the self for whom the force of forgetting is dysfunctional he cannot have done with anything (GM I 1). He would have the conscience of a machine.

Page 218 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The affirmative cant reach out to the other when mandated by the state to do so, your evidence is perverted on this, using the state allows authoritative action against the other. Savu 01
Jacque Derrida / Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/symploke/v009/9.1savu.html

in light of pressing contemporary topics and events such as immigration, terrorism, the Internet and its censorship or surveillance by the State (police), civil wars, etc., these canonical texts reveal to Derrida the heterogeneous yet irreducible relation between a genuine ethics of hospitality and a politics of hospitality. Whereas absolute/unconditional/all-inclusive hospitality suggests a "law without imperative, without order and without duty" (83), the laws of ordinary/conditional/exclusive hospitality refer to the actual conditions of hospitality, its rights and duties, which preexist the subject and are inscribed in the social/political order (25). These political structures share a phallogocentric model that Derrida traces back to the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian traditions. According to them, it is always a male figure of authority that, in laying down the laws of hospitality, testifies to the "violence of the power of hospitality" (149). Playing upon the ambiguity of the French word "hte"--which can mean both "guest" and "enemy "--Derrida reflects on the paradoxical status of the host at the moment of his/her initial encounter with the xenos. This proximity between "host" and "hostage" also accounts for the nexus between hospitality and hostility, which Derrida turns to when he considers the false dualities of private and public, private law and public law. Derrida's careful analysis of the political uses and abuses of an ideal hospitality leads him to suggest that political action should take place in the space between ethics and politics. Digressive and informal, his discourse on hospitality is also rich
When revisited in potentialities due to the deconstructive method through which he uncovers the mystery at the heart of the "naturally obvious" (136). In the sense that it expands, or, to quote Dufourmantelle, "takes to the limit" the "field of the thinkable," the movement of Derrida's "spoken reflecting" (10) is indeed "hyperbolic," just as it constitutes an act of remembrance, in that it "revives questions held in forgetfulness and secrecy" (140). Thus both lectures deserve credit not only for representing a significant step in Derrida's reflection on ethics and politics but also for prompting us to begin our own deconstructive work and rethink our identity.

The goal of ethics to the other and the ethics of the refugee actually furthers state control. Only by challenging sovereignty can we have independent ethics.
Popke 03
(Jeffrey, Department of Geology, East Carolina University, Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity, responsibility and the space of communitySage) MF In sum, the subject of modern ethics is a subject fundamentally constituted through the maintenance of boundaries, both social and spatial . Partly for this reason, much modern ethical thought has focused concern on those distant others who are located on the other side of the boundary. Indeed, as Zygmunt Bauman (1991: 59) has noted, within the modern spatialization of subjectivity, the figure of the stranger becomes the prototypical ethical problem, because the stranger is . . . someone who refuses to remain confined to the far away land or go away from our own and hence . . . defies the easy expedient of spatial or temporal segregation. In a similar vein, Michael Dillon (1999) has argued that the refugee,

Page 219 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

existing outside of ontopolitical borders, has come to represent a scandal for modern political subjectivity, calling into question the nature of political and ethical conduct. The typical response to such problems has been to endow the autonomous subject with a set of rights, which can be legally enforced within the boundaries of political jurisdiction . One of the most important figures in this conception of ethics is Kant, who believed that the project of modernity could be universally extended for the benefit of humankind through the application of reason and judgment (Shapiro, 1998). Kants philosophy, as Walker (1999: x) notes, was an attempt to internalize the law of reason, to develop the autonomous rationality, the mature personality realizable within each individual so that it might act in accordance with some universal moral norm. Importantly, Kant viewed this universal norm arising from the spatial interconnections between different parts of the world, which necessitated a cosmopolitical right that would guarantee conditions of universal hospitality. Kant writes (1939: 27): [due to] the connections, more or less near, which have taken place among the nations of the earth, having been carried to that point, that a violation of right, committed in one place, is felt throughout the whole, the idea of a cosmopolitical right . . . is the last step of perfection necessary to the tacit code of civil and public right. For Kant, this notion of a public right was founded upon a federation of free states (1939: 18), and thus depended upon a bounded notion of state citizenship. These two notions the autonomous subject of political reason and the territorialization of the state system have come to define contemporary politics based upon an epistemology of sovereignty. Recent work in international relations theory has posed significant challenges to this conception of sovereignty, politics and space (Edkins et al., 1999; Campbell and Shapiro, 1999b). Rather than accepting state territorialization and citizenship as natural, such work suggests that we view it as part and parcel of the philosophical infrastructure of modernity. As Shapiro notes (1999: 60), our understandings: tend to be constructed within a statecentric, geostrategic cartography, which organizes the interpretation of enmities on the basis of an individual and collective national subject and cross-boundary antagonisms. Ethical approaches aimed at a normative inhibition of these antagonisms continue to presume this same geopolitical cartography. One of the provocations of poststructuralism would be to call into question this conception of subjectivity and space, to follow Jean-Luc Nancy (2000: 136) in asserting that in order to think the spacing of the world . . . the end of sovereignty must be faced head-on. It is in this sense that Whatmore (1997) has called for a dissecting of theautonomous self in order to promote a relational ethics (see also Cloke, 2002). We need, as David Slater (1997: 68) puts it, to rethink what we might mean by responsibility to otherness. This responsibility can be linked to a notion of radical interdependence, in which the ethics of intersubjectivity are in the foreground.

Deconstructing universal conceptions of right and ethics actually opens up the possibility for responsibility to the other. Working within the state reentrenches current oppressive dualisms
Popke 03
(Jeffrey, Department of Geology, East Carolina University, Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity, responsibility and the space of communitySage) MF
Although I am sympathetic with the impulse behind such sentiments, I think that Smith mischaracterizes the nature of postmodern thinking, and I would suggest that a deeper engagement might be possible between the concerns of poststructuralism and geographical ethics.

This engagement would reject any normative ground for ethical conduct, not in order to evade our responsibility to distant others, but rather because foundational normative theories provide the means by which our ethical responsibility can be elided . From this perspective, the deconstruction of universalist conceptions of rights, ethics and justice should be viewed as a means of opening possibilities, rather than closing them. In what follows, I want to elaborate on this perspective, focusing attention on three areas in particular: the nature of
the subject, the question of politics, and the ways in which these imply particular understandings of space. Most renditions of moral or ethical theory have their roots in Enlightenment thinking, when the decentering of the authority of God and monarch placed human individuals at the center of the social world, and thus provided the possibility for an ethics that would be based upon human reason and agency (Venn, 2000). The locus of this agency is the Cartesian subject, endowed with autonomy and rationality, and thereby capable of making moral decisions . There are two dimensions in particular of this modern subjectivity that

Page 220 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

the modern subjects coherence and autonomy has been managed and maintained through repeated attempts to define, categorize and classify a range of deviant others. Modern notions of autonomy and agency, in other words, have been dependent upon the specification and control of difference (ethnic, racial, gender, class, etc.), against which the positive identity and self-image of the (western, male) Enlightenment subject could be maintained. The birth of the modern subject, in this sense, is tightly bound up with the processes of colonialism, industrialization and governmentality through which certain kinds of difference were made to matter in both conscious and, perhaps especially, unconscious ways (Pile, 1996;
are worth highlighting here. First, Wilton, 1998; Venn, 2000). The second and related point is that the ways in which these various axes of identity/difference have been mobilized are fundamentally spatial.

Modern subjectivity is not only inscribed through a dualism between self and other, but also between here and there, via the spatialization of inclusion and exclusion, presence and absence, and the specification of what is in-place and out-of-place (Shields, 1992; Sibley, 1995; Cresswell,
1996; Kirby, 1996). The Cartesian subject is interpellated within ametaphysics of spatial presence in Heidegger s terms, Dasein, or being-there and circumscribed by a location or place from which it can negotiate the world. Derrida (1994a: 82) has referred to this metaphysics as ontopology, an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general.

Government enforcement of responsibility takes away from the individuals ability to think and act on an individual level of morality, which is key to regaining lost sense of morality in politics
Diprose 08
(Philosophy Social Criticism 2008; 34; 617 Rosalyn Diprose, Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/6/617) First, in Some Questions of Moral Philosophy and Responsibility Under Dictatorship (or what Arendt prefers to call totalitarianism), and crucially for a revision of the juridical sense of responsibility,

Arendt, following Nietzsche, argues that conscience, and hence the capacity for personal or self-responsibility, is not determined either by the moral norms we inherit or by the particular laws of the society into which we are born. Otherwise how could such norms be so easily reversed and the reversal embraced by a majority of a citizenry, and, further, as Nietzsche would say, how can we be responsible for acts determined by conventions we did not choose ? Arne Vetlesen shows, in his comprehensive analysis of Arendts thoughts on the relation between conscience and doing evil, that she actually points to two kinds of conscience: that ever present conscience that operates habitually and is influenced by prevailing norms and laws (TMC 186), and conscience that, as the experience of judgment of particulars (TMC 189) that is a by-product of thinking, makes thinking manifest in the world (LM I 193), where the thinking that conscience makes manifest is not knowledge of the good but the challenging of all established criteria, values and accepted rules of conduct (TMC 188).8 This second kind of conscience is what matters to Arendt. Put simply, both she and Nietzsche posit a difference between acting habitually in accordance with moral and legal rules that dictate what is right and wrong and what Nietzsche would call genuine conscience the experience of the capacity to judge what is right or wrong for oneself. Second, in
linking conscience to reflective critical thought or judgment, Arendt posits a connection between the experience of conscience and both the undeterminable and futural character of the self. That is, reflective thinking (hence judgment of particulars experienced as conscience), and along with it our finitude, temporalize the self in a way necessary for both responsibility and an undetermined future. Arendts account of the historicity of the self borrows from Nietzsches concept of time in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Vision and the Riddle.9 Against both cyclic and linear notions of time, Zarathustra formulates time in terms of

Page 221 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

two paths extending from the present gateway called the moment in which human beings stand, one toward the past and the other toward a future that contradicts the past. In Life of the Mind (especially LM I 20213) Arendt argues that it is the act of reflective thought that opens this gap between past and future to disrupt the passive passing of linear historical time between those two exemplars of human finitude: the moments of birth and death.10

Only a finite being can inherit a tradition of laws and moral norms, but in inheriting a tradition that would determine the path one takes, the act of reflection, that is, remembrance and anticipation, opens an undetermined future. Nietzsches gateway, for Arendt, is . . . [t]he
path paved by thinking [or judgment] . . . within the space-time given to natal and mortal men. Following that course, the thought-trains, remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time. This small non-time space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, cannot be inherited and handed down by tradition. (LM I 210)

This gap between the past (tradition memorialized) and an undetermined future, which thinking opens and conscience makes manifest, constitutes the selfs futurity. And it is this futurity that is foreclosed in a dampening of conscience and a failure of personal responsibility. Not only do totalitarian government and a reversal of norms for the treatment of others jeopardize this fundamental undetermined futural aspect of the human condition, but it also destroys human plurality in general.11 Arendts third salient point then is that the capacity for judgment (and therefore conscience) expresses what
she had referred to in The Human Condition as the who as opposed to the what of the person (HC 179). Her model of judgment in her reflections on responsibility is explicitly Kantian, although it owes much to Socrates. Conscience is at once the capacity to judge particulars autonomously and rationally and it is a self-relation, that is, it is self-awareness and an internal dialogue with oneself (e.g. SQMP 76; see also LM I 17993). As an internal dialogue between the habitual self and the selfs other internal witness, judgment expresses both difference in identity (TMC 1834) and the persons capacity to transform the past and embark on a new path: judgment or thinking expresses the person in his or her uniqueness, and conscience is the experience of this uniqueness made manifest in the world. The process of thinking, as opposed to knowing, therefore indicates that humans exist in the plural (SQMP 96) and thinking and remembering . . . is the human way of striking roots, of taking ones place in the world into which we all arrive as strangers. What we usually call a person . . . as distinguished from a mere human being or nobody, actually grows out of this root-striking process of thinking (SQMP 100). So, although Arendt does not put it this way, this capacity to discourse with oneself, including the judgment of what is right and wrong, is, for her, the basis of normativity in two senses: it is the capacity through which we arrive at our own norms of conduct and, as a capacity in others, it is what gives other

Acting according to conscience, being responsible in a nonjuridical sense, rather than being coordinated by a totalizing politics, is, she says, how one can regain what those in former times, including Kant, called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the status of being human (PRD 48).
persons moral value.

Government established norms of ethical and moral right and wrongs lead to the dulling conscience of the individual taking out all solvency. It also leads to accepting the shift to totalitarian regimes in the name of crises.
Diprose 08
(Philosophy Social Criticism 2008; 34; 617 Rosalyn Diprose, Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/6/617)

The juridical concept of self-responsibility cannot explain, and indeed may exacerbate, a contemporary crisis of conscience of the order that concerned Arendt: when liberal democratic governments initiate programs that citizens feel are contrary to what they had assumed (rightly or wrongly) to be law or moral custom.4 Examples of this abound in the present: a government engages in what its citizens consider to be an
unjustified war or it annexes part of its territory for what its citizens may consider to be immoral and illegal treatment of refugees (in the case of Australia) or prisoners of war (e.g. Guantanamo Bay in the case of the USA). Or, as happened in Australia in December 2005, a government implements (anti-terrorism) legislation that puts in jeopardy fundamental rights and freedoms of its own citizens (for example, provisions allowing preventative detention without charge and control of the movement of individuals or groups merely suspected of terrorist activities, and antisedition provisions that criminalize activities that urge disaffection against the government).5 Or less dramatic but of a similar order,

under the umbrella of economic rationalism a government gradually abdicates responsibility for the well-being of the disadvantaged or the sick. Such government initiatives

Page 222 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

can precipitate a crisis of conscience, and responsibility (in the juridical sense of either duty or blame) seems to vanish or falls disproportionately toward women, particular racial and ethnic groups, the socially disadvantaged and/or the dispossessed. Rather than examine this shift in the distribution of responsibility, my concern is with the mechanism of the dampening of conscience that disables it or precipitates its redistribution. This crisis, then dampening, of conscience can manifest in different ways. Citizens may take the government initiative to be establishing an exemplar for the ill-treatment or neglect of particular groups and, without question or even passionately, hold those groups responsible for their own suffering or for felt insecurity in a population, and follow the governments example in their conduct toward these others. Arguably, the race riot on Cronulla beach in Sydney on 11 December
2005 (the week after that anti-terrorism legislation was rushed through Parliament amid a flurry of publicity) was a particularly graphic example of this flow-on effect, where a large group of flag-waving inebriated and largely Anglo-Celtic Australians aggressively sought to protect their beach from what they felt to be an invasion by unwelcome Lebanese youth.6 While the Prime Minister explained the riot in terms of isolated criminal behavior and others viewed it as an eruption of wider suppressed racism, it could be equally well explained in terms of an unthinking imitation, albeit disordered and extreme, of norms of conduct toward particular groups emerging from several years of a nationalistic politics of division and fear that would direct blame for felt insecurity toward those considered un-Australian.

A dulling of conscience and disabling of responsibility under such circumstances can take less spectacular but no less affective forms. Citizens may feel uncomfortable or distressed about such trends but turn a blind eye in the
belief either that this is a localized problem or that the rule of law, more compatible with their own moral sensibility, will be restored. Or citizens may strongly oppose such government initiatives, and abhor their flow-on effects, but, in the absence of any obvious culpable agent, may feel powerless to do anything about it (after all, this is government of the people by the people). In any case

volatile emotions or passive compliance or confusion about what is right and wrong govern our conduct toward others. That we are reluctant or cannot find someone to blame for acts carried out in accordance with such government initiatives is in part because, insofar as modernity can be characterized by anonymous government, as Foucault following Nietzsche has analyzed, this involves a transfer of responsibility for upholding law and moral norms from the state to the disciplined, self-governing individual. Under such conditions liberal democratic governments can act apparently without conscience but with impunity while the individual citizens who bear the burden of responsibility, in the juridical sense, seem unable to assume it. What is at issue when such governments seem to initiate a reversal in customary standards of conduct toward others is not only whether individuals should be held responsible for acts committed in accordance with that regime, but also whether they have the capacity to assume responsibility in any ensuing dulling of conscience . What happens to the capacity for
responsibility, and to the normative basis of conscience, judgment and conduct, when the laws and moral norms we supposedly embody through a disciplinary regime of anonymous government are undermined by that same government which remains, nonetheless, anonymous and beyond judgment? This was Arendts concern. Not so much the transfer of responsibility from the state to the individual or any ensuing failure of leadership in upholding political responsibility,

but the dulling of conscience and failure of personal responsibility that follows. The government she had in mind was totalitarian not a dictatorship, she hastens to add but totalitarian in the sense of government that reaches beyond the political into all spheres of life and that coordinates human existence toward, for example, a uniform national identity (PRD 334).7 Insofar as such government can be democratically elected and enthusiastically embraced in times of felt insecurity, Arendts question as to why so many went along with and allowed themselves to be coordinated by the Nazi reversal of law and moral norms is just as pertinent now , 30 years after she

Page 223 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

last asked it. As a consequence of neglecting the corporeal and affective dimension of conscience, Arendt, I will argue, cannot adequately explain how conscience can be dampened and personal responsibility fail under such government (I will turn to Nietzsche for that). But she does pinpoint what is at stake in such a failure (the humanness or value of persons) and why conscience must be restored if the world of potentiality and plurality that we share is to endure. I now draw together and provisionally summarize her salient claims about conscience and responsibility that move the meaning of responsibility away from, without abandoning, its juridical sense.

Forcing ethical views upon people through politics results in the ethics being short lived as individuals are unable to feel invested in these new ideals.
Nancy Luxon 2008 Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault

Yet, although he believes such ethical work might prepare for public engagement, Foucault avoids any claim that such ethical cultivation translates directly into political action. Individuals may have a richer set of ethical resources upon which to draw and potentially enter politics, but it remains to them to make that choice. Forcing that connection might be perilous. A clue to the perils of such self-governance for politics appears in Alexanders famously reported comment to Diogenes: if I were not Alexander, I should like to be Diogenes. Politically, this remark might be interpreted as reflective of Alexanders own humility and of the moderation with which he exercised his own power. Yet it also alerts us modern readers to another danger: for Alexander to express himself as does Diogenes would be to require him to be someone other than who he, in fact, is. It would be to deny his currency, his powerful position, and the very real relations that constitute the political and social terms of communityin Christian terms, it would be an act of self-renunciation, while in Deleuzian terms it would be an act made from longing.59 In both instances, the cost of longing or self-renunciation would be that stability of mind and presence to oneself that Foucault finds to be so difficult to establish and so inherently fragile. Renunciation and desire simply return individuals to the unsteady longing to be other than what they are. Paradoxically, the daily adjustments of parrhesia result in a greater steadiness both in thought and action. Requiring individuals to be otherwise is to unsettle them without educating them to the techniques by which they might regain their balance. As a political program, then, its effects will be fleeting, as individuals are unable to situate themselves in these new ideals or to feel invested in the relations to
themselves, to others, to

truththat sustain it.

State ethics violate the very idea of democratic ethics (no solvency) Jeffrey Minson 1985
Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics. Lecturer in the School of Humanities Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

the current tarnished image of morality, by which may be traced back to an historical event. Somewhere back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, morality became delimited in both law and opinion as a province of social life and thoughts in its own right, alongside politics , economics, the fine arts
Midgley argues in a semi-genealogical fashion that she means its equation with moralism and its vulnerability to social criticism, and so on. In identifying this representation as an historical-intellectual development, Midgley predictably cites J. S. Mils essay On liberty as a milestone in that history. In this essay, which is often regarded as the definitive philosophical manifesto of

Page 224 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

a sphere of independent action and moral judgment for every morally competent citizen of a modern (democratic) state. Independence is cashed out in terms of Mills famous distinction between private and public domains. The ethical is thus defined as a domain of personal freedom of thought and action; it is a private domain insofar as neither law nor organized public opinion are permitted to intervene into this domain in order to enforce collective moral strandards (or even to prevent self-inflicted damage).
liberalism, Mill delineates

Page 225 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Universal / Absolutist Ethics Bad**

Universal morality is impossible because everyone has individual passions and views.
Walter Kaufmann 1980 From Shakespeare to Existentialism http://taimur.sarangi.info/text/kaufmann_nietzsche.htm

The highest type, to Nietzsche's mind, is the passionate man who is the master of his passions, able to employ them creatively without having to resort to asceticism for fear that his passions might conquer him. But not everybody is capable of this achievement, and Nietzsche does not believe in the possibility of a universal morality. He prefers self-control and sublimation to both license and asceticism, but concedes that for some asceticism may be necessary. Those who require such a radical prescription strike him as weaker, less powerful types than men like Goethe, for example. The will to power is, according to Nietzsche, a universal drive, found in all men. It prompts the slave who dreams of a heaven from which he hopes to behold his master in hell no less than it prompts the master. Both resentment and brutality, both sadism and asceticism are expressions of it. Indeed, Nietzsche thinks that all human behavior is reducible to this single basic force. He does not endorse the will to power any more than Freud endorses sexual desire; but he thinks we shall be better off if we face the facts and understand ourselves than if we condemn others hypocritically, without understanding. Institutional ethics results in a homogenous mindless unconscious. Only by advocating individual ethics can humans gain value for themselves
Daiger 2006
(Christine, Associate Professor President, NASS Chair, Equity Committee, CPA Member of the Team CPA B.A. Concordia, M.A. Universit de Montral, Doctoral studies Brock University, Nietzsche: Virtue Ethics.. Virtue Politics,Project Muse) MF
Let us remember the three points under criticism in the critical program of virtue ethicists: the overreliance on rule models of moral choice, the overly rationalistic accounts of moral agency, and the formalism inherent in such theories. If we did not know that we are talking about virtue ethicists, we would readily say that this pertains to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche does reject rule models. His ethics of creativity argues that one must create values for oneself and not rely on any external (transcendent) rule . Nietzsche also
fiercely rejects the rationalistic account of moral agency. He struggles to rehabilitate the repressed parts of human nature, claiming that reason is but a very small part of ourselves. He talks of the human being in terms of a fiction (see D 105). We are wronged in the conception of ourselves: we are led to believe that we are neatly divided between reason and instinct. But this division is illusory. The human being is a social structure of many souls ( BGE 19). We possess a soul that is a social structure of the instincts and passions (BGE 12). Nietzsche says further that [i]f we desired and dared an architecture corresponding to the nature of our soul (we are too cowardly for it!)our model would have to be the labyrinth! ( D 169). We are indeed very far from the traditional picture of the self and also far from the superiority of reason that is proposed by traditional philosophical

Nietzsche rejects the formalism inherent in traditional moralities as he would generally reject any formalism in thought. Nietzsche does share the critical program of virtue ethicists. The nihilism he proposes is supposed to remedy the alienating traditional philosophical (and religious) discourse. But does he stop at the nihilistic moment? Is his program purely nihilistic, as Leiter suggests? I have argued elsewhere that far from being purely nihilistic, Nietzsches philosophy is entirely
approaches and moralities in particular. Last, it is also evident that

Page 226 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

constructive.19 His challenge consists in rejecting the existing morality to construct anew. The old systems deficiencies cannot be adjusted by reorganization. One must erase everything and start from scratch. This is where his
attacks on morality come into play. In this moment Nietzsche announces the death of God and its metaphysical import. Nietzsche is clear about his self-attributed immoralism: At bottom my expression immoralist involves two denials. I deny first a type of man who has hitherto counted as the highest, the good, the benevolent, beneficent; I deny secondly a kind of morality which has come to be accepted and to dominate as morality in itself dcadence morality, in more palpable terms Christian morality (EH

His rejection of morality is thus clearly identified by him as a rejection of traditional morality. He also says of fellow immoralists, they see [their] honor in affirming (TI
Destiny 4). Morality 6).20 There is no question of abandoning ethics. Ethics is needed and will be his preoccupation for the first steps of his reconstruction, for it was a preoccupation before his reconstruction as it lead to the rejection of the defective ethics. Nihilism is a necessary step toward this reconstruction. As he says in The Gay Science: We

deny, and must deny, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something which we perhaps do not as yet know, do not as yet see! (307). What is it that wants to affirm itself? In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche says that We are accountable to ourselves for our own existence; consequently, we also want to be the real helmsmen of our existence and keep it from resembling a mindless coincidence (1). The bermensch,

in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is the figure who is successful in becoming his own master. He is an Overman, more than a man, a human being that is human and more. Why more? The bermensch is the individual who has overcome the fragmentation inherent in tradition. It is the person who has reunited himself, who has decided to live fully as he is. It is also the person who knows that life is will to power and that he himself is an instance of this will to power. Accordingly, he wishes to embody and respect the will to power within himself. In addition to all of this, he accepts the eternal return hypothesis. He is ready to suppose that the actions and decisions he makes during his life will return eternally the same. The change from man to bermensch is tremendous. So much so that we cannot talk about an elevation from man to bermensch but really of a transfiguration, as Nietzsche himself refers.21 Even the highest type of human being present in Nietzsches writings, the strong man, is far below the bermensch. He says: Your souls are so unfamiliar with what is great that the Superman would be fearful to you in his goodness! And you wise and enlightened men, you would flee from the burning sun of wisdom in which the Superman joyfully bathes his nakedness! You highest men my eyes have encountered! This is my doubt of you and my secret laughter: I think you would call my Supermana devil! (Z Manly Prudence). The bermensch is an ideal type of human being. Every individual should emulate this figure as an illustration of what one can become if only one were to engage oneself in the way of creation. When I speak of an ideal type, the bermensch, I mean that it is a figure toward which one must strive, not to be confused as a state one can reach. For one thing, it is not clear in Nietzsches mind whether there will ever be bermenschen. For another thing, I think we should interpret the figure he presents to us as a dynamic state of being. If the bermensch accepts life and himself as an instance of the will to power, he will be in constant becoming. The drive for more power, characteristic of Nietzsches being, will lead the individual into a continuous flux and constant overcoming of oneself. This is how one should understand the ber of bermensch. But even if we are talking about a state of flux, this is a state that one should strive to acquire while engaging in the process of attainment. According to Nietzsche, there are certain things that one must do in order to approach this excellence and in turn

the creation of oneself and the creation of values that is essential in supporting a new ethics. The human being should be the creator of oneself. She should be her own master and define her own rules (which is what is truly meant
become an bermensch. Among these things are

by the famous, or infamous, Master morality).22 Once the sky of values has been emptied, the task is to fill it again for oneself. The individual should no longer rely on any transcendent to provide these values, as the previous experiment of Christianity and

Human beings must create an ethics for human beings. The individual must create an ethics that respects ones nature as human and as will to power. This is expressed in Nietzsches maxim: What Saith
its transcendent morals has proven that its only possible result is alienation.

thy Conscience?Thou shalt become what thou art (GS 270). You must flourish! Note that there is nothing in Nietzsches writings until Beyond Good and Evil that indicates that the way of the bermensch is bared for certain individuals. He makes clear that this potentiality exists in every individual. It is only a matter of the individual choosing to actualize his or her own self as will to power.23 Thus the emphasis is placed on the flourishing of the agent via the adoption of certain virtues in line with ones own being.

Any project that defines a universal ethical claim fosters indifference. Only by finding ethics in the absence of universal norms can ethical action take place
Popke 03
(Jeffrey, Department of Geology, East Carolina University, Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity, responsibility and the space of communitySage) MF

Page 227 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

From an empirical perspective, these insights have provoked a re-examination of geographical phenomena in a wide range of domains, with emphasis increasingly placed upon the ways in which social meanings and categories take on the appearance of truth or objectivity. Recent work has examined, for example, the discourses governing geopolitics ( Tuathail, 1996; Tuathail and Dalby, 1998), the economy (Barnes, 1996; Gibson-Graham, 1996), urban space (Soja, 1996; Dear, 2000), colonialism and development (Jacobs, 1996; Yapa, 1996), the environment (Braun and Castree, 1998) and the nature of identity, particularly the spatial structuring of gender/sexual and racial/ethnic difference (Sibley, 1995; Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Nast, 2000). The poststructuralist intervention has also prompted a series of philosophical debates, which have posed a challenge to traditional understandings of metaphysics and epistemology. In this more theoretical vein, poststructuralism offers a critique of logocentrism, the centering or grounding of claims to truth or objectivity . From this perspective, the apparent stability of meaning embedded in any system of thought is potentially destabilized by elided traces of difference, and by the multiple contexts in which knowledge is produced, received and interpreted. As Strohmayer and Hannah (1992: 36) put it, the truth of any statement, scientific or otherwise, which ultimately must rely on some anchoring in order to avoid being completely arbitrary, is

undecidable. This deconstruction of universals poses a significant challenge to traditional understandings of ethics, for the anti-foundational stance of poststructuralism implies that any project aimed at defining an ethics, or a normative theory of society, would be doomed to failure. From a poststructuralist perspective, universal claims to knowledge and truth can become a barrier to fostering a sensitivity to difference, and thus ethics would need to find its purchase in the radical instability of meaning and the deconstruction of universal normative claims. The goal of such an anti-essentialist approach, as David Slater (1997: 69) has
to suggest that

noted, is to cultivate a political openness, or an ungrounded ground, where foundations or norms or universal prescriptions only exist to be put into question as a permanent feature of the process of democratization. Some commentators have gone so far as

we should take up a position against ethics, in the sense of a model of moral or ethical actions, and instead work to foster an ethics of encounter without a commitment to resolution or closure (Campbell and Shapiro, 1999a:
xi, xvii; see also Caputo, 1993). I will try below to suggest how we might imagine such an ethics of encounter, but first I turn to examine some of the responses within geography to the postmodern challenge to ethics.

Their form of moral absolutism prioritizes clean moral hands over moral results: they are more concerned with not acting directly immoral than preventing much larger immoral consequences

Nielsen 1993 (Kai, Phil. Prof @ U. Calgary, Absolutism and It Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber, p. 170-2) letting him remain stuck while the whole group drowns is still more monstrous. The consequentialist is on strong moral ground here, and, if his reflective moral convictions do not square either with certain unrehearsed or with certain reflective particular moral
Blowing up the fat man is indeed monstrous. But convictions of human beings, so much the worse for such commonsense moral convictions. One could even usefully and relevantly adapt here-though for a quite different purpose-an argument of Donagan's. Consequentialism of the kind I have been arguing for provides so persuasive "a theoretical basis for common morality that when it contradicts some moral intuition, it is natural to suspect that intuition, not theory, is corrupt." Given the comprehensiveness, plausibility, and overall rationality of consequentialism, it is not unreasonable to override even a deeply felt moral conviction if it does not square with such a theory, though, if it made no sense or overrode the bulk of or even a great many of our considered moral convictions that

Anticonsequentialists often point to the inhumanity of people who will sanction such killing of the innocent but cannot the compliment be returned by speaking of the even greater inhumanity, conjoined with evasiveness, of those who will allow even more death and far greater misery and then excuse themselves on the ground that they did not intend the death and misery but merely forbore to prevent it? In such a context, such reasoning and such forbearing to prevent seems to me to constitute a moral evasion . I say it is evasive because rather than steeling himself to do what in normal circumstances would be a horrible and vile act but in this circumstance is a harsh moral necessity he [it] allows, when he has the power to prevent it, a situation which is still many times worse. He tries to keep his 'moral purity' and [to] avoid 'dirty hands' at the price of utter moral failure and what Kierkegaard called 'double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in this
would be another matter indeed morally evasive way but this does not make it right.

Page 228 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Ignoring consequences is immoral - they sacrifice others to preserve moral purity. It is most moral to act to produce the best end regardless of the moral cleanliness of the means

Ailinsky 1971
24-7)

(Saul D., Activist, Prof, Social Organizer with Int'l Fame, Founder of Industrial Areas Foundation, Rules for Radicals, p.

"Does this particular end justify this particular means?" Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends. The end is what you want, and the means is how you get it. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The person [man] of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. The practical revolutionary

conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action in action one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one s individual conscience and the good of [humankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual's personal salvation. He [or she1 who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has peculiar conception of "personal salvation"; he doesn't care enough for people to be "corrupted" for them . The people [men] who pile up the heaps of
will understand Geothe's " discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends-which with rare exception is conspicuous for its sterility-rarely write about their won experiences in the perpetual struggle of life and change. They are strangers, moreover, to the burdens and problems of operational responsibility and the unceasing pressure for immediate decisions. They are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if studying a navigational chart on land. They can be recognized by one of two verbal brands; "We agree with the ends but not the means," or "This is not the time." The means-and- end moralists or non-doers always wind up on their ends without any means. The means-and- 'ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive-but real-allies of the Haves. They are the ones Jacques Maritain referred to in his

The fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue." These non-doers were the ones who chose not to fight the Nazis in the only way they could have been fought; they were the ones who drew their window blinds to shut out the shameful spectacle of Jews and political prisoners being dragged through the streets; they were the ones who privately deplored the horror of it all-and did nothing. This is the nadir of immorality. The most unethical of all means is the nonuse of any means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences
statement, " between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced from the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not to men. The standards ofjudgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be. 1 present here a series of rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends: first, that one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue. When we are not directly concerned our morality overflows; as La Rochefoucauld put it, "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others."

Page 229 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Aesthetic Ethics Good**

Foucault proposed an aesthetical ethics in which individuals choose their ethics based on an aesthetic existence. Poster 07
Mark, Swans Way: Care of Selfin the Hyperreal University of California, Irvine Configurations, 2007, 15:151175 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.

To be sure, in the late project on ethics, Foucault does not propose a new version of the liberal notion of the autonomous individual, self-reliant and free, one who builds a stable identity, like the comic character Baron von Munchausen, by lifting himself up by his own bootstraps. This Western conceit is, after all, the main subject of Foucaults critique, and the chief preoccupation of his work. The post structuralist in fact presents his notion of self-subjectivation as an alternative, and overlooked or repressed, stream of thinking in the West, one that has been overshadowed by the injunction know thyself.Foucault formulates the tradition he points to as the care of self, implying that this somewhat underground alternative culturemight provide resources in the present for new types of emancipator endeavors. Here he takes his cue from Nietzsche, who foresaw atransvaluation of values in which ethics would be based not on renunciation and self restraint but on aesthetics .31 Foucault anticipates
the project of the hermeneutics of the subject contributing to a culture in which everyones life [might] become a work of art.32 I shall raise the question of the care of self in relation to cosmeticsurgery reality TV, but before embarking on this project, a thorough understanding is required of Foucaults idea of the care of self. In the 1982 lectures at the Collge de France, Foucault presented a genealogy of ethics in the ancient world, concentrating on the Hellenistic period where the care of self reached its richest point of development. He contrasts the care of self with the relation to the self in Platonism, Christianity, and modern philosophy, primarily Descartes. In all three cases,

Foucault strives to distinguish the care of self as a spiritual practice in which the self is transformed. In the care of self, the self is not discovered as it is in Descartes, or realized in its authenticity as it is in Sartre; rather, Hellenistic care of self is a complex of lifelong practices in which the individual attempts to change himself/herself. It is not a case of attempting to discover the truth of oneself, as in Plato, or to convert oneself in the image of a transcendent principle, as in Christianity. Here is one definition Foucault
gives of the Hellenistic care of the self: The Greeks of the Hellenistic period developed a culture of self-constitution, potentially open to all, through meditation, writing exercises, group meetings, and other practices. The direct goal was an art of living, an aesthetic of self-relation, an ethic of spiritual formation.

Narcissism were the Other is supposed to discover themselves is opposed by Foucault, indicating that we should live aesthetically instead and draws a line between this narcissistic enlightenment and aesthetic values Poster 07
Mark, Swans Way: Care of Selfin the Hyperreal University of California, Irvine Configurations, 2007, 15:151175 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.

One more aspect of Foucaults position must be clarified before I begin. As we have seen, Foucault rarely addresses the idea of the care of self in relation to contemporary culture. But one distinction about the care of self is crucial and must be borne in mind. In response to a question from Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus suggesting the common narcissism in modern society and ancient Greek ethics, Foucault offers the following comment: In the Californian cult of the self, one is supposed to discover ones true self. . . . not only do I not identify this ancient culture of the self with what you might call the Californian cult of the self, I think they are diametrically opposed. 40 If I Want a

Page 230 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Famous Face and The Swan are understood only as depictions of individuals in quest of their true selves, then clearly the issue is not one that concerns Foucaults idea of the care of self. I want rather to inquire if there is a hint of care of self in these most abject television series. For as Foucault writes, our culture, complex as it is, does not easily support this idea: We have hardly any remnant of the idea in our society that the principal work of art which one must take care of, the main area to which one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, ones life, ones existence. 41 Surgeries Reexamined The question I shall pose in relation to The Swan and I Want a Famous Face is this: What can be learned about these shows when they are approached from the vantage point of the concept of the care of self? And what does such an interrogation reveal about popular culture at a time when the media are disseminated throughout society ever more densely and with increasing variation and intermediation?42

Aesthetic judgments, or judgments free of bias and societal opinion, are the best alternatives to judging morals and ethics without placing our own vanity and egos as the hidden priority Downard 04
(Northern Arizona University. Nietzsche and Kant on the Pure Impulse of Truth. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27)

Nietzsche maintains that art and not morality is the origin of our pure impulse to truth. I believe that Nietzsche's purpose in appealing to art is to find a basis for establishing and perhaps improving our freedom as inquirers. According to both Nietzsche and Kant, aesthetic judgments express a special kind of freedom. Kant maintains that this freedom surpasses even the autonomy of our moral agency. 11 Like moral judgments, aesthetic judgments must be free from any given inclination or contingent purpose. Unlike moral judgments, aesthetic judgments must be free from any given concept or principle, including the ends and principles of reason .
Given Nietzsche's larger philosophical project, this fact makes it easy to see why he would appeal to art. His question is one of how the capacity to act from a pure impulse ever evolved from natural inclinations. Furthermore, he wants to give an account of how this capacity evolved that does not make an appeal to either language or reason. It is the independence of art from both the concepts embodied in language and the principles of reason that makes art an especially appealing candidate. At this point, I would like to review the general features of Kant's account of aesthetic judgment. At the same time, I will offer some textual evidence [End Page 30] for thinking that there are substantial agreements between Kant and Nietzsche about the nature of aesthetic judgments. In his early essay on truth, Nietzsche does not offer an account of aesthetic judgment. As such, I would like to start by briefly reviewing the agreements that Nietzsche expresses in both The Birth of Tragedy and Zarathustra with Kant's aesthetics. According to both Kant and Nietzsche, there are two types of aesthetic judgments. We experience the sublime when we confront the infinitude of abysses, mountains, and storms. We experience the beautiful when we hear the harmony of a piano sonata or see the unity in a painting. Setting to the side the differences between these two types of judgments, let us focus on the points that are common to both. Kant's analytic is an attempt to make sense of three conflicting intuitions that we share about aesthetics. 12 On the one hand, matters of art are a matter of personal taste. Aesthetic estimations are subjective judgments. Because they are subjective, there are no objective proofs to which we could appeal to settle disputes. At the same time, we do quarrel about matters of beauty and sublimity. If I find a painting beautiful and you think it is ugly, we take ourselves to be engaged in a real disagreement even if there are no objective grounds to settle the dispute. In order to help settle our quarrel, I

Nietzsche maintains that the distinction between the subjective and the objective cannot be used in aesthetics to do any philosophical work. Nietzsche's main point, like Kant's, is that aesthetic judgments are not merely subjective. They are not expressions of what is merely agreeable for an individual. A judgment of taste cannot be based on the satisfaction of personal preferences: "the striving individual bent on furthering his egoistic purposescan be thought of only as an enemy to art, never as its source" (BT, 41). At the same time, aesthetic judgments are not determinative judgments, for there are no objective grounds for matters of taste. Nietzsche challenges the idea that aesthetics is grounded on standards of reason (Z, 166). He wants to suggest that the aesthetics must be independent of such determinate concepts and principles. Nietzsche recognizes that there can be quarrels over matters of taste. In fact, he elevates the idea to a crucial
might point to the harmony of shapes, while you might point to the unattractive colors. position in his argument in Zarathustra when he challenges those who would maintain that judgments of taste are merely subjective expressions of personal preference: "[t]astethat is at the same time weight and scales and weigher; and woe unto all

Page 231 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The fundamental prerequisite to being a self-conqueror is that one overcome one's personal biases and prejudices. According to Kant's transcendental analysis, judgments of taste must be grounded on a
the living that would live without disputes over weight and scales and weighers!" ( Z, 117). disinterested pleasure. In order for the pleasure that we take in an aesthetic experience to be disinterested, we must seek a higher ground for our judgments. In exercising [End Page 31] his judgment, Zarathustra tells us that he "had to fly to the highest

Not only do we need to set aside our interest in what we find agreeable and what we find to be consistent with our prudential interests, but we must also set aside our interest in satisfying the requirements of morality (BT, 142). According to Kant's analysis, aesthetic judgments must be purposive without any given purpose. Zarathustra teaches us to live without any dependence upon given ends. He urges us to renounce any servitude under given purposes. Often, Nietzsche refers to such a condition as a matter of chance or accident. It is through the purposiveness of art that purposes grow from mere accidents (Z, 62). Purposiveness is realized where harmony and unity are restored to what was merely fragmentary. Under the last two moments of Kant's analysis, aesthetic judgments must make claims of subjective universality and subjective necessity. When we estimate the beauty or sublimity of an object, we make claims to the effect that all other human beings ought to agree with our judgment. 13 The judgment is universal insofar as it makes a claim on all others. According to Nietzsche, judgments of taste help us to become reconciled to one another by teaching the "gospel of universal harmony" (BT, 19-24). A judgment of taste is necessary insofar as it makes a claim on how others ought to estimate the
spheres that (he) might find the fount of pleasure again" ( Z, 98). object. According to Nietzsche, in the Apollonian state we experience dreams with a sense of real necessity. For Zarathustra, the "Thou shalt is higher than to command for those that are sublime" ( Z, 48). Nietzsche recognizes that it is possible to make such claims of necessity only where you have set aside personal biases and prejudices.

As such, you can only make such claims where you call this cessation of all need "necessity" (Z, 77, 222). So far,
we have reviewed the agreements between Kant and Nietzsche on aesthetic judgments and have found them to be in substantial agreement on major points. The fact that the agreements are found in both The Birth of Tragedy and Zarathustra is evidence that Nietzsche did not dramatically alter his position on these points in aesthetics between his early and later periods. 14 Furthermore, the fact that "Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense" and The Birth of Tragedy were published at about the same time indicates that Nietzsche was likely working with such ideas in his early essay on truth. Kant tells us that the key to the critique of taste is in the solution to the following problem. The question is whether the feeling of pleasure that we take in an aesthetic judgment follows from the judgment, or whether the feeling of pleasure precedes the judgment. 15 Only if the feeling of pleasure follows from the judgment is the judgment free from determination by external causes. Only if the judgment is free from such

As an aesthetic reflective judgment, [End Page 32] the basis for the correctness of the judgment is the complete freedom of the subject. Here we find what may be the key to understanding Nietzsche's account
causes can we presume to require that others agree with our judgment.

of aesthetic judgments. In Nietzsche's terms, the purely perspectival character of aesthetic judgments is the key to their legislative authority. For Kant, one who is engaged in an act of aesthetic judgment can tell us how we ought to judge because only a subjective necessity is presupposed by such judgments. Taste claims a special kind of autonomy. Only where we have overcome all of the external causes of bias in judgment, including the tyranny of our feelings, the tyranny of reason (scientific, prudential, and moral) and even the tyranny of the object and the truth of its existence, does our judgment have autonomy. Only where autonomy has been realized can we presume to tell others how they ought to judge, assuming that they have adopted an aesthetic perspective and distanced themselves from their own biases and prejudices. The structural similarities between Kant's two arguments against consequentialism are striking. In both Kant's ethics and his aesthetics, the issue is one of the purity of the

Because of the structural similarities between the two arguments, we can make the same kinds of arguments against rationalist and empiricist accounts of truth from the perspective of art as can be made from the perspective of ethics. On Kant's account, aesthetic reflective judgments share some of the same features as determinative moral judgments. Most important, aesthetic reflective judgments are categorical in their form even though they are singular judgments and are not determined by an objective principle of reason. Because they are categorical and not hypothetical, aesthetic judgments must be grounded in a pure impulse. Kant claims that the experience of the sublime teaches us to esteem in opposition to our interests and that the experience of the beautiful teaches us to love. In
judgment.

Page 232 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

a similar fashion, Nietzsche claims that the experience of the sublime gives us a height above our vanity and the experience of the beautiful teaches how to love something, such as the truth, from a pure impulse (Z, 116-18). By placing our own individual art and judgment before the worlds ethics we have the ability to question the institutionalized ethics that leads our lives and form our own idea of ethics by the superior imperatives Downard 04
(Northern Arizona University. Nietzsche and Kant on the Pure Impulse of Truth. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27)

Why should we think that Nietzsche is right to claim that art is the origin of our pure impulse to truth? Why shouldn't we agree with Kant that a pure impulse to the truth can and should be grounded in practical reason? I believe that Nietzsche can make the same criticism of Kant that he has made of empiricist and especially rationalist accounts of truth. Namely, that on certain questions, Kant's account of truth is grounded in a principle of self-love. The main [End Page 37] reason Kant falls prey to such an objection is that there are a whole host of questions Kant is unable or unwilling to admit are real questions. Let us start with Nietzsche's
example of honesty. According to Kant, why should we be honest? The answer is that any minimally rational agent recognizes a duty to be honest. Rational agents need no further reason to do their duty because the principles of morality give them overriding reasons to be moral. On Kant's account, can a moral agent honestly question what it is to be honest? What I mean is, supposing the circumstances are perfectly clear, and supposing that there are no apparent conflicts of duty, can a moral agent honestly raise the question, what ought I to do? Kant maintains that any minimally rational agent already knows the answer. Such an agent may feel a temptation to violate the duty to be honest, but the agent recognizes that the duty to be honest should always be given the highest respect. Nietzsche seems to think that we can raise honest questions about our values. On the one hand, the requirements of conscience do appear to impose necessary obligations for our conscience. On the other hand, we can raise questions about what, in particular, is required by an obligation. Furthermore, we can raise questions about the legitimacy of an obligation itself. As moral agents, we realize that social traditions and personal biases may unduly affect our conception of the requirements of morality. Even those requirements of conscience that seem the clearest and the strongest may, in a manner great or small, be infected by certain biases and prejudices. Kant insists that all minimally rational agents know what duty requires and, as such, are aware of the principles of morality. When a question about the requirements of morality arises, all we need to do is carefully abstract from our personal biases and prejudices and focus our attention on the principles that are innate to our power of practical reason. In effect, the answers to any moral questions that might arise are already contained in the principles embedded in our conscience. We can rest assured that the principles are absolutely universal and necessary. As a system of principles, the set is complete, consistent, and unchanging. Why does Kant believe that the system of moral principles has these general features? In ethics, he takes a

stronger stand than he does in natural science. The ideas of freedom, immortality, and God are regulative ideas that are justified only as practical postulates. But the ideas that the requirements of morality are absolutely universal, necessary, complete, consistent, and unchanging are constitutive of the very idea of a categorical imperative. In ethics, we know with significantly more certainty that the requirements of morality really do have these general features. 20 Nietzsche is free to question Kant's assumptions on such general points. How do we know the truth about honesty with such certainty? Kant's response is that we just know the principles of morality. Nietzsche's point is that such a response is empty. It is not an answer to the question. Rather, it is an attempt [End Page 38] to avoid the question. Why
does Kant seek to avoid the question? His reason seems to be that the question leads us to skepticism about the requirements of morality. A natural response to Kant's worry is that such questions may lead

Page 233 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

us to be skeptical about claims to certainty in ethics, but it is an open question as to whether or not we need such certainty in ethics. Kant's mistake was to turn his back on questions that

we ought not ignore. He closes the door to inquiry by setting to the side questions to which we ought to seek answers. That is a bad habit to inculcate. Nietzsche's criticism works equally well against both the rationalists and Kant (GM, 289-92). The attempt to avoid real questions by saying that the question has no answer, or by simply assuming an answer, is ultimately grounded on vanity. The fact that you happen not to like the consequences that
follow from the question is not sufficient reason to set the question to the side. Kant would have been better off to forward such claims as regulative principles. He could have made his claims about the absolute necessity and universality of the principles of duty as transcendental hypotheses. While such a move would have avoided premature claims to certainty, it would not remove Nietzsche's objection. As a hypothesis, the claim that the principles of practical reason are absolutely universal and necessary is not a good hypothesis. The problem is not that it is false. For all we know, the principles of

morality may be absolutely necessary and universal. The problem is that, as a hypothesis, it does not answer real questions. How can I be so sure that my understanding of my moral duties is correct? I have a clear understanding of the principles of morality and it is plausible to suppose that those principles are absolute. Simply asserting that the principles of morality are absolutely universal and necessary does not answer the question, regardless of whether the assertions are forwarded with certainty or only as hypotheses. Having made what I take to be the main point of Nietzsche's criticism in
his early essay on truth, and having turned the criticism toward Kant's ethics, let us step back and consider how he might have obtained the upper hand in the debate. The main question is, When engaged in inquiry, why ought I to commit myself to standards of correctness in general? Kant and Nietzsche agree that the pursuit of truth must be grounded on a free impulse . The advantage

of modeling the standards of correctness on aesthetic judgments and not moral judgments of duty is the following. The former but not the latter are free from determination by any given purpose or rule. As such, Nietzsche does not need to make nearly as many presumptions about the nature of truth as Kant. The fact that aesthetic judgments are not determined by objective principles was thought to be their greatest weakness. But Nietzsche seeks to turn a weakness into a source of strength. The greatest strength of aesthetic judgments is their superior freedom from such presumptions. Aesthetic judgments are a natural model for such hypotheses because neither makes a claim [End Page 39] to truth. When we forward a hypothesis, we say that it would explain a certain phenomenon if it were truth. We think it is a plausible conjecture, but we do not (at least yet) claim that it is true. Similarly, the freedom of an aesthetic judgment is predicated upon its independence from any claims to truth. Nietzsche wants to raise further
questions. What is the origin of our pure impulse to the truth? How can beings that were once governed entirely by self-interest ever gain the capacity for freedom? In order to gain the upper hand on these questions, Nietzsche does not need to assume that the capacity to act from pure impulses did in fact evolve from natural inclinations. The main advantage to his position is not merely that he can give answers to questions that Kant cannot. Rather, the main advantage to his position is that he can raise the questions in the first place. Because he does not need to presuppose the status of any rules or ends, he is free to pursue any line of inquiry whatsoever, let the consequences of what he discovers be damned. Once we have decided to address such questions in the terms of art,

we have new resources available to us. Instead of having to ignore certain difficulties, we can stare them in the face. For Nietzsche, overcoming our servitude to vanity is the greatest hurdle: "Nature threw away the key; and

Page 234 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

woe to the fatal curiosity which might be able for a moment to look out and down through a crevice in the chamber of consciousness, and discover that man is indifferent to his own ignorance, is resting on the pitiless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, and, as it were, hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger" (TF, 177). Ultimately, the way in which we need to face such challenges is to let the sublimity of the task remind us of the sublimity in ourselves.

Page 235 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**AT: Kants Categorical Imperative**

Institutionalized ethics, such as the Kants Categorical Imperative, places regulations of what is right and what is thought to be wrong without explanation or freedom to assume an alternative pathway by the individual Downard 04
(Northern Arizona University. Nietzsche and Kant on the Pure Impulse of Truth. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27) All four types of moral theories fall prey to the same objection. The principles that they hold up as the primary principle of morality all have the form of a hypothetical imperative. Hypothetical imperatives establish only that a means is good relative to some end. In order to show that a given end is worth [End Page 27] pursuing, all of these moral theorists simply assert that we are inclined toward such an end either because it is something that we desire, or because we have rational impulses that move us

in such a direction. According to Kant, all such incentives, regardless of whether they are empirical or rational in character, are impure. As such, they fail to express our freedom as moral agents. Only an incentive of respect that is generated by an awareness of the categorical imperative is pure. The reason is that only a principle of this form expresses our autonomy as moral agents. The difference is a matter of priority .

The feeling of respect is pure because it follows from the moral law. All other moral theories use a form of justification that puts the incentive first and the principle second. At this point, let us turn to Nietzsche's argument against both rationalist and empiricist accounts of truth. I hope to show that Nietzsche's criticisms can be defended using Kant's moral
argument against consequentialism. If Nietzsche's criticisms can be defended in this manner, then his criticisms will work against any philosophical account of truth that is grounded on a principle of self-love. The targets of Nietzsche's criticisms in his early essay on truth can be divided, according to Kant's table, along the axes of subjective and objective accounts. Taking them in reverse order from Kant's argument, let us first examine rationalist accounts of truth. According to Nietzsche, such theories posit the following kinds of claims.

Rational beings control their behavior entirely by abstractions. Their aim is to avoid being carried away by a disorderly array of perceptual impressions. Abstract concepts can be put into a pyramidal order of genus and species, with the unruly impressions residing at the bottom. Standing back, looking at the pyramid that we have constructed, we are impressed by those concepts that are "more fixed, general, known, human of the two and therefore the regulating and imperative one " (TF, 181). In creating such a world of concepts, our conduct is regulated by imperatives. These imperatives guide the conduct of our inquiry and determine how we ought to form concepts and distinguish between those assertions that are worthy of being believed and those that ought to be treated as false. The target of Nietzsche's criticism is, first and foremost, the imperatives that rationalists think should guide the conduct of our inquiry, and only secondly the beliefs that are held to be true at any given time as a result of following those imperatives. Nietzsche makes his criticism of rationalist accounts of truth in
the following terms. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal" I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. [End Page 28] Nietzsche's criticism has the

On both accounts, the mistake of the rationalists was to assume that merely logical principles could establish how we ought to conduct ourselveseither morally or in scientific inquiry. Logical principles cannot establish what we ought to hold as true any more than they can establish ends that are morally worthy of our pursuit. In order to hide this
same structure as Kant's criticism of Wolff's moral theory. flaw, rationalists try to sneak in a given end or belief. But the question remains, is that end really worth pursuing and is that assertion really worth believing? We should note that

Nietzsche does not assert that the belief adopted on the basis of such a procedure is false. Rather, he says that it has limited value as a truth. The reason is that the belief is, to some extent,

Page 236 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

improved by following the rationalists' method. It is rendered more consistent and harmonious with all the other assertions that are held to be true. But the rationalists have failed to use a method that honestly asks whether or not the belief itself is worthy of being believed . By way of contrast,
empiricists explain the origins of our beliefs in the following kinds of terms. A habitual relation between a word and certain images is caused by mere repetition. A nerve stimulus causes an image to appear in our consciousness as a sound or a sight. Objects external to us cause the stimulation of our nerves. Nietzsche's first point against an empiricist account is that the appeal to an object outside of us is the "result of a wrong and unjustifiable application of the concept of causality" (TF, 177). This concept has led empiricists to formulate a chain of causes, each one explaining what follows it in the series. Empiricists such as Hobbes and Hume openly assume that all objects have the same basic nature (material objects for Hobbes and conscious impressions for Hume), and all relations between things must be understood in terms of de facto causes. But insufficient justification is given for the presumption that words, images, nerve impulses, and objects external to us all have the same nature and can all stand in causal relations to one another. Empiricists believe that these kinds of philosophical assumptions should guide our inquiry.

Nietzsche takes issue first and foremost with the imperatives that they think should regulate our conduct. What is the basis of these imperatives ? Why not think that there is a difference in kind between nerve impulses and conscious images? Why not think that the relation
between the two is fundamentally an aesthetic relation and not a merely de facto causal relation? The question that Nietzsche puts to the empiricists is at root the same as the question he puts to the rationalists .

The point of Nietzsche's criticism of both rationalists and empiricists can be understood by considering his account of our move from the state of nature to the state of society. In order to end the war of all against all, human beings forge a peace treaty in which they agree to use concepts according to fixed conventions. This treaty establishes the difference between truth and lie. The [End Page 29] honest person follows the fixed conventions, the liar uses the fixed conventions to make things that are "unreal appear to be real" (TF, 2). He
reverses the fixed conventions and says, for example, "I am honest," when the correct word for his actions is "dishonest." The liar misuses the proper designations for his own selfish purposes and causes harm to others.

The majority of people follow the established conventions, but are their actions any less fraudulent? What the majority of people hate is not being deceived, but the harmful consequences of being deceived. Once again, Nietzsche does not assert that there is no value to such a grade of truth. Rather, he wants to question whether there is a higher grade of truth that we ought to pursue. The point of his criticism of both rationalists and empiricists is to question whether or not the imperatives that they recommend for the conduct of our inquiry can lift us out of the this state. In this state, we can establish a certain peace. We can rest in confidence that the fixed conventions have the status of accepted certainties. But we lack freedom. Nietzsche does not believe that either account can improve our freedom. The reason is that neither teaches us to act from a pure impulse to truth. Rather, they encourage us to seek the pleasant consequences of preserving the fixed conventions. Kants categorical imperative results in duty being impersonal. This results in a society where we work simply out of necessity and no person choice resulting in the destruction of ourselves like the German writer Heinreich von Kleis J. Thomas Howe 2003
Faithful to the Earth. J. Thomas Howe studied at Lake Forest College (BA, 1989), Yale Divinity School (MAR, 1993), and Claremont Graduate University (PhD, 1999). He teaches at the Iliff School of Theology and Regis University in Denver, Colorado

Page 237 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

With this point in mind, Nietzsche takes Kants categorical imperative as the very recipe for decadence, even for idiocy (A,11). The ideas of a good-in-itself and universal (noncontextual) notions of cirtue and duty are chimeras and expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life (A, 11). They make duty impersonal. Nietzsche does not dismiss notions of duty and virtue but only suggests that they must be personal discoveries. Regarding Kant, he says : Yet this nihilist with his Christian dogmatic entrails considered pleasure an objection. What could destroy us more quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any inner necessity, without any deeply personal choice, without pleasureas an automaton of duty? (A,11) For Nietzsche, the result of this is a general weakening of the human personality. Along similar lines, Nietzsche takes Kants aesthetics to lead to the same sort of weakening of
human personality. For Kant, Nietzsche quotes, the beautiful is that which gives us pleasure without interest (GM, III:6). Nietzsche is amused by this, writing, If one can even view undraped female statues without interest, one may laugh a little at their expense (GM, III:12). Nietzsche offers Stendhals idea of beauty as a contrast to Kants disinterested aesthetic. Stendhal calls the beautiful une promesse de Bonheur, which ought to arouse the will (GM, III:6). In schopenhauer, Nietzsche finds a manifestation of the Kantian aesthetic that brings its nihilism into clear light. Making use of the Kantian notion of disinterested beauty, Schopenhauer finds aesthetic contemplation to be lupulin and camphor, a sort of anesthesia for the will. Asking us to listen to its tone and sentiment, Nietzsche quotes Schopenhauer: This is the painless condition that Epicurus praised as the highest good and the condition of the gods; for a moment we are delivered from the vile urgency of the will; we celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of volition, the wheel of Ixion stands still! ( GM, III:6) Schopenhauer thought that the beautiful should calm the will, and, by calming it, the human being can find a degree of relief. Not far down the road from this point in intellectual history is Nietzsches last man, who no longer desires anything.

To be sure, there is a difference between the last man and the human being Kant envisioned as governed by the categorical imperative. But insofar as Kant relegated the sphere of meaningfulness to the sphere of the noumena, he made such a realm ultimately unavailable. If such a person were to live according to the Kantian worldview, with a high degree of honesty, he or she would resemble, as Nietzsche writes, the German writer Heinrich von Kleist. In 1811, Kleist committed suicide. His desire to live was diminished earlier when his conviction that the world was meaningful, purposeful, and knowable was shattered by Kants epistemology. Nietzsche writes in Schopenhauer as Educator that Kleist suffered from a despair of truth (SE, 3). This danger, he continues, accompanies every thinker whose starting point is Kantian philosophy (SE, 3). Nietzsche then goes on to quote a letter from Kleist: A short while a go I became acquainted with Kants philosophyand I must now share with you one of his ideas, whereby I dare not fear that it will shatter you as deeply and painfully as it did me. We cannot decide whether what we call truth is really truth, or whether it only appears to us
to be such. If the latter is the case, then the truth we collect here is nothing upon our death. And all our efforts to procure a possession that will follow us to the grave are in vain

My sole, my supreme aim has disappeared,

and I have no other.

(SE, 3).

Kants categorical imperative creates a world where people are impersonal to the notion of duty. A nation following this categorical imperative of impersonal duty will assure its destruction as it makes a nation of conscience lacking machines. Nietzsche The Antichrist
Friedrich 1895

A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case it is a

Page 238 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of "virtue," as Kant would have it, is pernicious. "Virtue," "duty," "good for its own sake," goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Konigsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of selfpreservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find hisown virtue, his own categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.To think that no one has thought of Kant's categorical imperative as dangerous to life!...The theological instinct alone took it under protection !An action prompted by the lifeinstinct proves that it is a
right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection . . .

What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasureas a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no less for idiocy. . . Kant became an idiot. And such a man was the contemporary of
Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopherstill passes today! . . . I forbid myself to say what I think of the Germans. . . .

Didn't Kant see in the French Revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic ? Didn't he ask
himself if there was a single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of it, "the tendency of mankind toward the good" could be explained, once and for all time? Kant's answer: "That is revolution." Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German decadence as a philosophythat is Kant!

The categorical imperative destroys any individualism and promote sovereignty by claiming in the name of self-preservation we must embrace a universal ethics White 97
(University of Illinois Press, Nietzsche and the problem of sovereignty) Kants philosophy may have enabled the resurgence of tragic wisdom. But it soon became clear to Nietzsche that while his own philosophy was also concerned with the sovereignty of the individual, Kantian solutions, like the categorical imperative, must entail the complete oblivion of the individual as such. In The Antichrist, for example,

Nietzsche describes the categorical imperative as typical metaphysical ploy. He views it as an attempt to escape or redeem individual existence by directing it after a law that is both universal and necessary. The fundamental laws of selfpreservation and growth demand that everyone invent his own virtue, his own categorical imperative, he writes. Nothing ruins us more profoundly, more intimately than every impersonal duty, every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction AC sec. 11). We might say that for Kant we are only moral (and hence autonomous) agents insofar as
we disregard the particularities of space and time to consider ourselves the embodiment of universal law. Arguing from the perspective of sovereignty,

Nietzsche asserts that the categorical imperative is therefore an immoral concept since it suppresses the singularity of individual existence within the monotonous rule of law. In fact, Nietzsche realized that by reason by itself, or through the meditation of the categorical imperative, may never be used to direct or determine the nature of individual sovereignty. This conclusion is in keeping with our basic understanding of what sovereignty means. If sovereignty really is the celebration of the individual, or that mode of being in which the individual

Page 239 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

achieves some kind of self-possession, the legislation of any specific formula for sovereignty actually denies individuality by attempting to order it in advance. The paradox here is that no one may simply legislate sovereignty, since sovereignty is precisely the
commandment one has over oneself. Thus, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche celebrates his own life and the project of self-appropriation, but he deliberately frustrates all imitation when he warns about the danger of all books, or when he counters the heroic portrayal of himself as the champion of impossible causes with a warning to beware of all great poses(EH Why I Am So Clever sec. 10). Clearly, he understood that to prescribe the specific content of sovereignty is ipso facto to destroy it; and he was therefore bound to reject Kans circumspection of autonomy and sovereignty in the formula of the categorical imperative. In the end, Nietzsches criticism of Kant is really a critique from within. For it is an attempt to radicalize Kant that is still guided by the same sovereign ideal that is common to both of them. And perhaps for this reason ,

Nietzsches invective against Kant is so relentless and impassioned; for in this way he empathizes the essential difference between their retrospective projects. In fact, Nietzsches meditation on Kants doctrine of sovereignty suggests the paradoxical nature of Nietzsche own philosophical goal. In all of the passages quoted above, Nietzsche criticizes Kant because the latter has abandoned the individual to the rule of the impersonal law. Clearly, Nietzsches goal is somehow to rescue individuals from whatever values, institutions, or moralities constrain them and encoureage self-oblivion . But if sovereignty is to be
identified with the affirmation of the individual as such, then it follows that sovereignty can never be conceptually appropriated; the individual is that which cannot be analyzed, reduced, or repeated in language: individuum ineffabile est. In this sense, however, a philosophy of sovereignty is bound to express that which can never be said. Hence it must remain deeply problematic and will require every kind of ruse and strategy if it is ever to succeed.

Page 240 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

*****BIOPOWER***** **Link: State Ethics**

The affirmatives attempt to secure society allows for the government to rule a state of exception on behalf of Humanitarian Imperatives. It allows the sovereigns biopower to go global
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security Sage Journals) MF The second area of complementarity can be seen as relating to the manner in which Agamben articulates the relationship between bare life and the exercise of sovereign power as one that operates through the state of exception. What we argue here is that human security is instrumental

in sovereign powers ability to delineate the circumstances in which such a state of exception can be proclaimed. What the discourse of human security does, whether broad or narrow, is to help define the exceptional circumstances that require the international communitys intervention , whether on behalf of humanitarian imperatives as initially conceived or in the service of maintaining global order as made evident more recently. It does so by initially constructing the terms that inform the exceptional circumstances that define the range of threats to human life. In turn, it contributes to the labour of defining and authorizing when the suspension of conventional international law of nations can occur .
The question that surfaces at this juncture is what authorizes the suspension of the law in the name of human security when the discourse of human security has yet to find its codification as international law? In other words, what allows human security to stand before the law? Returning to Agamben, human security can be understood here as participating in the institution of a form of sovereign power insofar as it simultaneously operates within and outside the law. It points towards a zone of indistinction in relation to its efforts to codify the authorization of a form of international intervention that becomes apparent in the fact that this authorization has yet to receive the status of international law while, at the same time, it must invoke the force that law normally assumes. The human security discourse thus finds itself in an aporia in relation to international law, which it must suspend while simultaneously invoking its force. On this point, Agambens reading of the relationship between sovereign power and biopower clearly brings back an element of analysis that is intentionally left aside in Foucaults biopoliticization of sovereign power highlighted through his reading of racism noted earlier. Agamben allows us to reintroduce the connection between the institution of the juridico-political order and biopower, which much of Foucaults work on modern forms of power under the rubric of a multiplicity of force relations sought to sever (Neal, 2004: 375). Having said that, Agambens reading is not entirely satisfactory either, which leads us to the final element of the assemblage between sovereign power and biopower brought to light by the human security discourse. Following Connollys critique noted earlier, Agamben appears to maintain a view of the logic and paradox of sovereign power as coherent and ultimately centred on the sovereignty of the state. The cartography of the form of sovereign power that articulates itself through the human security discourse would seem to complicate this view. Human

security can be read as informing the institution of a form of sovereign power that ultimately has as its plane of exercise the globe. This element of globality emerges most clearly in the manner in which the human security discourse articulates threats. Constituting threats specifically in terms of threats to human life means that the human security discourse, through a categorization and accounting of such threats, must constitute them with a

Page 241 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

view of (in)security that is global. In conceptual terms, viewing human life as a grounds upon which the (in)security dilemma is played out makes the life of the human species the referent of security (Dillon, 2007). To be sure, the human security discourse in practice identifies these threats as emanating from specific locales insofar as its interventions target delimited non-Western populations, and thus the Western state clearly continues to play a central role in mounting the recent series of international interventions . However, too
much emphasis on the state misses how such interventions have come to depend upon strategic complexes of global governance that bring together state and non-state actors, public and private organizations, military and civilian organisations (Duffield, 2001: 45). In helping to constitute

key elements of the state of exception, the human security discourse prepares the conceptual ground upon which such complexes are bound up with instituting a form of global sovereign power unmoored from the formal juridico-political sovereignty of any one state or coalition of states . Within the post-9/11 moment, then, human security can be seen as having laid the conceptual terrain for a form of human subjectivity amenable to the exercise of global sovereign rule. Rather than seeing a disjuncture between pre- and post-9/11, human security
proposes a form of life that is intimately connected to the assemblages of biopower and sovereign power that mark this rule.

The modern humanitarian movement is rendered in biopolitical terms and actually works to extend the states biopolitical control to a global scale
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security Sage Journals) This article has sought to explore the interconnections between biopower and sovereign power in relation to the human security discourse. An entry point into understanding factors contributing to such an assemblage is to be found precisely in the shifting conceptions of security in the postwar period. In this frame, the circulatory dynamics become the new grounds upon which to understand global order in terms of security. From here, the broadening and deepening of security can be traced to the apprehension of irremediable threats at a global level . It is from this general context that we can comprehend the advent of the human security discourse in both its broad and narrow forms. While the human security discourse draws from the transformations of security in the postwar environment, it also, we argued, moves towards new terrain. Most notably, it casts the problematique of (in)security in biopolitical terms by having the health and welfare of populations as its referent. Much of the initial work of the human security discourse has been

about properly ordering, categorizing and accounting for the true threats to human life. More recently, the formalization and institutionalization of the human security
discourse within the UN has begun to locate areas of strategic intervention that, informed by rationalities of governmentality, are meant to minimize risks by distinguishing between good and bad circulation. In the post-9/11 era, we identify continuity rather than rupture in the human security discourse. While many would see the humanitarian impulse within the human

security discourse as anathema to emerging patterns of world order signed by the global war on terrorism, we make the argument that, in rendering life in biopolitical terms, this discourse in fact prepares the ground for the operation of a form of sovereign power that claims the globe as its field of operation. What an institutional examination of the human security discourse affords us is a way in
which we can trace the assemblage of sovereign power and biopower in the contemporary moment while concurrently revealing a complexity to this articulation that escapes its more formal theorization.

In rendering life bare and politically unqualified, human security enables a

Page 242 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

form of human subjectivity amenable to the sway of sovereign power exercised from the global realm. Moreover, we argue that the human security discourse is
intimately bound with the problematique of exceptionality, and thus participates in providing the ground for the justification of suspending founding elements of international law while simultaneously seeking the force that law must entail in order to authorize a new form of international intervention. Finally, we suggest that this production of human subjectivity that the human

security discourse participates in enabling, coupled with the logic of exceptionality in the post-9/11 moment, can be understood as providing the grounds for an exercise of sovereign power on a planetary scale. The States attempt to be ethical is just a cover to increase biopolitical control over the population. Humanitarian intervention is meant to justify state sponsored security and control over life
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security Sage Journals)

During the 1990s, the concept of human security circulating among academics, governments, policy institutes, nongovernmental organizations, intergovernmental bodies and the media became increasingly influential in narrating the changing patterns of world order and prescribing action within them. Meant to figure the shifting source and meaning of threats, human security coincided with the broader labour of redefining traditional notions of national security that had begun in the 1970s but intensified with the collapse of the Cold
War. Although the discursive economy of human security tended to be divided between strong notions (emphasizing threats such as famine, hunger, disease and economic crisis) and narrow readings (focusing on violence, state failure, civil war, crimes against humanity and genocide ), the common

thread that tied the discourse together was the emphasis on shifting the referent from the state to the individual and, thus, bringing security down to the lives of human beings. In so doing, the discursive economy of human security not only sought to unravel the notion of security from statism and the interstate system, but also attempted to couple security with the concerns of international humanitarianism and human development. The
responses to world order marked by the events of 9/11 seem to have created two positions with regards to the present and future of the concept of human security.1 On the one hand, there are those who would argue that 9/11 sounded the death knell of the human security discourse. The military actions and the counter-insurgency campaigns waged in various parts of the globe that sign the global war on terror would suggest a violent and brutal return to the discourse of traditional state-centric security and the concomitant collapse of the vaunted New World Order foretold in the early 1990s from which the notion of human security

From unsanctioned, preemptive military actions against harbouring states and rogue states and targeted military operations to support the war on terror, to extralegal detention centres, state-sponsored assassinations, extraordinary rendition, deportation without due process, suspension of habeas corpus and indefinite detention, the contemporary moment certainly does not seem to leave much space for governance with a human face. On
emerged.

the other hand, for others, while the policies and actions unleashed by the global war on terror certainly appear to mark a setback in the form of world order that is necessary for the continued implementation of human security, 9/11 served as a stark reminder of the kinds of socio-economic conditions that the broader human security discourse was meant to remedy. Advocates would point to the continued institutionalization of this discourse within the United Nations as

Page 243 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

United States do not obviate the need for, and have not mitigated the continued articulation of policies and practices aimed at, the development of a more humane form of global governance.
evidence that the unilateral measures of the This article argues that both possible responses leave unattended the manner in which the human security discourse works towards setting the terrain for the transition from the pre- to the post-9/11 world order. The initial humanitarian imperatives that drive the discussions

surrounding the need to bring greater security to human lives help to constitute a form of life amenable to an exercise of the form of sovereign power that has marked the post-9/11 era. This article traces this alternative reading by illustrating how the concept of human security can be read as working to set the discursive terrain for the dual exercise of sovereign power and biopower .
Using the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, we outline this duality by examining not only how the human security discourse participates in defining the conditions of exceptionality, thus enabling the exercise of sovereign power, but also how, in having human life as its target, human security ultimately enacts the human in biopolitical terms. Seen from this vantage point, the concept of human security informs the current biopolitical

networks of global governmentalities and works in conjunction with rather than against the exercise of sovereign power made evident by the global war on terrorism. The article also seeks to turn the discussion towards theory by bringing to light
how our reading of the conceptual deployment of human security from the vantage point of the international leads to assemblages of sovereign power and biopower unanticipated by the theoretical articulations offered by Foucault and Agamben. Our initial aim is to examine what, at first sight, may appear as two competing modalities of power that is, sovereign power and biopower. We then turn to the concept of security with regards to the conditions of possibility for the development of the human security discourse in the post-Cold War world. This sets the stage for our examination of human security. Here, our objective is twofold: (a) to interpret the concept of human security through biopower and sovereign power, as noted above, and (b), conversely, to use the human security

discourse as a vantage point from which to read the way in which these technologies of power can be seen as interwoven in ways not made evident by their theoretical articulation. The idea of human rights and a states obligation to protect things like hunger is just the moving of security discourse into the private life. This idea of an ethical responsibility is just the states excuse for further biopolitical control of everyday life
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security Sage Journals)
DT

What we propose below is an examination of the complementarity between sovereign power and biopower via the concept of human security as it has been articulated from the realm of the international, while concurrently revealing how the human security discourse itself provides a way of tracing some of the complexity highlighted above, thus problematizing the more formal and theoretical assemblage of sovereign power and biopower found in the work of Foucault and Agamben. In order to place this analysis in context, we begin by tracing the discourse of security from the post-World War II context onward. What we intend to show is that the shift from the term defence to security helps set the terrain from which the interweaving of biopower and sovereign power found in the concept of human security is rendered possible. The formal origins of the concept of human security are to be found in the worldview of an international organization that was concerned with post- Cold War humanitarian issues, and only subsequently became enmeshed in the discourse of national foreign policy concerns and academic debates on security.

the initial impulse was to shift the referent from the state to the legitimate concerns of ordinary people who s[eek] security in their daily lives (UNDP, 1994: 22). In other words, the objective was to bring security down to the level of human
Generally attributed to the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report and some of the concurrent writings of Mahbub ul-Haq ,

Page 244 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

life by seeking to develop strategies in the provision of both safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression and protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life whether in homes and jobs or in communities (UNDP, 1994: 23). In so doing, security was to be decoupled from the particular national interest of states and tied to the universal concern[s] (UNDP, 1994: 22) of all people. In articulating itself universally, human security was therefore initially meant to be built upon the bedrock of universal human rights. This move would be accompanied by efforts to identify a comprehensive list of threats that the all encompassing (UNDP, 1994: 24) concept of human security would respond to that is, economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security (UNDP,
1994: 2425). Clear connections were made between severe impediments to human development and pervasive and chronic threats to the fulfilment of human potential. Such a broad formulation sought to transcend the state, insofar as it brought into question its role as a provider of security relative to other actors for example, international organizations, NGOs and non-military government agencies while simultaneously identifying the state itself as a potential source of insecurity. This elision of the state also served to make the quotidian the object of security. Whereas security tended to be understood in terms of defining historical moments centred around the survival and integrity of the state, we now see emerging an understanding of (in)security that arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event (UNDP, 1994: 22). In this way, human security certainly participated in the broader redefinition of security begun in the 1970s and 1980s; however, it also set off on new terrain, in that shifting its referent to the individual introduces as threats a host of contingencies that emerge from daily life. This initial deployment of the concept in the mid-1990s was subsequently accompanied by other efforts to theorize human security in ways that would be more amenable to the multilateral and middle-power approaches found in the foreign policy concerns of certain states. Examples like the Responsibility

To Protect generally moved away from the broader development concerns of the Human Development Report towards a more narrow focus on introducing a new set of international norms on intervention that would guide and restrict the conduct of the state and the international community in extreme and exceptional cases (ICISS, 2001: 31). Here, the threats are concomitantly narrowed down to violent threats to individuals (Human Security Center, 2005: viii), such as mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease
(United Nations, 2004: 65). Emphasis shifts from an understanding of threats that stem from a broad set of quotidian political, social, economic and environmental contingencies, to what are deemed to be avoidable catastrophe[s] (United Nations, 2004: 65). Within this context, there is a partial but significant return to the state, in that it is through the nexus of the state that the provision of both security and insecurity, by state and non-state actors, is predominantly understood.

The State exploits and destroys the Other in the name of humanitarian intervention and for the sake of humanity as a whole
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security Sage Journals) MF

The traditional apparatus of the state as concerns its monopoly over the (il)legitimate use of violence also makes its return in the form of military intervention as a response of last resort to the extreme violation of rights that are held as inviolable. This then enables the shift towards tying security to the notion of the states ability or inability to fulfil its responsibility to protect the human beings within its care. In this sense, the referent and threats continue to be articulated in non-territorial forms, as within the broader

Page 245 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

notion of human security, but the responses are framed within the nexus of the state and therefore call forth a statist conception of security . This return to the state is made all the more evident in the manner in which the narrower concept of human security centres around (re)defining norms surrounding the legitimacy of the international communitys right to intervention. Such an effort attempts to inaugurate and codify a new law around a set of norms that simultaneously requires the suspension of certain foundational elements of international law in cases of violence which so genuinely shock the conscience of mankind, or which present such a clear and present danger to international security, that they require coercive military intervention
(ICISS, 2001: 31) on the part of the international community. It is the concept of human security that serves to define and identify the extreme and exceptional circumstances that it itself requires in the subsequent formulation of its responses. In so doing, the human security discourse

participates in setting the conditions for both the suspension of the law and the authorization of its refounding in the form of new norms of intervention . As we will explore below, this marks a key dimension of the operation of the concept of sovereign power elaborated earlier. The bulk of the most current stage of the development of
the human security discourse can be found in the institutionalization of that discourse within the UN, beginning with the 2004 report by the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (United Nations, 2004), the UN Secretary-Generals 2005 report In Larger Freedom (United Nations, 2005a), the General Assemblys World Summit Outcome Document in September 2005 (United Nations, 2005b), and UN Security Council Resolutions 1674 and 1706, adopted in April and August of 2006, respectively. These documents which set the stage for the formalization of the human security discourse within the UN via its two main bodies.10 In parallel with these developments, the independent Advisory Board on Human Security and the Human Security Unit (HSU) within the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) were created in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Both were fashioned as a result of the recommendations formulated in the Human Security Commissions (2003) report Human Security Now, and both were charged with disseminating and integrating human security within the UN and beyond. These activities have been financed by the UN Trust Fund for Human Security (UNTFHS), set up by the government of Japan, which also sponsored the establishment of the Commission.11 The Human Security Unit reports that an average of 24 projects have been funded per year since 2004. While these developments are recent and cannot be overstated given the chill that 9/11 brought to the debates on international humanitarian intervention, they do however indicate an attempt at mainstreaming the concept of human security through a process of initiating formalization and institutionalization. What follows is a reading of the broad and narrow conceptions of human security informed by our earlier elaboration of the concepts of sovereign power and biopo wer.

The ability of the state to apply good or bad ethical claims is the root of security discourse. In the name of ethics the affirmative gives the state increased biopolitical control. Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security Sage Journals) MF

In (re)defining the threats to human life as its most basic operation, the discourse of human security must begin by defining and enacting the human in biopolitical terms. The target of human security, whether broad or narrow, is to make live the life of the individual through a complex of strategies initiated at the level of populations. In defining and responding to threats to human life, these strategies have as their aim the avoidance of

Page 246 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

risk and the management of contingency in the overall goal of improving the life lived by the subjects invoked in their own operation . In this sense, as with
Foucaults understanding of the biopolitical, the health and welfare of populations is human securitys frame of intervention; however, until its recent institutionalization within the UN , the human security discourse, from the vantage point of the international, has been marked mostly

by defining and identifying the global patterns and trends of human insecurity. In other words, the human security discourses initial move is found in creating the measurements that aggregate the threats to human life . The
clearest example of this initial labour in relation to the narrower understanding of human security can be found in the Human Security Report in 2005, which boasts that no annual publication maps the trends in the incidence, severity, causes and consequences of global violence as comprehensively (Human Security Centre, 2005: viii). This quest to properly order, categorize and account for the true threats to human life in the post-Cold War world is also exemplified in the series of UNDP reports. As Mark Duffield & Nicholas Waddell (2006: 5) point out, the UNDP . . . launched its annual Human Development Report in 1990, dedicating it to . . . ending the mismeasure of human progress by economic growth alone. It is through this mapping that the human security

discourse then advocates on behalf of specific areas of strategic intervention in the name of the health and welfare of targeted populations . Although still in their infancy, the strategies are meant to foster development as a means of securing the health and welfare of targeted populations . Recent
programmes detailed by the Human Security Unit include preventing the abuse of illicit drugs in Afghanistan; addressing the health of women and adolescents affected by HIV in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala; contributing to the provision of more secure access to small-scale energy services for local basic necessities in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Guinea; combating the trafficking of women and children in Cambodia and Vietnam; providing access to education in Kosovo; integrating displaced peoples in Colombia; promoting the radio broadcasting of information covering humanitarian issues in areas of Africa and Afghanistan; building civic participation and self-reliance in Timor-Leste; and stabilizing refugee host communities through a multifaceted strategy that includes the reduction of small arms and the provision of basic education, food and environmental security in Tanzania (United Nations Human Security Unit, 2006). Such programmes operate at the level of the chronic insecurities in the day-to-day life of targeted populations. They envision human security as part of comprehensive, integrated, people-centered solutions (United Nations Human Security Unit, 2006: 2) that are meant to provide a measure of remedy to quotidian threats. While the programmes target specific populations in delimited locales, the threats are themselves framed in regards to circulation and

seek to ultimately distinguish the bad from the good flows in terms of (in)security. In this scenario, following from the programme examples above, good circulation would include information on humanitarian issues, civic participation and self-reliance; bad circulation would entail, inter alia, trafficking, illicit drugs and small arms. Returning to Foucaults understanding of security and circulation elaborated earlier, the frame of intervention of the human security discourse, in seeking to maximize the positive elements and minimize the risks to human life, operates on a terrain of calculability that attempts to manage the incalculable through probabilities. In its initial stages, the objective of the human security discourse, in seeking to distinguish between bad and good circulation, had as its primary grammar of reference sustainable human development.12 With the post-9/11 moment and the ensuing war on terror, however,
the distinction between good and bad circulation tends to take as its frame of reference global order. With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as the subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, the globality of the circulation of threats for the West becomes more explicit, and consequently a new cartography of threats and vulnerabilities is drawn up and rationalities and technologies are deployed to counter them. As Duffield & Waddell (2006: 10) explain in relation to the war on terrorism: The predominance of security concerns, especially homeland

Page 247 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

security, means that issuesof global circulation of people, weapons, networks, illicit commodities, money, information, and so on emanating from, and flowing through the worlds conflict zones, now influence the consolidating biopolitical function of development. Unlike Duffield & Waddells work, the tack we would like to follow in the section below is not directed towards tracing the biopolitical function of international development practices in relation to the war on terror, but to the way in which the human security discourse participates in setting the terrain for and the deployment of sovereign power. In the name of humanitarian and ethical concerns the government intervenes even more into the person life of the people. The biopolitical order is reinforced by the idea that the state has a responsibility to its people and therefore has a right to control it.
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security Sage Journals) MF One would be hard pressed to find a more paradigmatic symbol of the post- 9/11 world order than Camp Delta. Guantnamo Bay has become the prime example through which

the question of exceptionalism and its bounded relationship to sovereignty has come to the fore.13 How is it possible to reconcile the biopolitical function of human security
outlined above with the exceptional times of the post-9/11 world? What are the mechanisms and assemblages through which we can understand the complementarity between biopower and sovereign power? In this final section, we explore what we understand to be two key dimensions that mark the complementarity between these forms of power while simultaneously showing how their articulation problematizes the way in which they have been understood in theoretical terms. We have already explored via Agambens work how rendering life bare can be seen as the originary activity of sovereign power. What can be brought to light here, in relation to our discussion of human security above, is that the life lived by the subjects of the human security discourse can be seen as life lived as bare inasmuch as this discourse is not meant to qualify political life. As explored previously, life through the lens of human security is understood primarily in terms of providing for the basic sustenance of day-today life. Brought into the post-9/11 context, what this enables is an opening

towards mapping global order in a way that apportions this bare life in relation to zones of exceptionality amenable to the logic of an exercise of sovereign power. This is reflected in the way development objectives and humanitarian goals now tend to submit more directly to the dictates of the management of global order. Instead of targeting populations that are most insecure as measured by the human security discourse and viewing the provision of security to those populations as an end in itself, the targeting is now overridden by the hard security concerns of homelands and ends understood increasingly in terms of the aims of the global war on terror .14
While the human security discourse could always be critically interpreted as prioritizing its responses to populations that are threatened in relation to servicing the maintenance of the global liberal order (Chandler, 2004), the shift here can be understood as one where this servicing

reveals a more intimate connection between sovereign power, biopolitics and the maintenance of post- 9/11 order. This connection comes in the way in which the
human security discourse prepares conceptually a form of life that is at hand for the mounting of proactive interventions of pre-emption and prevention. We can see elements of this shift in the most

Page 248 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
the

recent institutional developments of the human security discourse within the UN. To be certain,

post- 9/11 moment can be taken as a movement away from a further codification of grounds for humanitarian intervention that would have as its objective the health and welfare of populations as an end in itself . As Alex Bellamy (2006: 165) chronicles, the language of the World Summit Outcome Document as it relates to the model of humanitarian intervention outlined in the 2001 ICISS report was watered down in favour of reinforcing not only the principle that the burden of protecting populations fell chiefly on individual states, but also the idea that the threshold for interventions on humanitarian grounds should be high. Thus, there was a clear shift in the document away from what was meant to be shared responsibility between the international community and the host state through a re-emphasis of the responsibility of the latter. At the same time, the document also moved towards safeguarding
the Security Councils political discretion to choose when and whether it would intervene rather than endorsing binding criteria that would compel the Council to act in cases of clear humanitarian emergencies, as prescribed in the ICISS report (Bellamy, 2006: 166167). While these changes can be seen as weakening the case for binding the Council to intervene on humanitarian grounds, they can

also be read as broadening the scope for interventions on discretionary grounds. They do this by further codifying the range of justifications for intervention that emerged
from Security Council resolutions during the 1990s while simultaneously reaffirming the Councils ability to choose which cases merit its attention. Perhaps most importantly, the outcome

document retains the understanding of sovereignty as responsibility outlined in the ICISS report, reinforcing the notion that it is the host state that has the primary responsibility to protect. The test of responsibility here remains couched in terms of the biopolitical functions of the state insofar as what is measured is the latters ability or inability to provide for the health and welfare of the populations within its care. As recounted by Bellamy (2006: 164 167), the negotiations leading to the final draft of the outcome document came as a result of pressure
from representatives of states that wanted either a free hand to determine whether and when to intervene (the USA) or to retain the traditional supremacy of sovereignty in terms of political and legal autonomy (Russia and China). Although this can be taken as a deferral to the norms of territorial inviolability, there is a continued adherence to an understanding of sovereignty

that is qualified in line with the states biopolitical functions, in that each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity (United
Nations, 2005b: para. 138). Combined with the endorsement of the Security Councils political discretion on intervention, these most recent institutional developments could also be read

as a codification of sovereignty in biopolitical terms, and thus as reinforcing the linkages between sovereign power and biopower.

Page 249 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Link: Ethics**

Foundationalism is a moral stance that leads towards a homogenous biopolitical structure

Jeffrey Minson 1985 Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics

Foundationalism we define abstractly as follows. It views ethical considerations as always grounding, and therefore ideally overriding other considerations. The ethical cannot be confined to other province of human and social life but rather subsumes all other provinces. This subsumption consists in always being entitled to subject economic, political, artistic, legal or any other aspects of situation to its criteria of evaluations . Moral evaluations takes
priority over other particularistic and consequently one-sided types of evaluations; these themselves lie under an injunction to attempt to take their cue from the ethic mode of evaluations which transcends them all.

Evaluations takes the form of subjecting actions or state of affairs to the test of whether they conform to the first principles of that ethic . To take a well-known example from eighteenth century
political philosophy, Jeremy Benthams Fragment on Government advertised the merits of the principle of utility as the rock on which all rationally justifiable Parliamentary legislation and social administration must be grounded: accurately apprehended and steadily applied (the principle of utility) affords the only clue to guide a man through these straits (Bentham 1967, pp. 93,

However, philosophical theories hold no monopoly on this form of argument. Anticipating the case-study on abortion in Chapter 8 below, it is on the basis of ethical foundationalism that
97).

people view abortion as primarily a moral issue, the questionable corollary of this view being that principled abortion law and policy must flow from a prior consideration of its moral justifibiability. Foundationalism is never a purely ethical stance; over and above principles of evaluations or justification, it always embodies a view (if not in explicit empirical propositions, then in its metaphors, imagery and rhetoric) about its moral constituency i.e. the nature of the agents who are subjected to its constraints. When Mary Midgley seeks to base her ethics on universal human needs, she neglects to take account of the extent to which the ethical

foundationalism framework orders the space in which these universal human attributes can appear as the prior and ethically decisive one. Foundationalisms mode of evaluation conveys two implications in respect to change: (i) if something is morally wrong, therefore we ought to move heaven and earth to change it; and (ii) an imperialist impulse towards homogenization, i.e. an urge to remould the whole world in the ideal image of its first principles. For these reasons foundationalism may be singled out as the single most important key to the enigma of the so-called eccentricity of ethics which was first broached in the preface. Attempts to coercively generalize ethical stances results in reinforcing the already hierarchal and dominating system of the state, this coercively brings people into the states control and is biopolitical Richard Day 2001
Ethics, affinity and the coming communities. B.A.Sc.(UBC), M.A.(York,Toronto), Ph.D.(SFU) Associate Professor

Contemporary Western societies are not only societies of the tree; they are also societies of the state form. Since it is impossible to do justice to this concept here, I will restrict the discussion to the couplet war-machine/state form, and the relations of this couplet with the arborescent/rhizomatic distinction. State forms, at the highest level of generality, are apparatuses of capture that bring outside elements inside by connecting them up with an arborescent syste m. While Deleuze and Guattari do provide elements
of a genealogy (1986: 42437), they are careful to point out that the state form cannot be traced back to a point of origin. Rather, there have been

Page 250 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

states always and everywhere (429), coexisting in relations of competition and cooperation with war-machines, forces that are exterior to the state apparatus and attempt to untie the bonds of capture (352), to destroy the State and its subjects (Deleuze and Parnet, 1983: 104). In terms of social and political effects, states tend to perpetuate already instantiated (arborescent) forms, while war-machines tend to destroy old forms and instantiate new ones through rhizomatic connections. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, revolutionary organization must be that of the war machine and not of state apparatus (Guattari, 1995: 66); indeed, they see their own writing as an operation that weds a war machine and lines of flight, abandoning . . . the State apparatus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 24). Yet, just as arborescent forms can grow rhizomatic appendages, states can and must incorporate warmachines, tame them and put them to use in an institutionalized army, make them part of the general police function (Deleuze and Parnet, 1983: 103). This is the special danger of the war-machine: if it does not succeed in warding off the development of a state form, it must pass into the service of the state or destroy itself (104). It is here, in the form of ecstatic injunctions accompanied by somber warnings, that Deleuze and Guattari, like Foucault, present not only a negative call to resistance, but also a consistent and positive ethicopolitical stance. At times, they take us even further than this, advocating what Keith Ansell-Pearson has called novel images of positive social relations (Ansell-

We have no need to totalize that which is invariably totalized on the side of [dead] power; if we were to move in this direction, it would mean restoring the representative forms of centralism and a hierarchical structure. We must set up lateral affiliations and an entire system of networks and popular bases (Foucault, 1996: 78). This system of networks and popular bases, organized along rhizomatic lines and actively warding off the development of arborescent structures, would provide bases for social forces that neither ask for gifts from the state (as in the liberal-democratic new social movements) nor seek state power themselves (as in classical Marxism). Unlike the molar forms of social transformation, these molecular movements would resist the will to domination in Foucaults sense, in favour of affinity; that is, they would take up ethico-political positions but refuse to try coercively to generalize these positions by making moral, ontological, or other foundational claims.
Pearson, 1998: 410). Thus Deleuze:

Page 251 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

*****GOVERNMENT PROVISION***** **Rimal** Authoritarianism and constraints are key to avoid overpopulation and resource crunch that will end life

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]

resources are finite. The conditions that make life possible are being threatened by overpopulation and by industrial processes which deplete resources and pollute air and water. Typically, the crisis is considered the result of increasing shortages in the physical environment. However, a more complete understanding of the ecological crisis requires an examination of human nature, especially as it has been reflected in and shaped by modern political thought since the Renaissance. Modern political thought, in a departure from classical modes of reasoning, emphasized secularism, materialism, individualism, and individual rights-the cornerstones of the political ideology of liberalism and the foundation of the American political system. The resulting view of man's relations to his fellow man and to the physical environment makes solutions to the ecological crisis particularly difficult in the United States because, contrary to the liberal ideology and political institutions so long enjoyed here, solutions will require constraints on individual and group behavior . The radical departure of modern
Essays on the ecological crisis usually stress the point that
political philosophy from the classical tradition becomes apparent on recalling Plato's Republic, in which Socrates and the interlocutors sought to discover the meaning of justice as it appeared in the soul and in the city. Their dialetical search for a just "City in Speech"-a hypothetical city-led them first to the simple city which provided for man's basic needs. It was well ordered but assured adequate provisions for only the necessities of life. Though Socrates called it the city healthy, Glaucon called it a "city of pigs," for it failed to satisfy man's desire for those comforts and conveniences which go far beyond life's necessities. This point forced the interlocutors to continue the search for the City in Speech, examining not only the requirements of justice but the nature of human desires and the source of proper limits for the soul and the city.' Creation of the just City in Speech reflected the ancient understanding that

human beings must control their desires, and the discovery and implementation of proper controls , said Socrates, required rule by philosophers. In order for the City in Speech to come into being, philosophers would have to become kings or vice versa. But since chances of wisdom coinciding with consent were slight,
Socrates completed the dialogue by showing how the City in Speech could degenerate because of the triumph of governing principles other than wisdom. The City in Speech was left to stand only as a standard by which to evaluate actual political communities.

Its creation in the dialogue, however, exposed enduring political problems, among them how to control human desires for material comforts and conveniences. The classical
tradition assumed that part of the art of governing was the control of such desires.2 In many ways modern political philosophy stood this classical tradition on its head by emphasizing popular

consent rather than philosophic wisdom as a major goal of politics. Individual rights and liberties became the source of limits on governmental authority . Government came to be understood as originating from a contract agreed to by autonomous individuals. And the pursuit of happiness became largely a pursuit of material goods for which there were no natural limits. This modern political philosophy has nurtured the liberal tradition in America. One of the major accomplishments of the Founders was creation of a political system that legitimized the pursuit of material comforts, that thinkers in the classical tradition had sought to harness. However, the success of the Founders' experiment in liberal government depended on the infinite availability of the natural resources necessary for such pursuits . Contemporary discovery of the earth's "carrying capacity," or lim- its to nature's "commons," appears to jeopardize the continued success of the

Page 252 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

American experiment. If American political ideology and institutions have been successful in encouraging pursuit of happiness through material acquisition, they appear incapable of imposing the limits which are required to forestall ecological disaster. This incapability, in turn, leads to arguments that popular government must give way to authoritarianism . But if
authoritarianism is the response to the inability of popular government to impose the limits required to avoid ecological disaster, such a response merely reflects the crisis to which modern political philosophy and liberalism have led; it is not itself a solution. There is no assurance that authoritarianism is any more capable of proper limits than is popular government. Perhaps the best illumination of the dilemma posed by the ecological crisis is a review of the philosophy of John Locke, whose thought profoundly influenced the Founders of the American republic.

Constitutional liberties encourage an unsustainable relationship with natural resources

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor] Lockean thought legitimated virtually endless accumulation of material goods; helped equate the process of accumulation with liberty and the pursuit of happiness; helped implant the idea that with ingenuity man can go beyond the fixed laws of nature, adhering only to whatever temporary laws he establishes for himself in the process of pursuing happiness; and helped instill the notion that the "commons" is served best through each man's pursuit of private gain, because there will always be enough for all who are willing to work. In short, Lockean philosophy led to a strong ideology of man's relationship to man and the earth, in which autonomous individuals seek comfort and enjoyment through hard work and material acquisitions. Such beliefs, added to the doctrine of inalien- able rights and the argument of limited government, have played a significant role in the design of the American Constitution and political

Private property and liberty encourages unsustainable resource consumption

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in America, "Nothing checks the spirit of enterprise ." He noted that the enjoyment of liberty could not be separated from the "productive industry" fostered by free enterprise. 14 The dream of life lived for the enjoyment of liberty (freedom to pursue abundance through productive enterprise) and happiness (the securing of abun- dance) appeared to be coming true. Nothing in the constitutional structure threatened the dream, and it was increasingly clear that government in the United States existed to secure the blessings of property, just as Locke had taught. By the nineteenth century the radically secular orientation of American liberalism was bolstered by developments in modern natural science.15 Scientific advances provided new insights into the workings of the physical environment and ways to control it. Technology and industrialism provided seemingly unlimited opportunities to create the material abundance associated with happiness. Liberalism, argues Louis Hartz, proved its real
Less than forty years after the adoption of the Constitution, strength in driving out any ideological forces which sought to compete with growing visions of abundance and happiness on earth.16 Although liberal ideology and institutions nurtured

Page 253 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

neglected to instill an understanding of America's dependence on natural resources. Foreign observers saw the dependence much more clearly. For example, Tocqueville noted that: The physical causes, independent of the laws, which contribute to promote general prosperity, are more numerous in America than they have been in any other country in the world, at any other period of history. In the United States not only is legislation democratic, but Nature herself favors the cause of the people .17
the commitment to material abundance and earthly happiness in America, they However, John Stuart Mill contended that despite such conditions un- limited growth was impossible because the resources of nature were not infinite. Mill considered nature's physical limits a blessing and looked forward to a "stationary state" in which population and capital would be balanced. He said such a state would still man's productive passions and allow him to cultivate social and moral endowments.l8 Nineteenth-century German biologist Ernest Haeckel coined the term "ecology" in his effort to point out man's dependence on his physical environment. Every system, he argued, reflects three qualities-interde- pendence, complexity, and limitation.l9 But ecological lessons ran contrary to the liberal belief that

nature could and must be conquered to serve man's purposes. And repeated warnings in this century that man could exceed the carrying capacity of the environment if he did not limit population or industrial processes have gone largely unheeded.20 Welfare is key to avoid the resource crunch that will end all life
Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor] Of late, the warnings have intensified, notably in the reports of the Club of Rome. In 1972 a sophisticated computer model developed by the Club projected that unless

population or industrialization is curtailed drastically, worldwide collapse of the ecosphere will occur within 100 years.21 In 1974 an updated study responded to many
of the criticisms leveled at the 1972 report but came to only slightly more optimistic conclusions: survival is possible, but only if man diverts from the path of "undifferentiated growth" to "organic growth ." That is, growth compatible

with the requirements and limits of physical nature: For the first time in man's life on earth, he is being asked to refrain from doing what he can do; he is being asked to restrain his eco- nomic and technical advancement, or at least to direct it differently from before; he is being asked by all the future generations of the earth to share his good fortune with the unfortunate-not in a spirit of charity, but in a spirit of survival.22

Tyranny is inevitable its only a question of how quickly we allow it to form

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]

who now foresee and advocate authoritarianism as the only workable response to ecological problems anticipate the demise of the liberal experiment in much the same way Socrates
Ironically, those

Page 254 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

anticipated the demise of democracy in Book vIII of the Republic. Socrates argued that democracy inevitably leads to tyranny because of the refusal of the many to accept proper limits. The absence of limits leads to chaos, which in turn gives way to tyranny because any order is better than no order. The democratic man, unable to distinguish right from wrong, proper from improper, eventually accepts tyranny in preference to the chaos which makes life unlivable . Hardin, Heilbroner, and Ophuls suggest that modern man is, or soon will be, in a similar situation with respect to the ecological crisis. Despite the hopes of "technological optimists" the carrying capacity of the earth is bound to be exceeded unless rigid limits are imposed. Faced with chaos and extinction, modern man will find authoritarianism the only alternative. Frontline: Mutual coercion agreed upon by the majority will check bad instances of coercion
Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]

Hardin contends that coercion is the only remedy. As a safeguard against arbitrary coerion, he prescribes "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected." 45 Presumably, majority rule will reduce the possibility of arbitrariness since it will merely coerce the minority to behave in ways that will not destroy the commons. Uniqueness: A global authoritarian revolution is coming there is a lack of political interest in the promotion of democratic freedoms. Windsor, director of Freedom House; Gedmin and Liu, presidents of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty & Radio Free Asia, 09
(Jennifer Windsor, director of Freedom House; Jeffrey Gedmin and Libby Liu, presidents of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty & Radio Free Asia, June 2009, Undermining Democracy: 21st-Century Authoritarians, http://www.underminingdemocracy.org/overview/)
When asked not long ago about the effectiveness of the European Unions posture toward an increasingly assertive and illiberal Russia, former Czech president and communist-era dissident Vaclav Havel argued that the

European democracies had lost their voice and needed to take a firmer, more open stand against abuses by their large and strategically important neighbor to the east. * He warned that todays Russia is advancing a new form of authoritarianism , with methods of control that are significantly more
sophisticated than the classic totalitarian techniques of the Soviet Union. Finally, the former Czech leader lamented that as democratic states increasingly gave primacy to economic ties in their relations with Russia, the promotion of human rights was being shunted to the margins .

The Kremlin was intensifying its repression of the political opposition, independent journalists, and civil society organizations, but the response from established democracies had softened to the point of inaudibility . Havel was referring only to Russia, but he could just as easily have been speaking of China, another authoritarian country whose high rates of economic growth and rapid integration into the global trading system have had the effect of pushing the issues of democratic governance and human rights to a back burner. China , like Russia, has modernized and adapted its authoritarianism, forging a system that combines impressive economic development with an equally impressive apparatus of political control. As in Russia, political dissidents and human rights defenders in China continue to challenge the regime. Chinese
activists recently published Charter 08, a human rights and democracy manifesto that draws its inspiration from Charter 77, the Czechoslovak human rights movement of which Havel himself was a founder. But while Europes anticommunist dissidents were

Page 255 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

the focus and beneficiaries of a worldwide protest movement, the Chinese intellectuals who endorsed Charter 08 labor in virtual anonymity. Few in the United States and Europe are familiar with the name of Liu Xiaobo, a respected literary figure and leader of Charter 08, who has been imprisoned by the Chinese authorities since December 8, 2008, for his advocacy of democracy and the rule of law in China. Havel too spent years in jail during the Soviet period for questioning the communist authorities monopoly on power and their denial of basic human and democratic rights. But the world paid attention to his plight; even government leaders raised his case in meetings with communist officials. In China, Liu remains in detention and effectively incommunicado, and democratic leaders rarely speak out publicly on his behalf.

Todays advocates for freedom may be receiving less attention, and less assistance, from their natural allies in the democratic world because the systems that persecute them are poorly understood in comparison with the communist regimes and military juntas of the Cold War era . As a result, policymakers
do not appear to appreciate the dangers these 21stcentury authoritarian models pose to democracy and rule of law around the world. It is within this context of shifting and often confused perceptions of threats and priorities that Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia undertook an examination of five pivotal statesRussia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and Pakistanto advance our common understanding of the strategies and methods these regimes are employing, both within and

beyond their borders, to impede human rights and democratic development. The countries assessed in Undermining Democracy were selected because of their fundamental geopolitical importance. They are integrated into larger economic, political, and security networks and exert a powerful influence on international policy at the regional and global levels. However,

Iran, a unique authoritarian polity ruled by Shiite Muslim clerics, looms over the Middle East . The governing cliques in
they are also geographically, economically, ideologically, and politically diverse .

Russia cloak their kleptocracy in a contradictory blend of Soviet nostalgia and right-wing nationalism.

Venezuela is ruled by a novel type of Latin American caudillo who holds up Fidel Castro as his mentor. China sets the standard for authoritarian capitalism, with rapid economic growth sustaining a single-party political system. Pakistan, a South Asian linchpin, is faltering under the legacy of military rule and an extremist insurgency . Three of these countries
Iran, Russia, and Venezuelaare heavily dependent on oil and gas exports, and exhibit all of the peculiar distortions of so-called petrostates. The present analysis comes at a time of global political recession. According to recent findings from Freedom in the World, Freedom Houses annual survey, political rights and civil liberties have suffered a net global decline for

three successive years, the first such deterioration since the surveys inception in 1972. Freedom Houses global analysis of media independence, Freedom of the Press, has shown a more prolonged, multiyear decline . While the consolidated authoritarian systems of China, Russia, and Iran are rated Not Free in Freedom in the World, and the rapidly evolving, semiauthoritarian states of Pakistan and Venezuela are currently rated Partly Free, all five have played an important role in contributing to the global setbacks for democracy. Uniqueness: Authoritarianism is spreading globally its already enmeshed in global political and economic institutions. Eckert, Reuters Asia Correspondent, 6-4
(Paul Eckert, Reuters Asia Correspondent, June 4, 2009, Democracy seen threatened by new authoritarianism, http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE55344V20090604?sp=true)

China, Iran, Russia and Venezuela form a clique of authoritarian states that use their wealth and influence to undermine global democracy and rule of law, a study by U.S.-funded agencies said on Thursday. The report, released on the 20th anniversary of China's suppression of the Tiananmen democracy movement, says these states' challenge to Western democratic institutions represents a far "murkier picture" than the Cold War because they are integrated into the global economy and world bodies. "Policymakers do not appear to appreciate the dangers these 21st century authoritarian models pose to democracy and rule of law around the world ," said the study by Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia, all prominent U.S. democracy-promotion bodies. " Just as they rule without law within their borders, authoritarian regimes are eroding the international rules and standards built up by the democratic world over the past several decades, threatening to export the instability and abuses that
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

Page 256 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

their systems engender," it said. The study said manufacturing and trading power China and petro-states Iran, Russia and Venezuela shared strong similarities despite their distinct political systems and backgrounds . Authoritarian capitalist China and Russia have built systems that twin "impressive economic development with an equally impressive apparatus of political control ," it said. CURBS ON OPPOSITION, MEDIA Shiite Muslim clergy-ruled Iran and Venezuela, run by "a novel type of Latin American" strongman, held managed elections amid curbs on the opposition and on media , it said. Ruling powers in the four states buttressed their control with tight restrictions on the Internet and media, promotion of nationalist versions of history in school textbooks and use of state wealth to serve their own interests, said the report. Internationally, China has built a strong following in Africa and Latin America with generous no-stringsattached aid packages. Russia, Iran and Venezuela have used oil wealth to support regional clients, said the report. "At the regional and international level, these authoritarian regimes are undercutting or crippling the democracy-promotion and human rights efforts of rules-based organizations ," it said. Targets included the United
Nations, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the Organisation of American States (OAS), added the report. The report also included Pakistan because of its struggling democracy, history of military rule and growing extremist insurgency .

Page 257 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

**AT: Privatization** Privatization Fails More Than Succeeds

Vestal, Staff Writer of Stateline.org, 06 (Christine Vestal, Staff Writer of Stateline.org, 8/4/06, States Stumble Privatising Social Services, http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story? contentId=131960) Advocates for the poor worry that putting too much responsibility in the hands of profit-motivated companies could endanger the vulnerable people the programs are intended to help. Federal rules require state employees to make final decisions for some entitlement programs, but letting a private contractor make the initial eligibility cut could have a profound effect on welfare outcomes, they say. Supporters of privatization argue that antiquated state eligibility systems no longer are cost-effective, and say improvements best can be accomplished by a high-tech, profit-motivated contractor with incentives to operate efficiently. Texas policy-makers say their plan not only will save taxpayer dollars but modernize the social services eligibility process, allowing people to apply for support over the Internet, by fax, through call centers and at self-serve kiosks. Currently social services applicants must travel to their local social service offices during business hours and wait in line to talk to a caseworker. Daniels, who left his post as Bushs top budget advisor to run for governor in 2003, grabbed headlines this year when he privatized an Indiana toll road, granting a 75-year lease to a foreign consortium for $3.8 billion. Most agree that the state welfare eligibility process with long lines, limited office hours and error rates in the 25 percent rage -- needs improvement. But advocates for the poor argue that the problems result from underfunding and understaffing, not lack of expertise. The only people with experience in the complex and sensitive work of determining welfare eligibility are state workers. Why would you hire a high-tech company to do that? asks Stacey Dean of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an advocacy group for the poor. Other privatization critics argue that transferring public services to private companies has been plagued by quality-of-service problems for the last two decades. The concept makes sense and state policy-makers always are eager to save money, but in practice, privatization has failed more than it has succeeded, says Mildred Warner, a privatization expert at Cornell University. In an analysis of privatization of state and local services over the last 20 years, Warner concluded that the majority of projects failed because of deteriorating quality of service. And in more than half the cases, the projects did not save taxpayer dollars, she said.

No moral common good exists arguments that the free market will provide for those in poverty are loose predictions and are nto morally motivated
Barry and Stephens 98 Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University and Associate Professor Emeritus of Management at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [Bruce and Carroll U., Objections to an Objectivist Approach to Integrity Academy of Management Review Volume 23, No. 1, pg 162-169, jstor]
I fully accept, however, that solidarity is desirable for and conducive to the stability of the welfare state, although I will not venture an opinion as to whether it is necessary. I also realize that questions of stability and legitimacy have a lot to do with each other (stability may for instance depend upon the state's beingperceived as legitimate) but I still insist that the two questions should be kept distinct analytically. Needless to say, in an all-things-considered judgment, the question of what makes the welfare state function (a question of which stability is a part) will have to be addressed but that is not what I do here . Besides, it is hardly a question best dealt with by philosophers. I will concentrate on the normative question of legitimacy2. One thing to note here is that for solidarity to do anything at all for the legitimacy of a certain state arrangement it has to be solidarity on a state wide level. "Those very sentiments of loyalty and solidarity" mentioned above are sentiments for all people within the same state. When the

existence of, or the likelihood of, such sentiments is made a component of legitimation, a picture is

Page 258 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

called to mind of a consensus oriented society with a substantially moral common good that commands everyone's allegiance. The unreality of this picture aside, integrating such sentiments in the legitimation of the welfare state is to make the strength of the justice claims of the less fortunate dependent upon the moral motivation of the more fortunate. I do not accept that. Legitimation requires moral argument, not loose predictions about what people may or may not be morally motivated

Privatization Raises Death Rate

BBC News, 09 (1/15/09, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7828901.stm) The researchers examined death rates among men of working age in the post-communist countries of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union between 1989 and 2002. They concluded that as many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies. Following the break up of the old Soviet regime in the early 1990s at least a quarter of large state-owned enterprises were transferred to the private sector in just two years. This programme of mass privatisation was associated with a 12.8% increase in deaths. The latest analysis links this surge in deaths to a 56% increase in unemployment over the same period. However, it found some countries with good social support networks withstood the turmoil better than others. Where 45% or more of the population were members of at least one social organisation, such as a church group or labour union, mass privatisation did not increase mortality. But Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were worst affected, with a tripling of unemployment and a 42% increase in male death rates between 1991 and 1994.

Individual investors will be less profitable than the government ensuring the failure of privatization Anrig, vice president of policy at The Century Foundation, is the author of The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, 04 (Greg Anrig, vice president of policy at The Century Foundation, is the author of The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, 12/14/2004, Twelve Reasons Why Privatizing Social Security is a Bad Idea, The Century Foundation) Privatization advocates like to stress the appeal of "individual choice" and "personal control," while assuming in their forecasts that everyone's accounts will match the overall performance of the stock market. But studies by Yale economist Robert J. Shiller and others have demonstrated that individual investors are far more likely to do worse than the market generally, even excluding the cost of commissions and administrative expenses. Indeed, research by Princeton University economist Burton Malkiel found that even professional money managers over time significantly underperformed indexes of the entire market. Moreover, a number of surveys show that most people lack the knowledge to make even basic decisions about investing. For example, a Securities and Exchange Commission report synthesizing surveys of investors found that only 14 percent knew the difference between a growth stock and an income stock, and just 38 percent understood that when interest rates rise, bond prices go down. Almost half of all investors believed incorrectly that diversification guarantees
that their portfolio won't suffer if the market drops and 40 percent thought that a mutual fund's operating costs have no impact on the returns they receive. While predictions vary significantly about how investment markets will perform in the decades ahead, it's safe to say

that any growth in individual accounts under privatization will be significantly lower than what the overall markets achieve.

Page 259 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Privatization Not Efficient

Towns, Ranking Democratic member, 97 (Rep. Edolphus Towns, Ranking Democratic Member, 11/4/97, Social Services Privatization: The Beneftis And Challenges To Child Support Enforcement Programs, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight House of Representatives) [Sohn] Privatization is the shifting of activities or functions from the governmental sector to the private sector through vouchers, contracts or joint ventures. Before we begin that shift, we should ask whether the activity is uniquely governmental; whether privatization would improve the economy and efficiency of the activity and whether there is some reason to transfer a revenue stream from public to private hands. According to the Urban Institute, there is no evidence that private service delivery is more effective than public service delivery. The effectiveness of any service delivery depends on the same key factors that the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight have always considered: authority, accountability, and clarity. The General Accounting Office found that privatization in the social service arena may be difficult to achieve because of a lack of qualified bidders. In addition to possible contractor inexperience, there may also be a problem with governmental inexperience in developing contract specifications, reviewing contractor bids, negotiating bond and performance issues and monitoring overall outcomes. Mr. Chairman, I hope that we consider those findings today and determine if those problems still exist.

Privatization Creates Disaster

Lantos, US Congressman, 97 (Tom Lantos, US Congressman, 11/4/97, Social Services Privatization: The Beneftis And Challenges To Child Support Enforcement Programs, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight House of Representatives) [Sohn] Mr. Chairman, many of my friends on the other side of the aisle tend to view government as a disaster and they are all too eager to solve a problem by turning it over to the private sector. Is Medicare too expensive? Bring in private-sector HMOs. Irritated by the IRS? Let's hire private companies and sign a contract. But back in California, we have learned an important lesson: The private sector can create some spectacular boondoggles of their own at the expense of the taxpayer. California's experience with contracting out government services to the private sector involves a Fortune 500 Corporation, a big pot of tax dollars, and a computer system that is stuck in an endless loop of delays, cost overruns, and excuses. CORPORATIONS RUNNING THE PRIVATIZED ECONOMY ARE ANALOGOUS TO BIG GOVERNMENTS

Henig, political science professor, 90 (Jeffrey R. Henig, political science professor, 1990, Privatization in the United States: Theory and Practice, Political Science Quarterly) The first of these themes involved the analogy between government and private monopolies. Characterizing government as a public monopoly ACCOMPLISHED THREE THINGS. FIRST, IT Made criticisms of big government more accessible and acceptable to a mass public that already had internalized the association between monopoly and inefficiency, unresponsiveness, and waste. SECOND, IT gave criticisms of big government an anchor in traditional microeconomic theory at the very time that the assumption that economists could provide an objective and scientific underpinning for public policy was on the rise. THIRD, it made an important step toward expanding the hegemony of economic theory. Economists previously had based their claim to expertise upon the distinctiveness of the economic sphere; the analogy

Page 260 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

*****THE USFG***** *****Courts***** **Social Reform / Movements** Judicial rulings fail to spur social movements on their own Rosenberg, Gerald N. 2009 [University of Chicago political science and law professor, law degree from University of Michigan, PH. D. from Yale. Romancing the Court. Boston University Law Review, l/n, NS]
In other words, for judicial opinions to foster democratic accountability there must be public and elite support, pre-existing groups and resources committed to the issue, a committed leadership, and a predisposed target audience. When all these conditions are present, law can, but not necessarily will, make a difference. McCann puts it this way: Even under the most propitious circumstances . . . the contributions of legal maneuvers to catalyzing defiant collective action will be partial, conditional, and volatile over time. 82 McCanns analysis suggests that demos prudential dissents are neither necessary nor sufficient for mobilizing social movements. They are not necessary because if there is an active social movement in place then no judicial help is needed. They are also not sufficient because without a preexisting movement and the other factors McCann identifies, such dissents will accomplish nothing. Indeed, Guinier provides two examples of successful mobilization without demosprudential dissents. She describes an extremely well-organized and successful movement to restore voting rights to ex-felons in Rhode Island.83 She postulates that, [a] dissent from the Supreme Court could help in such an effort,84 but activists in Rhode Island did not need it. Similarly, she tells the story of how social movements in Missouri defeated an attempt to enact a very strict voter identification bill,85 also without the help of demosprudential opinions.

Courts cant produce social reform 3 reasons Rosenberg, Gerald N. 2009 [University of Chicago political science and law professor, law degree from University of Michigan, PH. D. from Yale. The Hollow Hope. University of Chicago Press, p 10, l/n, NS]
The view of courts as unable to produce significant social reform has a distinguished pedigree reaching back to the founders. Premised on the institutional structure of the American political system and the procedures and belief systems created by American law, it suggests that the conditions required for courts to produce significant social reform will seldom exist. Unpacked, the Constrained Court view maintains that courts will generally not be effective producers of significant social reform for three reasons: the limited nature of constitutional rights, the lack of judicial independence, and the judiciarys inability to develop appropriate policies and its lack of powers of implementation.

Page 261 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Courts Good: Generic**

Judicial supremacy key to maintaining constitutional unity and rights of minorities. Whittington in 7 <Keith E. (William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University), Political foundations of
judicial supremacy: the presidency, the supreme court, and constitutional leadership in U.S. history , 2007> There are a number of justifications for judicial supremacy, and these justifications tend to overlap with the more political justifications for judicial review. For some, judicial supremacy is essential to preserving the rule of law and preventing constitutional anarchy. Thinking particularly of the competing constitutional assertions of the state governments, this was Daniel Websters concern when he asked his congressional colleagues, [C]ould anything be more

preposterous than to make a government for the whole Union, and yet leave its powers subject, not to one interpretation, but to thirteen, or twenty-four, interpretations? Instead of one tribunal, established by and responsible to all, with power to decide for all, shall constitutional questions be left to four and twenty popular bodies, each at liberty to decide for itself, and none bound to respect the decisions of others? He doubted whether the government would be capable of long existing under such circumstances. For others, the value of judicial supremacy is not in its capacity to provide authoritative legal settlements, but
in its capacity to provide substantively desirable legal settlements, but in its capacity to provide substantively desirable legal outcomes. The judiciary alone serves as a forum of principle within the American constitutional system, capable of focusing on questions of justice free from the din of the battleground of power politics. For still others , judicial supremacy is

regarded as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system because the Court alone functions as a countermajoritarian institutions securing the liberties of individuals and political minorities. Unfettered by political interests or popular prejudices, the judiciary can penetrate to the true meaning of the Constitution and the subtle requirements of its principled commitments. Some questions question of justice and rightsare too important to be left in the hands of legislative majorities or the people themselves. Judicial supremacy insures that they are not .

Not adhering to precedent kills Court legitimacy Hansford and Spriggs in 6 <Thomas G. (Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California,
Merced), James F. (Professor of Political Science, Professor of Law, Fellow in the Center for Empirical Research in Law, Washington University in Saint Louis), The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court, 2006> As a result of the norm of stare decisis, the Court can incur legitimacy costs by negatively interpreting a vital insititionalized precedent. If instead of following a highly institutionalized, bedrock precedent (i.e., a highly vital precedent) the Court chooses to treat the precedent in a negative manner, then the new policy set by the Court may be perceived as being less legitimate . In other words, just as there are greater legitimacy benefits to following a particularly vital precedent, there are potentially greater legitimacy costs to overruling or otherwise undermining a precedent that is highly vital . There will be less of a legitimacy cost, on the other hand, when the Court negatively interprets a precedent that is not particularly institutionalized or authoritative. The vitality of a precedent, therefore, determines the extent to which the justices bear a legitimacy cost when negatively interpreting the precedent. The more vital a precedent is, the greater the cost that results from treating the precedent negatively. The ideological distance between the justices and the precedent has no effect on the costliness, in terms of legitimacy, resulting from negative treatment. This argument can be represented as: legitimization of new policy=-b 8(V).

Undermining the Constitution causes extinction Henkin Atlantic Comm Qtly 88 (Columbia, 1988, (, Spring)
Lawyers, even constitutional lawyers, argue "technically," with references to text and principles of construction, drawing lines, and insisting on sharp distinctions. Such discussion sometimes seems ludicrous when it addresses issues of life and death and Armaggedon. But behind the words of the Constitution and the technicalities of constitutional construction lie the basic values of the United Stateslimited government even at the cost of inefficiency; safeguards against autarchy and oligarchy; democratic values represented differently in the presidency and in Congress , as well as in the intelligent participation and consent of the governed. In the nuclear age the technicalities of constitutionalism and of constitutional jurisprudence safeguard also the values and concerns of civilized people committed to human survival.

Page 262 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Hollow Hope / Courts Bad**

The Supreme Court Prevents democracy

Zinn, historian, 2005 Howard Zinn, The Progressive, Its Not Up to the Court, http://progressive.org/mag_zinn1105

the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our culture--the media, the educational system--tries to crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system. That is why Cindy Sheehan's dramatic stand in
Still, knowing Crawford, Texas, leading to 1,600 anti-war vigils around the country, involving 100,000 people, is more crucial to the future of American democracy than the mock hearings on Justice Roberts or the ones to come on Judge Alito.

Link- Environment. The Courts were only able to help the environment once the other branches had acted.

Rosenberg, Gerald N. University of Chicago political science and law professor. The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? 1993. 271. The decades of the 1960s and 1970s witnessed attempts to change much of American society. Among these attempts was a movement to protect the environment. Part of that movement, viewing courts as the crucial institution capable of producing change, focused on litigation. Making explicit analogies from the civil rights movements use of the courts, early environmental litigators explicitly aimed to contitutionalize a right to a healthy environment. In later years, after a great deal of congressional legislation, environmental litigator went to court aiming to broadly interpret and strictly apply these legislative attempts to protect the environment. In this overview, I argue that while the attempt to constitutionalize a

right to a healthy environment could not overcome the constraints of the judicial system, once the other branches acted, litigation was able to contribute to environmental protection when one of the four conditions were present . That is, when other actors added incentives or costs, courts were effective. Similarly,
when market forces supported court decisions, litigation helped. Finally, litigation made a difference when those officials necessary for implementation were willing to act and use courts as cover.

Controversial Supreme Court decisions spur confusion, accomplishing nothing.

Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08 Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08 http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do? docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

A second, closely related, mechanism deals with words and meaning. Suppose, as a hypothetical example, that the Supreme Court one day announces a new approach to pupil assignment rules. Separate but equal educational facilities no

Page 263 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

longer satisfy the requirements of equal protection. n27 Instead, public school authorities may not use race as a criterion for assigning students to schools, especially if they intend to produce separate schools for white and black children. Questions immediately arise as to what the Supreme Court meant. Does the ruling apply only in the South? n28 Must school districts bus children to achieve racial balance, or may they rely on remedies that operate on the [*151] basis of school choice? n29 What about segregation resulting from housing patterns and neighborhood preferences? n30 Suppose, in the wake of the ruling, most
of the white parents move out of a city and take up residence in all-white suburbs? n31 Does the ruling apply to public accommodations, swimming pools, and movie theaters, or just to schools? What about singles ads in newspapers and separate high school proms?

Immediately after a law-reform ruling like Brown, public authorities will confront a host of questions like those just listed. And because the new ruling appears to go against the grain, authorities, even those with good will, likely will conclude that the Supreme Court could not have meant that. n32 In the end, the surprising new ruling will end up meaning very little. n33 The Supreme Court undermines minority rights movements causing tension in American communities and dependence on flawed legislation. Williams, news analyst with NPR News, 09 Affirmative action dies in multi-racial U.S. August 7, 2009
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/affirmative-action-dies-in-111147.html So,

why now? More often than not, it is the American left that gets lost in absurd fantasies about race in this country. They pretend there has been no progress in recent decades, even when they see the rise of a black middle class and witness the election of a mixed-race president and the likely confirmation of a Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court. But today, it is the right wing and its supporters on the high court who are making stuff up. They pretend that the nation is already so transformed that a colorblind America is a reality and that affirmative action is superfluous, so much so that white employees in a city fire department an arena long dominated by Irish- and Italian-Americans need help from the Supreme Court to get a promotion. Litigation distracts time and money from successful grassroots movements
Stephen Carter, Professor of Law @ Yale, Michigan Law Review, ln, 92 Rosenberg goes beyond the assertion that litigation strategies rarely if ever produce significant change. He argues, correctly" at they are often counterproductive, for they can distort perceptions about where resources are needed (pp. 339-42). The particular case of abortion, Rosenberg notes that " reliance on the Court seriously weakened the political efficacy of pro-choice forces. After the 1973 decisions, many pro-choice: activists simply assumed they had won and stopped if prochoice activity. ...The political organization and momentum that had changed laws nationwide dissipate in celebration of the Court victory " (p. 339). The result, of course, was that pro-choice forces abandoned the political arena to pro-life forces --and then professed surprise when prolife forces won important electoral victories. The current broad public support for at least some abortion rights has arisen largely because of the more recent decision of pro-choice forces to return to the grass roots --the place, Rosenberg tells us, where real social changes take place (p. 341).

Page 264 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Courts merely join movements- they dont produce social change Devins, 92 Associate Professor of Law and Lecturer in Government, College of William and Mary, REVIEW ESSAY: Judicial Matters: The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? By Gerald N. Rosenberg. California Law Review, LN
Rosenberg convincingly shows that courts cannot do it alone. Congress, the White House, the states, and interest groups also play a pivotal role. State efforts to legalize abortion before Roe, congressional and administrative efforts to eliminate dual school systems, and the civil rights and women's movements highlight a remarkable inventory of non-judicial influences identified by Rosenberg. The Hollow Hope also does an extraordinary job of demonstrating that numerous landmark Supreme Court opinions were little known and even less discussed at the time of decision. In fact, Rosenberg's evidence of the paramount role played by nonjudicial forces is one of the strongest to date. The Hollow Hope then offers abundant support for a more modest, more accurate, and equally important thesis: the Supreme Court works within and hence both influences and is influenced by a larger

culture of political and social interests. While severe problems in analysis still remain, this rearticulation accomplishes Rosenberg's principal objective of sobering those who endorse an active judicial role. Court rhetoric prevents the mobilization of the public, short circuiting personal autonomy.
Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08 Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08 http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do? docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

One way to understand this mechanism is by means of a device that narrative theorist Jean Stefancic and I have called the "empathic fallacy." n34 A counterpart of the "pathetic fallacy," familiar from literary theory, the empathic fallacy is the mistaken belief that one can change another's beliefs and attitudes through words alone . In literature, the pathetic fallacy holds that
nature is like us with moods, feelings, and intentions that we can read and understand. The poet, seeing rain, writes "The world weeps with me." n35

The empathic fallacy, which we coin, holds that narratives are of relatively slight use in dispelling pre-existing ones. A reader confronted with a new narrative--a
black heroine, for example, when she has come to believe that blacks are lascivious and lazy, the opposite of heroic--will disbelieve it, or else pronounce the present case an exception. We are, in a sense, our stock of narratives. n36 These long held narratives form the basis against which we judge and interpret new ones, such as ones about intelligent African Americans; brave, resourceful women; energetic, hardworking undocumented aliens; or loving parents who are gay or lesbian. Unless the new [*152] narrative is unusually clever, calculated to resonate with another that we already hold, we tend to reject it as outrageous, extreme, or wrong. n37

Supreme Court opinions are, of course, narratives--stories--and thus subject to both mechanisms. Over the course of history, a few Supreme Court opinions have contained such memorable language ("Poor Joshua," n38 "There is no caste here" n39 ) that they have moved significant numbers of readers and hastened reform. Rosenberg correctly notes their rarity, although he would be wrong if he maintains that the number is
zero. CONCLUSION Rosenberg's new edition, then,

soberly reminds reformers not to place undue

Page 265 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

reliance on courts and litigation. If dispossessed groups wish to combat unfair practices and laws, the legal profession may offer them symbolic victories, but little more. To secure real gains, they will need to explore other avenues, including storytelling and literature, electoral politics, and the oldest remedy of all--self-help and resistance to illegitimate authority. n40 Civic Engagement is key to democracy Fretz, Director, Service-Learning Center, Naropa University, 04 (Eric, Director, Service-Learning Center, Naropa University, "Teaching Liberty and Practicing Deliberative Democracy in the Classroom," 2004, The Campus Compact Reader, Winter, http://www.compact.org/reader/winter04/article2- 1 .html)
Introduction: In the past decade, many American citizens have joined a choir of voices lamenting the demise of public life in the United Spates. The common chorus goes like this: Americans have forgotten how to be citizens in a democracy and architects of public life. Our democratic imagination is blunt, and public life in the United States is dying a slow death. Civic engagement, the hallmark of American democracy, is in rapid decline. According to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, less than 50% of eligible voters participated in the 1996

election and since the 1960s, voter participation has declined by more than 2.5%. Close to 80% of the population ignores local elections. The percentage of Americans who regularly attend public, school or political meetings is at all-time lows, and we seem willing to trust our government only in times of extreme threat to the republic. The general consensus seems to be there's not too much to be done about these problems of public apathy. A 1995 New York Times ICBS News poll revealed that 59% of the people polled
could not point to one elected official they admired, and 79% believed the government is "run by a few big interests looking out for themselves" (Boyte, "The Work of Citizenship" 4). Increasingly,

Americans see local and federal government as entities that are separate from their own interests and needs. We have lost a sense of Abraham Lincoln's vision at the fields of
Gettysburg when he declared "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Page 266 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**AT: Hollow Hope / Courts Good**

Civil obedience follows legislation- social change is a product of congressional law.

Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08 Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08 http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do? docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

Civil disobedience might appear to be a narrow exception to the rule that law generally shapes behavior. n14 But the civil disobedient breaks the [*149] law openly, nonviolently, and prepared to suffer the consequences . n15 Although one could think of it as illustrating law's inefficacy, civil disobedience occurs rarely enough that it does not shake our faith in the system. And because the violator is prepared to accept punishment, it is scarcely a frontal challenge to that system as a whole. The same is true for cases in which a minority group believes the law is both unjust and unlikely to change anytime soon. Then the group may seek actively to frustrate enforcement. Anti-snitching campaigns in the black community or efforts by Latino organizations to provide sanctuary or supplies to undocumented immigrants crossing the desert on foot are recent examples. n16 But even here, the law exhibits a kind of efficacy--the group seeking to nullify it has to go through great efforts and incur considerable risk to do so.Everyday experience with cases like these, then, conveys the impression that law "really works." How could Rosenberg seemingly maintain the opposite? Lawsuits can facilitate social movements
Nagin The Yale Law Journal Company, 08 Tomiko Brown Nagin, "One of These Things Does Not Belong": Intellectual Property and Collective Action Across Boundaries 7/08 http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do? docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7363&docNo=11

legal concepts mediate the interpretative frames that socio-political mobilizations ,

Ultimately, Kapczynski wants to achieve even more. She seeks to theorize how such as A2K, deploy to assert their interests. Kapczynski's discussion of framing theory advances the scholarly conversation about law and popular mobilizations in a crucial way: it helps to bury "zero-sum" propositions about law's effects on social movements. n2 Those with

a zero-sum view imagine law as a blunt instrument, either breathing life into or taking it away from social movements . Other scholars have offered a more satisfying
account of law's impact on social movements, one that emphasizes that even [*282] failed lawsuits can facilitate movements' cultural and political agendas . But, as I have previously argued, even these scholars sometimes duplicate the zero-sum theorists' tendency to ascribe far too much agency to the law, n3 a supposed "master frame" that animates activists' each and every move. Kapczynski posits a more dynamic model of interaction between law and social mobilizations. IP law and legal concepts are constitutive, but not the center of the universe, in her analysis.

Page 267 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

She considers the internal dynamics of the A2K mobilization on its own terms, and ascribes tremendous agency to the activists, who manipulate law to great effect. Kapczynski's "gravitational pull" thesis deftly illustrates her conception of IP law as an important, but interactive and dialogic, instrument of meaning. Frame theorists claim that collective actors use frames for diagnosis, prognosis, and motivation. Legal concepts can be deployed in

a variety of ways within the framing process, Kapczynski argues, occupying architectural, discursive, and strategic roles . A2K activists have manipulated legal
concepts to serve their interests, she shows. But so, too, have corporate actors. In fact, some of the article's most engaging passages explore not the A2K mobilization, but how IP industries articulated and advanced their goal of expanding IP protection in the marketplace of ideas. n4

Court decision can be transformativeits proven by the fact that Brown affected far more than just public schools John Kincaid, Robert B. and Helen S. Meyner Professor of Government and Public Service and Director
of the Meyner Center for the Study of State and Local Government, Lafayette College, Easton, PA. Fellow and former Executive Director (1988-1994) of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Washington, D.C.; Editor, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, St. Louis-Warsaw Transatlantic Law Journal, 1995 St. LouisWarsaw Trans'l 13 3, 1995, p. 147

Lastly, the federal courts, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, have played important roles in national standard-setting since 1954 when the high Court struck down state laws permitting racial segregation in public schools. n33 By relying on the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the U.S. Bill of Rights to state and local action, the Court has virtually transformed race relations as well as standards of practice in many state and local government institutions, such as schools, libraries, jails, prisons, and mental-health facilities.

Court decisions are insufficient in changing public opinion

Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08 Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08 http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do? docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

When Brown v. Board of Education came down, did Americans begin thinking about and acting toward blacks differently? By and large they did no t; Rosenberg provides impressive evidence on this point. n17 When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, did a woman's access to abortion services improve? Again, no; social disapproval did the work that an explicit legal prohibition formerly did, so that women desiring abortions were little better off than before. n18 And we find the same in other areas where law-reform advocates secure a breakthrough victory. n19 Rulings like those upholding same-sex marriage were soon rolled back by narrow construction, administrative foot-dragging, or delay resulting in little progress for the "victorious" group. n20 Judicial victories do not have a catalytic effect Michael McCann, professor of political science at the University of Washington, Social Movements and America Political Institutions, ed. Costain and McFarland, 1998, p. 205
The movement-centered approach urged here tends to interpret this latter aspect of legal

Page 268 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

"consciousness raising" somewhat differently than many characterizations by legal scholars .

Judicial victories (or other legal actions) do not "reveal" injustice to oppressed groups so much as improve the chances that such injustices might be effectively challenged by movement action in and out of the courts (McCann 1994). Moreover, formal legal action alone rarely is likely to generate this "catalytic" or "triggering" effect on movement constituents (Rosenberg 1991). Only
when concerted efforts are made by movement leaders and organizations to publicize such evolving opportunities and to use legal resources for movement-building purposes is successful organizing likely (McCann 1994). :1

Courts mobilize social change wage discrimination rulings prove Howard Gillman, Law Professor, 1999 (THE SUPREME COURT IN AMERICAN POLITICS, p. 72) Perhaps the best documented responses to judicially created opportunities and catalysts to action involve the mobilization of political interest groups and social movements. Stuart Scheingold demonstrated decades ago that Court actions could be resource in mobilizing activity in a variety of ways, including activating and organizing core constituent groups members as well as realigning support from third parties. My own research on the politics of gender as pay
equity (or comparable worth) reform provided a detailed account of this process. The very reform strategy its ::If was conceived by union and civil rights lawyers responding to emerging Court ruling that demonstration of race- or ,ex-based discriminatory impact could establish a judiciable claim under the 1964 Civil Right Act. Wage discrimination claims were filed in federal courts during the 1970s in an attempt primarily to develop new case law, but in many lo(:al contexts such lawsuits also became key resources for organizing women into unions or activating grassroots involvement among the already organized. This activity increased dramatically in local and state venues around the nation after the 1981 Court finding of sexbased wage discrimination against female prison guards in Co. of Washington v. Gunther. In short, the movement was conceived, born, and developed as a formidable political force from opportunities and resources created by federal court, and especially Supreme Court, rulings. Parallel accounts have been provided for a variety of both women's rights, animal rights, and the right of physically and mentally disabled.

Symbolic legal support to rights claims advance social movement Michael McCann, professor of political science at the University of Washington, Social Movements and America Political Institutions, ed. Costain and McFarland, 1998, p. 208 Finally, the symbolic normative power of rights claims themselves should not be discounted . This
point links Scheingold's (1974) "myth of rights" and "politics of rights" analysis. Because citizens in our society are responsive to (legally sensible) rights claims, defiant groups often can

mobilize legal norms, conventions, and demands to compel concessions even in the absence of clear judicial (or other official) support. This power of legal discourse has several related and
indistinguishable dimensions, including: abstract appeals to the moral sensibilities of dominant groups; more concrete appeals to the interests of dominant organizations in maintaining cooperative relations with victimized groups, such as workers or consumers; and, perhaps, most important, indirect appeals for moral censure from the general public regarding the actions of specific powerful groups. The latter factor of stigmatizing publicity distinguishes somewhat the potential impact of legal action in high-visibility social struggles from that in everyday disputes. Formal legal actions by movements threaten to transform disputes by

mobilizing not just judges as third-party intervenors but also a variety of social advocacy groups, nonjudicial state officials, and broader public sentiment or voting power through the catalytic dynamic discussed in the last section. In other words, litigation often provides a powerful means for, in Schattschneider's (1960) terms, "expanding the scope of conflict" in ways that

Page 269 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

enhance the bargaining power of disadvantaged groups and raise the perceived risks of hard line opposition from their foes. Even losses in the Courts lay the groundwork for political success Richard Gambitta, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University in Texas at San Antonio, Governing through Courts, 1981, p. 276-77. A court defeat or victory is a single episode in the litigation process , quite as it is in
the policy process. Concentration on the impact of those episodes should not blind us to the functions performed by the litigation itself. These latter need examination and explication as well. Space limitations prevent a full discussion here, but a few items may be listed, as an outgrowth of my research on Rodriguez, that may provide a beginning. First , litigation

provides access to influential government arenas where those without political power in majoritarian institutions can raise issues of concern, explain their contentions and political grievances, and receive an attentive hearing on the merits of their cause (Scheingold, 1974). Second, through the auspices of the court, including the vehicles of discovery and subpoena, answers may be secured to questions that might otherwise be ignored by bureaucrats , elites, private persons, and corporations. Gochman secured answers to extensive interrogatories detailing the
extent of educational disparities in Bexar County and in Texas. At that time, these vehicles provided not only an expeditious and efficient method of securing that information, but perhaps the only one as well. Third , litigation is a means of publicizing an issue, of

catching the attention, and perhaps the sympathies, of various segments of the population. Periodically, with increased frequency after the lower court victory, headlined or
featured articles would appear in newspapers and magazines reporting the information that the litigants had acquired. For a five-year period, the magnitude of the inequality resulting from the Texas school finance policy appeared in the press. Fourth, the litigation process can legitimize a political issue, regardless of the final judicial outcome. The lower court victory in Rodriguez especially increased the legitimacy of the Edgewood cause. And the five to four Supreme Court decision did not return that cause to its original state. Fifth, litigation has the potential to mobilize and solidify political support for an issue. It can do so for the defendant as well as the plaintiff, but if one has little active support and few resources to begin with, this function generally proves of positive worth . It did so in Rodriguez. Most importantly, litigation, as mentioned earlier, often contributes to the establishment of a legislative agenda. Significant lawsuits can recast the nature of a debate, whether or not they are ultimately victorious in court. In Rodriguez, earlier legislative dialogue on reform focused on increased foundation support, not on equalization. Subsequently, both topics were salient considerations. The lower court decision has established school finance reform as a legislative priority. Litigation can facilitate debates that otherwise may not occur, thus setting in motion, at times, the process of policy change, as it did in all three school finance cases. In a sense, litigation can be viewed as a political campaign. The success of

any campaign needs to be measured not only by the vote registered in the final election or court decision, but also by the impact that the campaign has on current and future public policy. Like an independent political campaign challenging the status quo, litigation that seeks policy change often raises issues that incumbent legislators have traditionally refused to address. Also, it
may distribute unfamiliar information on the operations of a particular system, publicize certain abuses resulting from the implementation of ongoing policies, and attempt to recast public and governmental debates, forcing a legislative agenda that might lead to reform. Moreover, a lower court victory, like an early primary victory, may change the course of public policy and affairs even though that early win is never repeated and is subseqently reversed.

Page 270 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Social success requires a shift in ideology that the Courts and individuals must achieve together.
Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08 Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08 http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do? docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

If judicial rulings are relatively ineffective in changing social values and practices in highly contested areas such as school desegregation, abortion, environmentalism, and same-sex marriage, what accounts for this failure?
I believe that the answer has to do with two related mechanisms. I call the first the reconstructive paradox. n21 This theory holds, essentially, that the greater a social evil--say,

women's subordination or black slavery--the more massive the social effort required to eradicate it. n22 Moreover, because the belief or practice is so deeply embedded, it is invisible to many. n23 Furthermore, the massive social effort necessary to alter a historical social practice will inevitably collide with other social values--property rights, settled expectations, the southern way of life, etc.--that are widely held. n24 This effort will require shifts in spending and changes in the way we relate to one another.
These efforts for social change, by contrast, will be out in the open, where they will spark sharp resistance and the accusation that the reformers are totalitarians, moving too fast, imposing costs on innocent people, reviving old grudges, and the like. n25 These considerations will enable the opposition to feel righteous and believe that the reformers sacrifice real liberty and security for a nebulous goal. For these reasons, social reform and reconstruction will strike most, at first, as dubious, premature, dangerous, and wrong. n26

Rosenbergs hollow hope analysis is flawed, court decisions polarize citizenry in exceptional ways. Epstein ,Henry Wade Rogers Professor Northwestern University School of Law, 91 Lee Epstein, Washington University-St. Louis review, THE HOLLOW HOPE: CAN COURTS BRING ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE? 91
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/rosenber.htm

As Rosenberg knows, the key precedential cases were brought to the Court by interest groups or movements. According to Greenberg's account in the JUDICIAL PROCESS AND SOCIAL CHANGE, for example, the LDF spon- sored the litigation needed to achieve victory in Brown; it was the group's persistence and not "luck," that weakened "the remaining legal constraint." I think this is an important link, but one Rosenberg largely overlooks. Another quibble I have is that some of his analyses are too casual . Those on public opinion immediately come to mind. Because he does not examine trends in survey data in a rigorous way, his observations tend toward the pedestrian. Here is what he writes about public opinion on abortion: "there was clearly no rapid or large change in American's support of abortion after the Court's decision" (p.238). He may be correct on an aggregate, first blush, level, but he misses an important point brought to light in Franklin and Kosaki's (APSR, 1989: 751-777) intriguing study: Roe did have the effect of polarizing the citizenry in an unprecedented way

Page 271 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Judges are seen by the public as essential to social change Stephen Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Yale University. B.A. 1976, Stanford; J.D. 1979, Yale. -- Ed., Michigan Law Review, 90 Mich. L. Rev. 1216, May 1992, p. 1216-1217 Since the pioneering work of Robert A. Dahl, most theorists have viewed the Court as one of many actors in the development of national policies on a variety of issues. n3 The implication is that the Justices are serious players in the game of societal transformation . Some scholars, Alexander
Bickel to the fore, have been more cautious, suggesting a Court of limited ability to make changes. n4 Bruce Ackerman, for example, has compared the Court to a group of brakemen sitting in the last car of a train, able to make it stop but not to make it go. n5 Yet in the popular

image -- the one enshrined by the political rhetoric of left [*1217] and right alike --the Justices ride right up in the engine and choose which track to take. Courts cant solve broader womens rights even precedent setting decisions fail because courts lack the essential tools to solve for alt. causalities Neal Devins (Associate Professor of Law and Lecturer in Government, College of William and Mary) 1992: Judicial Matters: The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? California Law

Review. Lexis The Hollow Hope's assessment of abortion and women's rights, while less detailed and less systematic, reaches similar conclusions. Indeed, Rosenberg uses identical metaphors, speaking of the Court as "join[ing]," "not creat[ing]," "a current of social change and a tide of history" (p. 265). Moreover, like his analysis of civil rights, Rosenberg sees courts as trying to play a leadership role but failing: "As with civil rights . . . the Court is far less responsible for the changes that occurred than most people think" (p. 201); "advocates of women's rights have 'won' quite a number of legal cases" (p. 212), but "precedent-setting decisions in women's rights have produced little because courts lack all the essential tools required of any institution hoping to implement change " (p. 227). Roe v. Wade, rather than being characterized as a watershed, is seen as solidifying a "widespread, vocal, and effective" pro-choice lobby (p. 184). That forty-six state laws were invalidated under Roe is downplayed; highlighted, in its stead, are statistics showing that the rate of legal abortions rose more dramatically the two years before Roe (300%, from 193,500 in 1970 to 586,800 in 1972) than the two years after Roe [*1035] (52%, from 586,800 in 1972 to 898,600 in 1974) (pp. 178-80). Rosenberg also minimizes Roe's impact by arguing that nonjudicial market mechanisms were critical in effectuating the decision. Specifically, had Roe demanded that abortions be performed in hospitals, the widespread refusal of hospitals to perform abortions (only 17% of public and 23% of private hospitals perform abortions) suggests that the case's impact would have been negligible (pp. 189-201). Rosenberg's examination of "women's rights" is also critical of the Court. Noting that the gap between men's and women's earnings has stayed constant since 1955, that litigation has not affected the wage structure, that most employment is sex-segregated, and that the ABA Committee on Judicial Selection typically gives better ratings to men than women, Rosenberg deems court action in this area inconsequential (pp. 207-12). The crux of the problem, instead, is a long list of social ills, including domestic violence, disproportionate household work, inadequate child support, and biased laws (pp. 212-26).

Rosenberg is wrong bad theory and no reason why congress and the executive do provide change David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E. Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A
Reassessment of Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis Certain deficiencies in Rosenberg's approach do limit the value of his conclusions about functionalism. Functionalism is a theory about how law and its interpretation by courts influence society. Rosenberg is unable to address questions of influence fully because he uses inappropriate methods and because he ignores the most important aspect of judicial influence -- the power of courts to redefine structures and

Page 272 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

expectations. Admittedly, whatever their mode of influence, judges are not always able to effectuate their goals. Rosenberg claims that such failures illustrate the ultimate impotence of the courts. Nonetheless, he fails to explain how he can conclude, at the same time, that the legislature and the executive are effective institutions even though these bodies face implementation difficulties comparable to those which, for Rosenberg, illustrate that courts are ineffective agents of change. Finally, Rosenberg fails to inquire whether results would be different if courts did not seek to effect change. Without answering this question, Rosenberg cannot compare the relative effectiveness of various government branches or definitively conclude that courts do not influence society.

Perm on the counterplan solves the DA to be effective, the court must work with other branches of government David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E. Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A
Reassessment of Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis Despite the deficiencies in Rosenberg's analysis, his work still offers important contributions to the ongoing discussion of functionalism. We conclude that Rosenberg's analysis actually demonstrates that the Court is, indeed, an effective institution. When we realize that the Court is but one branch of government, which, like every other branch, must work with others to effect its goals, Rosenberg's claim that courts can effect change in combination with others is in reality an important affirmation of judicial efficacy and, ultimately, of the functional role of law.

Courts solve social change massive swings in public opinion dont matter, minor changes in assumptions overtime build up and influence actors David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E. Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis Rosenberg's inquiry is flawed from the outset because he fundamentally misperceives the nature of influence and which evidence properly indicates its presence. Influence need not be manifested as blatantly as Rosenberg suggests it must be, but it may involve subtle changes in assumptions and minor shifts among coalitions. Similarly, Rosenberg's theory of causation fails to recognize that major changes most often unfold over extended periods of time and that people may not respond to a particular event immediately. If Rosenberg is to provide sufficient support for his theory, he must expand his inquiries far beyond their current limits and reestablish them upon a different and improved foundation. Rosenberg assumes that the influence of any event may be adequately measured by noting direct responses to it: actors may acknowledge its influence, or their reactions may betray its direct effect on their decisions. n81 Yet it is also likely that they will attempt to mask this influence. They may, for instance, wish to give the impression that they have been right from the beginning. Politicians are not big on footnotes. n82 Just as the origins of reform may be masked, so too advances in reform need not be indicated by wild swings in public opinion. Politics is often a game of inches . The civil rights movement broke out in a country where candidates were considered "safe" if they gained 55% of the vote, and a large percentage of districts were not safe. n83 Even the expectation of small changes in public opinion could have a significant impact on political actors. Often, this "swing vote" was held by blacks. Rosenberg thus errs in assuming that the Court could only influence policy by engendering massive swings in public opinion; altering the views of only a few may have an explosive impact in such an atmosphere. n84 In this political environment, the mere fact that Brown altered the law of the land could have had significant impact itself. It was not even necessary that anyone be converted to the cause of desegregation. Some of those who disagreed with the Court might have become convinced that the rule of law was more important than continued support for segregation. Even such limited and tepid support for Brown could have supplied the necessary margin of political victory to reformers in certain districts.

Page 273 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Social change doesnt need to be seen, court decisions simply need to challenge current assumptions to provide for change elsewhere David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E. Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis Even if Brown actually engendered opposition to segregation itself, such opposition need not have been open and active. Further, the decision need not even have gained a visible and prominent place in public or elite discussion. Game theory teaches that merely altering signals to indicate that additional choices are available may suffice to induce significant change in a situation where players previously doubted the availability of alternatives. n85 Brown need only have challenged the assumption that there was no option but loyalty to the segregationist status quo. n86 Not only did Rosenberg entirely fail to address this possibility, but his insistence upon a purely statistical approach disables him from adequately analyzing this important possibility. Manifestations of power and influence cannot be adequately investigated with a purely quantifiable approach, as Dahl's attempt to do so indicates. n87 This means that assessments of influence may require historical or other indices of impact. Judicial decisions can change assumptions not only by opening new options for opposition, but also through their power to grant legitimacy to certain claims and to redefine norms of institutional action . Undoubtedly, by changing the constitutional rule, Brown opened new doors for resisting segregation through actions at law. But it did more. It invalidated arguments in favor of segregation, both by excluding them from the courtroom and by stigmatizing their use in public debate. n88 It also opened an avenue for changing the law elsewhere, as courts and others applied the newly approved desegregationist argument in other situations. n89

The Hollow Hope theory is wrong Rosenberg misrepresents the efficacy of the lower courts in court decision enforcement David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E. Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis Rosenberg also fundamentally misunderstands the nature of judicial policy making and policy making in general. His approach evaluates judicial and legislative policy making under different standards and , as a result, unreasonably elevates legislative and executive influence over that of courts. When viewed in light of the true nature of the policy making process, Rosenberg's analysis actually demonstrates that the Court is an effective agent of social change. Rosenberg paints an unfairly impotent picture of the Supreme Court, in part, because he refuses to examine the work of lower courts. The Supreme Court generally does not implement the rules it develops, but relies upon lower courts to apply its rules in particular cases. Lower courts are like streetlevel bureaucrats or administrative agencies undertaking the enforcement work of Congress or a legislature. n103 The policy implementation literature stresses that once Congress passes a law, the real implementation and battles over enforcement occur as officials seek to ascertain and implement what Congress intended. n104 An effective analysis of Supreme Court influence cannot disregard the application of its decisions by inferior tribunals. How closely were important Supreme Court decisions followed, and how often were they relied upon? Were these decisions applied in new situations and extended to other areas of the law? Were lower courts amenable to claims under these rules, or did they consistently resist their implementation? Who won and who lost, and how was this changed by decisions of the Supreme Court? How did new found success or failure in litigation affect policy in other arenas? By refusing to pursue this rich line of inquiry and preferring to reign his inquiry within an arbitrary time period, Rosenberg's analysis is severely impoverished and his conclusions are brought into question.

Rosenberg fails to take into account problems with implementation at the Congressional level David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E. Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis

Page 274 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

While Rosenberg may have forsworn systematic analysis of the process through which Court decisions are implemented, he did not forswear all reference to the process. Rosenberg argues that biased judges and obstructionist interest groups placed such monumental obstacles in the path of judicial efficacy that the courts could not be labeled "dynamic" institutions, at least when compared with other bodies like Congress. n105 Yet Rosenberg's analysis seems to embrace a double standard. n106 He makes no reference to the obstacles legislatures face in implementing policy. State and federal officials may do much to interfere with effective implementation, n107 and interest groups effectively can close down the legislative arena for years. n108 Rosenberg notes none of these obstacles . He seems far more eager to ascribe change to forces other than the Court on the basis of purely post hoc argument. n109 He also fails to restrain his inquiry into the role of other institutions and phenomena within the same strict temporal limits as he did the inquiry into judicial efficacy. n110 In short, there may be no institution that lives up to Rosenberg's "dynamic" model. His failure to focus equally on the obstacles faced by various institutions brings his exaltation of Congress as the ultimate agent of social change into significant question.

Courts are important the Hollow Hope fails to take into account that the judiciary works with and results in the action of other branches of government to enforce decisions. Neal Devins (Associate Professor of Law and Lecturer in Government, College of William and Mary) 1992: Judicial Matters: The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? California Law Review. Lexis
[*1067] Courts matter. They matter a lot. Sometimes their orders set in motion market mechanisms which guarantee their effectiveness. n199 Sometimes the threat of judicial action prompts either settlement or legislative initiative. n200 Their opinions influence legislative deliberations n201 and change the status quo. n202 Occasionally, they trump agencies and interpose their normative views into the law. It may be that these influences sometimes result in unwise policy decisions and sometimes exceed the proper judicial role in our system of separated powers, but they are judicial influences nonetheless. The Hollow Hope unduly discounts these judicial contributions. Courts are given inadequate credit for what they do, as well as too much blame for what they do not do. n203 While Rosenberg does a masterful job of showing that courts do not effect change alone, he goes too far in refusing to recognize that the judiciary is actively involved in a partnership with elected government. His repeated broadsides at the judiciary sound a message of judicial irrelevance rather than one of limited governmental partnership.
n204

Rosenberg asks too much of court decisions he implies there is intent where there isnt justices rely on enforcement at the local level David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E. Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis Not only does Rosenberg fail fully to explore the nature of judicial and legislative policy implementation, but he also fundamentally misunderstands the nature of those portions of judicial decision making which he does explore. By demanding that the Court elicit broad acquiescence to the principles of its decisions if it is to be deemed effective, Rosenberg demands of courts results that litigants and judges rarely intend. Generally, their aims are far narrower. It has long been disputed in the public policy literature what relationship the intentions of actors should play to the standard by which their success in policy implementation is measured. n111 Judicial decisions may have effects beyond what litigants or judges subjectively intend, but it seems unreasonable consistently to hold courts to a standard they rarely seek to reach. Such an approach seems to constitute little more than assigning intent to actors with no more evidence that they entertained such an intent than that a decision has, years later, come to stand for a principle of social reform. n112 Merely bringing a case and having it heard may be all litigants actually seek. n113 Others may wish to overturn a particular law without intending to restructure social policy across the nation. n114 Furthermore, the Court may consciously avoid direct and immediate judicial coercion, as in Brown, where the Court ordered local officials themselves to adopt remedial measures. n115 Even the "all deliberate speed order" of Brown II was not a fully complete remedial decree: the Justices still chose to rely on local officials for implementation. n116 The Supreme Court did not clarify implementation orders until after 1964 and into the 1970s. It was only in Green v. County School Board n117 and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, n118 decided after the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 ESEA Acts, that the Court demanded particular affirmative steps toward

Page 275 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

desegregation. n119 It was during this time period that some of the most pronounced changes in integration occurred. n120 Perhaps, then, the cases that ought to be examined are the cases in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Rosenberg's ten year time frame should be adjusted accordingly. As Nathan Hakman, one of our constitutional law mentors, used to say, "Courts first decide cases and not causes." Rosenberg has entirely missed this simple truth. Finally, Rosenberg's definition of what constitutes the "significant social reform" that he seeks to examine is dangerously imprecise. n121 How many people must be affected for reform to be significant? What types of people? How much must change before reform has "occurred"? All these questions are left open, and the indeterminacy of this phrase undermines the force of Rosenberg's arguments throughout. n122

Rosenbergs claims arent warranted- groups he says lose hope are activist lawyers Malcolm M. Feeley, professor, School of Law, University of California, 1992 REVIEW SECTION SYMPOSIUM The Supreme Court and Social Change http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page? collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/lsociq17&type=Text&id=753 Although he draws on many sources and quotes many of them at length, Rosenberg is not at all systematic in his effort to locate those re- formers and other observers whose hopes he finds hollow . Perhaps he views it as unnecessary; after all, these views
may be so commonly held that it is impossible to locate a school of proponents. But to say that he has not clearly identified this group does not mean that he has not identified anyone. By my rough count, he mentions 42 advocates of the "dy- namic court" whose hopes he concludes are hollow.'0 (The inclusion of several of these people might be challenged because he mentions them only in passing or only briefly quotes from them.) Of this list

nearly half are activist lawyers and another quarter are judges and law professors. The rest are a smattering of political scientists, journalists , and
others whose professions I cannot identify. But with respect to the frequency of cita- tions and the length of quotes, the focus is overwhelmingly on activist lawyers and judges. In essence, he contrasts the wishes, desires, and hopes of these reformers with subsequent social policy developments related to important Supreme Court decisions. So far as I can tell , this

group of reformers is an ad hoc collection of activists (and their friends) who exaggerate claims about their own efficacy. That there is a
huge gap between their views and subsequent policies is hardly surprising. Imagine such a study of sports teams, contrasting coaches' preseason rhetoric with the teams' performances during the sea- son ("This team has a legitimate shot at the championship; on a good day it can beat anyone"-yet the team finishes three games out of the cellar). Or imagine someone reporting that there is a huge gap between candi- dates' campaign pronouncements and policies after election. Would any- one complain that the coaches had hollow hopes or that the information about the candidates is newsworthy? I suspect that no one other than a few sports writers, or opposition candidates, would find it worthwhile to take such rhetoric seriously. Certainly no one would take it as a disinter- ested diagnosis of the strength of the team or the candidate. Yet this is more or less what Rosenberg has done; he has

taken the rhetoric of the intensely partisan at face value and then shown that per- formance falls short of rhetoric. What he does not do is offer any reason-convincing or not-why observations of this group should be taken so seriously. I emphasize this because his book is so relentless. Each case study follows a
similar format: each begins with a mobilization of quotes by reformers which are then followed by a piling on of data to show that they were wrong. But Rosenberg never pauses to ask what the views of these reformers signify or why they are privileged voices to be taken so seriously.

Page 276 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

In cases of lost hope, the court didnt actually act on the social changehollow hope is a myth Malcolm M. Feeley, professor, School of Law, University of California, 1992 REVIEW SECTION SYMPOSIUM The Supreme Court and Social Change http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page? collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/lsociq17&type=Text&id=753 In each of these case studies-and others not mentioned here- Rosenberg concludes that the Court was weak because the goals of the re- formers were not met. But as I have tried to show, the Court never even attempted to do what he observes it did not do . It is hard to know what to make of such observations. At best it is myth debunking, although if so, we need to know more about the myth than he tells us. He promises to explicate this myth with his second provocative metaphor, "flypaper." But, as we shall see, he-does not keep the promise. Rosenberg and followers exaggerate the power the court has to lose hope Malcolm M. Feeley, professor, School of Law, University of California, 1992 REVIEW SECTION SYMPOSIUM The Supreme Court and Social Change http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page? collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/lsociq17&type=Text&id=753 Who is attracted to the Court and why? A substantial number of people attribute exaggerated powers to the courts . It would be interesting to know who they are. Unfortunately Rosenberg does not explore this group systematically. At the outset of
each case study he marshals quotes from a variety of sources revealing that a number of prominent people have had great expectations from litigation. But he provides no

sustained discussion as to how he selected those to be quoted, or who they are-why their views matter. One way to summarize his argument is as follows: "A lot of people think the Court is really powerful, but my study reveals that it isn't." Even if he is correct, and I am impressed with the data he has
marshaled, his study is at most a successful effort at debunking an ill-de- fined myth than it is in explaining the nature of the Court's powers or the pervasiveness and significance of the myth. A more sociological and theoretically informed study would have used the myth-the "hollow hope"-as the beginning of inquiry rather than the conclusion. It would have gone beyond myth debunking and asked, Who holds this "hollow hope"? Why do they persist in holding a belief that is so patently false? What functions does the myth serve? What is the nature of the flypaper Court? What functions does it serve? Throughout the book, Rosenberg raises such questions, but he never addresses them. Indeed, his brief concluding chapter, "The Fly Paper Court," is a dis- appointment. The metaphor promises to explore the seductions of the Court and those attracted to it. Yet it only reiterates his point that those who place their faith in the Court as an engine of social change are mis- guided. This, of course, is an important point, but the question is, Why are so many people then attracted to the Court? We know why flies are attracted to flypaper; flypaper is aromatic and flies are dumb. But the people Rosenberg identifies who are attracted to litigation are not so dumb; they are prominent lawyers, journalists, and public officials. How can they be so misguided? One can also ask, Is the metaphor apt? Certainly the metaphor is powerful: The Court attracts would-be reformers only to entrap them in a futile struggle. But flypaper is designed for this purpose. Is the Court? Is the Court responsible for trapping would-be reformers? Or has someone else fostered the myth? And is it in fact as dysfunctional as Rosenberg argues? Whatever the case, the anomaly Rosenberg has identified-the deep belief in a powerful Court coupled with a finding of abject weakness- should have been a central problematic in the study. To

conclude that the Court is like flypaper that entangles would-be reformers in a fruitless enterprise is to pose a problem, not conclude the analysis . Thus the

Page 277 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

unasked and unanswered questions: Who fosters the myth of the dynamic court? Who maintains it? What social functions does it serve? Rosenberg's book would have been far more satisfying had he pursed such questions.

Turn: Court action encourages further litigation and strategy- Brown proves David S. Meyer, Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Steven A. Boutcher, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, University of California, March 2007, Signals and Spillover: Brown v. Board of Education and Other Social Movements http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS %2FPPS5_01%2FS1537592707070077a.pdf&code=0953f61b8fdb83aea22b52 fd9ff5084a Next, we can consider emulation . Civil rights activists success in using the courts led a range of other interests to adopt litigation strategies, and indeed, even the organiza- tional structure of the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund.
OConnor, for example, describes pressure from board members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) to create a subsidiary directed to litigate on behalf of womens rights. 39 Baker, Bowman, and Torrey report that the feminist movements concern with discrimination against women, and inequality between women and men, led them to adopt the NAACPs approach as the only obvious model . . . . . following the NAACPs example, liberal feminists worked within the system to achieve change by focusing on gaining equal opportunity for women as individuals. 40 They report that NOW deliberately cop- ied the methods,

structures, and funding techniques of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and concentrated, like that organization, on the courts as an instrument of change through litigating cases raising constitutional claims. 41 Costain notes that members of Congress made the con- nection between women and blacks, and copied legisla- tive provisions for civil rights as well.42 The successful example of litigation, and the simple story about social change implicit in a judicial pronounce- ment, encouraged the strategy , and groups sought to frame
themselves as like African Americans in some way, usually as a distinct group that suffers discrimination. Activists organized to provide for equal protection under the law,

the same standard articulated in Brown, regardless of the nature of their constituency.43 The model was most easily adopted by other ethnic minorities and women, but it spread to consumers, disabled people, anti-war activists, crusaders against poverty, and even animal rights and envi- ronmental activists. Handler
reports that the war on povertys legal services program, started in 1967, was explicitly modeled on the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund, 44 as was the Envi- ronmental Defense Fund, also founded in 1967. 45 In these cases, as with the NAACP, dedicated organizations raised money to hire lawyers to le litigation to achieve their political goals, to win political visibility, and to raise more money. The iconic status of the Brown decision, in which the

Supreme Court reversed a long-standing precedent and articulated a clear vision of individual rights that man- dated, although it did not effect immediate
change in laws and policies, provided an incredible temptation for envi- ronmental groups. If the Court could nd a right for equal access to education, perhaps it could also nd a Constitutional right to a clean environment.46

Page 278 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Social movements will continue even if they dont win- resources, need to fight opposition David S. Meyer, Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Steven A. Boutcher, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, University of California, March 2007, Signals and Spillover: Brown v. Board of Education and Other Social Movements http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS %2FPPS5_01%2FS1537592707070077a.pdf&code=0953f61b8fdb83aea22b52 fd9ff5084a Second, some social movement organizations have extensive resources invested in the pursuit of social change through litigation. Activists are committed to social change, but they are also bound to support the survival of their organizations, and to make best use of the tools and expertise they have. Social movements comprise multi- organizational elds, including groups that specialize in litigation. In order to sustain the ow of resources into these groups, they must maintain an identity distinct from their allies, and continue to offer the promise of victory .58 Continued litigation lls a distinct organizational niche within a social movement, and makes use of well-established organizational expertise; even in the absence of social change, it is an organizational survival strategy. Third, like organizations, individuals have investments in
particular identities and tactics. Lawyers committed to social change employ familiar tactics and make use of the skills they have. The choice of the legal system as a venue for political action reects not only beliefs, but educa- tional and professional investments that support those beliefs. Its easy to imagine the cause lawyer doubting the effectiveness of shifting his or her skills and efforts to an alternative political venue. Finally, advocates of social change

continue to litigate at least partly because their opponents do. When an oppos- ing group seeks to pursue its interests through the courts, it virtually forces its opponent to do the sameor risk leaving a potentially important front in the political battle undefended .59 Groups can try to
respond to their oppo- nents by bringing alternative cases to the legal system, ones with more favorable facts or district judges; mini- mally, they can le amicus curiae briefs in opposition to other advocates As long as either side sees the courts as a potentially relevant institution,

numerous groups will continue to channel their efforts there. Clearly, efforts to pursue social change through the courts continue against long odds of success.

Page 279 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

*****Congress***** **Social Reform / Movements** Congress is the most effective agent for solving societal problems Dodd, Lawrence 2001 [Lawrence Dodd is a Professor at the University of Florida, Published in Congress Reconsidered, 7th Edition, Edited by Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Washington, D. C., CQ Press, pages 389-414. Re-Envisioning Congress: Theoretical Perspectives on Congressional Change.]
What we know at this point is that we have adjusted our governing perspectives during these decades and that, despite the bitter partisan battles that have come with the experimentation and shift, and to some extent because of them, our society is as prosperous and productive as ever. We also know one other thing: that Congress, the parties, and the electorate are capable of reassessing governing strategies, experimenting with new ones, learning innovative approaches, and addressing societal problems. To appreciate this capacity, we must attend to the conceptual lenses through which we examine Congress and craft multiple theoretical perspectives that can aid us in looking beyond momentary personalities and short-term stalemate to see the dynamic, historical processes at play. In doing so, we must bring to Congress the common-sense judgment we bring to daily life, taking care to focus on the motives and strategic behavior of participants in the foreground, on the shifting background contexts, and then ultimately on the critical ways in which the ideas that participants hold about politics and society shape their strategies and actions. As we do so, crafting social choice theories to analyze the foreground, social structure theories to interpret the background, and social learning theories to comprehend the role of ideas, we see an overall pattern that no one of our theories could fully illuminate, and that helps us understand how Congress can constructively respond to societal problems. Through these multiple lenses, we see the contest for governing power that ensures partisans will highlight societal problems as they challenge for control of Congress. We see the dynamic societal changes that generate new citizen demands and policy challenges. And we see the coming of a new generation of legislators, social activists, and engaged citizens who push Congress to experiment with fresh ideas, address the pressing policy challenges, and solve societal problems.

Page 280 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Centralization / Government Bad**

The affirmatives acceptance of centralization prevents social movements by discouraging individual actionthe result is extinction Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Peace Through Social Empowerment, "Primary Causes," http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp14.html)
It is simply this; that our primary problem is not war, or the environment, or population pressures, nor the squandering of the planet's finite resources, nor the alienation from life of many millions of people; THE PRIMARY PROBLEM IS THAT OF SIZE, size developed on such a scale as to disempower people and which makes their moral judgements irrelevant to the passage of events. If we ignore that and simply focus our energies on particular abuses then, however commendable our objectives and our efforts, we are dealing with the effects of the abuses of power and ignoring their causes. It was Einstein who remarked 'You cannot solve a problem with the mindframe that has created it'. In saying as much he was pointing to the core of our problem; a 19th century mindframe which accepts, without question or challenge, giant centralised states and economic entrepreneurship global in its scope, which together have created a doomsday scenario for the human race. No body can be healthier than the cells of which it is comprised. If the cells of small-scale community life are debilitated or non-existent in the body politic then what we are confronted with is a form of social and political leukaemia, a destroyed immune system which cannot prevent multitudinous forms of life-threatening malignancy, such as monster global wars, from flourishing. We are not going to solve the problems of the 21st century with the mindframe of the 19th. Social empowerment, involving the deliberate creation of an organic, multi-cellular structure and process of our political and economic institutions, is today the only realistic path to enduring peace and to any genuine social progress.

Voting negative challenges the inevitability of centralization and opens up local communities for action
Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Peace Through Social Empowerment, "Primary Causes," http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp14.html) Supposing then our reform movements changed tack? Supposing they tackled the problem of giantism and of excessive size in order to restore control of affairs back in citizen hands? And suppose all these reform and protest organisations joined hands to do so? What then would be involved? They would be agents of the most thoroughgoing and peaceful revolution the world has ever seen. A revolution not to capture power but to dissolve it. To dissolve it into people's hands where it rightly belongs in the manifold neighbourhoods, villages, parishes and human scale political structures throughout the world. They would be putting paid to the absurd notion that the citizen can have a meaningful voice or influence in political parties or in governments so enormous as to make it inevitable that power will be in the hands of those who are controlling things at the centre, a control which ensures that they control the party conferences, agendas, policies, candidate lists and so on. So persuasive is the power of established practice, and the powerful propaganda that accompanies it in asserting the natural and inevitable validity of our current institutions, that it requires a real effort of mind to recognise that far from being natural or inevitable they are neither. They are based in fact on quite unsustainable assumptions and not least of these assumptions relates to current scheming and plotting (it really is nothing less) to unite Europe under one Brussels-dominated Government.

Decentralization Solvency - Seeking institutional solutions while failing to question the assumptions that underlie such institutions will inevitably fail Papworth 02 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Cut the Cackle,"
Fourth World Review, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwr118.pdf )

Page 281 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

When confronted with a crisis of epic proportions, it might be thought that it would evoke a concern of like degree, that if it was so obvious that something was quite fundamentally wrong with our political and economic arrangements we would be posing no less fundamental questions about them. We are not. We are sedulously avoiding any serious attempt to probe the assumptions on which those arrangements are based, instead we are continuing to seek solutions which leave those assumptions untouched, and therein lies the roots of the modern crisis. What we need to think we instinctively regard as unthinkable, and the most imposing peak of this untouchable realm of our own minds relates to the size and scale of our institutions. No net benefitthere is only a risk the CP alone solves best.
Federal action coopts local movements Papworth 01 (John, Editor @ Ecologist + editor of Fourth World Review, Bringing Up the Local Issues, The Ecologist, June, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp3.html) We now have 'national' schemes and ministries for health, education, welfare and other essentially local matters. The evidence abounds and grows that these bodies are increasingly wasteful and inefficient, where they are not indeed riddled with the maggot of corruption, and not least of course they operate on organisational parameters which make a mockery of democratic principle. Somehow the illusion has been fostered, for example, that people who have devoted their lives to clambering to the top of the greasy pole are better qualified to ordain how children should be educated than are the parents and their local committees. So our public prints are loaded with otiose speculation about 'national' examination standards and results, and about the content of 'national' educational curricula; meanwhile, in rural areas, large numbers of children are bussed to giant 'comprehensive' schools where they learn about computers and nothing about how to grow food. Local government, instead of being a power in its own right but working in tandem, where necessary, with national government, is now the pawn of the latter, which is making a mess of the whole works. It is time to cry halt to the assault on freedom involved in all this centralisation; time to restore the power and the spirit of local power, responsibility and commitment of genuine local government as a precondition of a healthy democratic way of life.

Centralization and individualism are zero-sumthe growing power of centralized power necessarily decreases the significance of individuals
Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Peace Through Social Empowerment, "Introduction," http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp11.html) As any political (or other) unit grows in size, the significance of the individual proportionately declines. If you are a member of a 500 strong community, in the governance of its affairs your membership and your morality matter simply because your membership is both morally and statistically significant. They will matter even more if you are deeply concerned, since a large number of people in any community are generally, because of age or disposition, unable or unwilling to care. But if your political unit numbers 500 million your significance is reduced from 1/500th to 1/500 millionth! Yet despite this shrinking of your significance to proportions so minute as to be infinitesimal, the power of the unit itself has increased to quite staggering proportions: Where then is that power located? It is of course at the centre. The price of your diminished power is the tribute you pay to the swollen octopus of power at the centre.

Page 282 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The centralization of power in the center of an organization inevitably trades off with the individual.
Papworth 05 (John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the Fourth World Review, Village Democracy)

To enlarge the scale of such relationships to a giant mass is to effect a near total transformation of reality. For example, the workings of a modern mass political party, which may number millions, becomes an entity where the morality factor has largely been supplemented by that of power. Whatever moral objectives an individual may seek to pursue by joining a large mass organisation, his relationship with it can only be a power relationship. This is fundamental to his reasons for becoming a member at all; he is seeking, after all, to change the way power in society is used, but his individual power is emphatically unequal to that of the central controlling mechanisms. It is in fact power he surrenders by the mere fact of becoming a member. The same power cannot be in two places at the same time, either a member has it, as in his bowls club by the small size of the club, where his membership is a significant factor in controlling such power as it may deploy , or he doesn't, as in a mass political party where he is an insignificant cog in a massive wheel controlled by others at the centre. The mere fact of enlarged size makes size itself an assault on the democratic ethic as a matter of course.

Perm fails- power cannot reside in two places at once. Papworth 5 ( John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the Fourth World Review,
Village Democracy) Current thinking in any case takes no account of an essential prerequisite for the successful working of any federation. History is eloquent that if the members of a federation are significantly unequal in size and strength it will only be a matter of time before the bigger members dominate it. This proved the case in 'Germany', which, after its formation by Bismark, soon became dominated by Prussia and in the USSR, which was dominated by Russia. What ensues is not so much a federation as an empire under the dominance of the most powerful member. It is noticeable that in the USA and in Switzerland, two of the most successful federations in the record, no single member is strong enough to dominate the rest. This does not of
course resolve the problem of the power drives of any federation when it gets big enough to dominate other federations, as the USA does today. We can anticipate the prospect of China, or India, achieving a degree of power to rival that of the USA, especially when the power of the latter inevitably declines. But this does not resolve the problem of war so much as open up the prospect of even bigger global wars between rival federations. Hence any projects for a world federation will need to involve a massive scaling down of the big powers that now dominate world affairs so that the members achieve some approximation of parity in terms of size and strength. The same power cannot be in

two places at the same time; either people have power in their hands or they don't. Either giant governments and corporations have it in their hands or they haven't . Nevertheless the dream of some such international authority continues to shine like a beacon in the eyes of many pacifists and peace lovers, as well as being vaguely acknowledged as a good thing by a great many other people. The fact is that they have no grasp at all of the power realities involved or that any such body would be only too to likely make peace-lovers and their ideals its first victims . But then, an anxious enquiring voice will be heard to venture, 'Won't largely self-governing local communities or bioregional provinces sometimes want to make war on other neighbouring communities?'

The perm cannot solve. The endorsement of a mass movement, no matter how well meant, will inevitably lead to a loss of individual power.
Papworth, Albery, and Sale 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review, Director of the Middlebury Institute, Founder of the institute for Social Inventions (John, Kirpatrick, Nicholas, Common Sense, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf)

Page 283 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

We cannot expect to transform the bureaucratic and market dominated subversion of democracy now prevalent overnight. So often we are not even in contact with our neighbours, and in seeking change we tend to immerse ourselves in mass political bodies - themselves part of the disease rather than its cure, or in good causes such as campaigning for peace, or for the homeless, or to save the rain forests, where concerned people tend to find themselves in a moral ghetto largely talking to each other. A new approach to secure neighbourhood power implies a need to focus on the neighbourhood and on its problems and possibilities for both local and wider social transformation. No body can be healthier than the cells of which it is comprised. We cannot begin to do this if we are not in contact with our neighbours and this means we need to explore and adopt such measures as enable us to form and maintain working community relationships. Mass anonymity is its own form of mass powerlessness. Power cannot be in two places at once. If centralized government controlling a mass electorate has the power, then the citizen in no way has it or, on such a basis, can have it.

Centralized power inevitably trades off with the local. Papworth and Sale 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review,

AND Director of the Middlebury Institute, and Albery, Founder of the instiute for Social inventions, 01(John, Kirkpatrick,Nicholas, Common Sense, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf) Over the last century or more there has been a sedulous transfer of the power of local villages , parishes and neighbourhoods to the ambit of central government. The measures involved have been presumed to be justified on the grounds of efficiency and economy. Neither has been justified by events. Numerous services heretofore often conducted on a voluntary basis by dedicated, publicspirited local citizens have been taken over by salaried officials appointed by the central government, with a number of consequences which has helped to create a gratuitous social tragedy of ever widening dimensions. It is a tragedy which has been accentuated by the emergence of new forms of power in commerce, communications and transport which have also been deployed on a nonlocal basis and which have served even more to divorce the citizen from any real control over many of the many factors that now dominate citizen life. Two centuries ago an average villager had a distinct element of control over his school, medicine, police, entertainment, dress, cookery, food production, transport, shopping, welfare and social provision. Today such control has passed from citizen hands into the hands of powerful central bureaucracies appointed by the central government or into the hands of no less powerful commercial concerns. This process has often been justified by reference to the extension

Central government action discourages individual movements to solve the problem because they posit problems as out of our control
Papworth 02 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Cut the Cackle," Fourth World Review, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwr118.pdf)

Over half a century ago an Austrian professor of economics asserted, If anything is wrong it is because it is too big. Perhaps an oversweeping statement, but all experience since simply confirms it. Too big. Just that. So government is too big, banks, shops, farms, industries and fisheries are too big, and even more imposingly unthinkable, nations are too big. Why? Because giantism has made them unmanageable in keeping the peace or in ensuring economic justice and stability; the forces dominating them are out of control and producing effects we are powerless to prevent or to alleviate. This despite the ballot box and freedom of speech. Too big is the problem of the modern world and the challenge confronting us all is to reduce the size and scale of things so as to enable us to control them. Nobody would want a pair of shoes which was too large, so why do we tolerate far more important matters which suffer the same defect? We need to challenge that deep-rooted assumption in our minds that making things bigger makes them better when we are living in a crisis which howls with evidence indicating the contrary; evidence indicating that the small is generally better, far more stable, responsive, beneficial, controllable, peaceful and prosperous.

Page 284 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

The government is the root cause of problems

Papworth 95 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Small is Powerful, The Monster, page 2-3, 1995)
We need to see that in any mass form of society (i.e., one in which empowered local communities just do not exist), these powerful forces have little difficulty in deploying their abundant resrouces so as to secure an almost unlimited degree of acquiescence to their standards and values of a vast mass of uncritical, and all too often uncaring, individuals- who nevertheless have the power to vote. Ordinarily nature provides an abundance of leadership in every kind of community

which will take the initiative in tackling its problems; but when communities as such cease to exist, as centralized forms of power come to exercise a dominance over the affairs of the mass, such localized leadership loses the mainspring of its capacity to act ; it no longer has a stage, one might say, on which it can perform. It is this factor of negated or subjugated leadership which gives added signifncance to the proliferating number and variety of protest, reform or campaigning groups which today are such a marked feature of public life. An empowered community would not find itself faced with such groups for the simple reason that the conduct of its affairs would reflect the wishes of its members as a matter of course. Its leaders, instead of founding or joining some national movement, would be largely running the local show; but since there is no local show to run, if matters as coffee mornings, jumble
sales, or discos to raise funds for table tennis tables for teenagers are excluded, what role is there left for it to play in matters which will help to determine its character, its use of local resources or the general quality of life? So that what we are now

observing is a form of government which, because of the nature of the behind-the-scenes forms of power which sustain it and because of the values these forces are concerned to promote, is compelled to act in accordance with those values (which a mass electorate has been manipulated into adopting as its own), is creating a multitude of problems which the more public spirited elements are being driven to seek either to reform, combat or negate . So that in a very real sense we are in the grip of a process of government of the people and supposedly for the people which is creating problems, often of crisis proportions, which under a system of government by the people would scarcely arise at all.

Decentralization solves democracy and poverty

Kauzya 05 - The Chief in the Division for Public Administration and Development Management, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (John Mary, Decentralization: Prospects for Peace, Democracy, and Development, September 2005, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan021510.pdf, K. Ward) As part of the efforts to promote the participation of the people in the decision-making processes as well as the development activities, the policy of devolution of power and authority to sub-national governments (generally referred to as decentralization) is increasingly adopted and applied in many countries as one of the tenets of good governance. This is based on the premise that decentralized governance provides a structural arrangement and a level playing field for stakeholders and players to promote peace, democracy, and development. Many countries are promoting decentralized governance as a measure for democratization, people empowerment and poverty reduction. However, the efforts in this regard are not moving at the same pace, with the same political conviction, using equally competent capacities, and with the same success. Some countries have gone beyond political hesitation and put in place policies of decentralization but they lack the requisite capacities for the implementation. Others are still politically hesitant, not sure of the role of decentralized governance in democratization, people empowerment, and poverty reduction.

The government is the root cause of environmental destruction, wars, and economic upheavals Papworth 95 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Small is Powerful,
The Monster, page 10-11, 1995)

Page 285 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Hence to assert that our societies are out of control is surely to assert something too patent to be gainsaid; and that they are out of control because they have overreached themselves and have become too big is no less obvious. Too big, both in terms of the private and public institutions within each state and also in terms of the size of the states themselves; too big to be able to respond to the moral judgements of the generality of their members, in the way in which responsive human scale communities are able to evoke as a matter of course; in consequence our societies are in effect running amok in terms of environmental destruction, social despoliation, the squandering of the earths finite resources, economic upheaveals, a propensity for massive wars and even in terms of an uncontrolled proliferation of human numbers.

The centralization of power inevitably leads to global destruction. Papworth, Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review, and Sale 1
Director of the Middlebury Institute, and Albery, Founder of the instiute for Social inventions (John, Kirkpatrick, Nicholas, Common Sense, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf) One overall consequence of this lack of citizen control is control by boardroom moguls pursuing purely short-term pecuniary gains as obliged by company law and the shareholder primacy system in some countries. It is a deployment of power, undemocratic, irresponsible, pervasive and importunate, which has come to act on a global scale and helped to create the current ever deepening global crisis that now dominates all human life. It is a crisis which is destroying significant elements of the life support systems of the planet, vast proportions of irreplaceable reserves of finite resources and involving a wholesale degradation of the quality of life at numerous levels. Not least it has set in train a number of forces which betoken the most catastrophic consequences, whether in terms of another global war, environmental collapse or social disintegration, which ought now to be the central concern of all public policy considerations. It is a crisis which can only have ensued from a grotesque distortion of the decision-making power within human societies and can only be resolved if that distortion is corrected so that such power is effectively in the hands of the people in their neighborhood communities.

Individual engagement in democracy is key to preventing a collapse

Watson 04 Assistant Professor of sociology and gerontology coordinator @ Stephen F. Austin State University (J.B. Watson, A Justification of the Civic Engagement Model, p. 7374, Service Learning: History, Theory, and Issues) The civic engagement of ordinary citizens with voluntary associations, social institutions, and government in local communities is a central feature of strong democracies. Further, a fundamental feature of democratic governmental structure is its relationship to civil society, defined as "voluntary social activity not compelled by the state" (Bahlmueller, 1997, p. 3). Through voluntary participation in civil society associations at the local and regional level, citizens pursue activities that potentially serve the public good. Through this rudimentary civic engagement, citizens learn the attitudes, habits, skills, and knowledge foundational to the democratic process-(Patrick, 1998). Unfortunately, in 1998 the National Commission on Civic Renewal (NCCR) highlighted the declining quantity and quality of civic engagement at all levels of American life. A number of other studies concur on the decline of involvement in civic activities (Bahlmueller, 1997; McGrath, 2001; Putnam, 1995). This concern about the nature and extent of civic engagement in the United States has impacted the debate on the proper role of higher education in a democracy. Higher education institutions, as transmitters of essential elements of the dominant culture, struggle with the development of mechanisms to socialize the next generation about democratic values. A national debate has emerged on the higher education response to this perceived need for revitalizing constructive democratic engagement, building civil society, and increasing citizen participation in government at all levels. Colleges and universities have responded with a number of civic engagement

Page 286 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

initiatives, including university-community partnerships, empirical studies of political engagement, community-based (collaborative) research, and the development of new (or expanded) service-learning programs (Jacoby 2003).

Decentralized government is key to development of democracy

Rosenbaum 99 Director of the Institute of Public Management at the Florida International University (Allan, Democracy, Governance, and Decentralization, 1999, http://www.fiu.edu/~ipmcs/articles/dgd.htm, K. Ward) In general, decentralized government can be a very important element in the facilitation of an active and lively civil society. The more decentralized government is, and the stronger local governance capacity is, the more opportunities - in essence, the more arenas - are provided for the emergence of civil society institutions. In fact, very often it is the existence of local governance, combined with the emergence of local civil society institutions , that truly creates the pluralism that is so central to democratic institutional development . In that regard, local governments can and have played crucial facilitating roles in the development of vibrant civil societies. Local government policy and administrative practice can profoundly impact upon the capacity for civil society to emerge and play a role in governance. Likewise, the actions of local political leaders can either be supportive of or create major impediments to civil society development.

Localization is a pre-requisite to solving democracy

Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Peace Through Social Empowerment, "Primary Causes," http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp14.html)
Our prospects of countering the evil forces promoting the global crisis and of making any significant progress are bleak indeed if we do not grasp that if people have no real power to enable their moral judgements to be reflected in the general life processes of their own communities, if they do not themselves control their social structures, their schools, post office, bank, police, hospital, transport and their welfare services; if they have no local power to determine these matters, if they do not have their own locally elected representatives to sit, with others similarly elected, on boards which govern matters of wider import, including public utilities such as water, gas, electricity and not least, governing the content of radio and television, they have no effective power at all. The very structures disempower them and it is a mere abuse of language to describe any such process as democratic. Democracy, we should never cease to hold, does not mean government of the people, nor government for the people, both are essentially totalitarian concepts, it means government by the people. All else is claptrap and delusion.

Localized efforts are key to solve war and democracy

Papworth 02 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Cut the Cackle," Fourth World Review, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwr118.pdf)
To talk of the need for a new party is the old fashioned giantist approach; what we need is thousands of new locally-based independent political parties up and down the country! And in the world at large millions of them. The pressing need of the moment is for a political and economic programme they could adopt which affirms at every level the imperative need for the human scale as a prerequisite for the effective working of democracy. And the programmes? Each local neighbourhood party will decide its own as a matter of course, which does not mean they would not promote a common series of principles which serve their common interests. Such principles would relate at the national level to fundamental provisions for liberty, freedom and independence, involving of course a complete rejection of any association with the European Community. But cut the cackle all along the line;

Page 287 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

currently discussion is non-stop about what government policy should be on a host of matters which have been removed from local control. Our millions of new parties will assume as a matter of right the power to establish their own elected regional bodies to run services where such co-operation with other communities may be needed such as specialist hospitals, colleges, police, radio and TV, transport, utilities, banking and investment. This is a programme of liberation, a programme to get government off peoples backs and into their own hands. Such a political structure would at last enable peoples wishes to prevail on the issues of war, ecological sanity and economic justice. Across the world people would insist on the most rigorous controls on armaments production, where it was permitted at all, and of associated scientific research. At last the questions of war and peace would not be matters of power-brokering and diplomacy in the hands of giant states but moral questions of right and wrong in the hands of people. The centralization of power kills democracy, by concentrating decision making beyond the reach of the average citizen. Papworth, Sale, and Albery 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review, Director of the Middlebury Institute,, Founder of the institute for Social inventions, 01(John, Kirkpatrick,Nicholas http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf) of the franchise, but again what is evident is an increasing decline of citizen influence or capacity to control as giant political parties, subject to their own highly centralized bureaucracies, ordain their workings and their general policy direction. What emerges from this process is not one in which the citizen is able to express preferences which party or government then seeks to effect, rather it is a matter of policy decisions by powerful centralized bodies to which the citizen has no effective response except to assent. It is a process which gives enormous powers of patronage to party leaders and even more to heads of government and it is one quite incompatible with the spirit and practice of the democratic ethos. Such patronage is a powerful weapon in the hands of those who deploy it to secure subservience to their wishes rather than concurrence with the wishes of the citizen.

Decentralization promotes democracy

Kauzya 05 - The Chief in the Division for Public Administration and Development Management, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (John Mary, Decentralization: Prospects for Peace, Democracy, and Development, September 2005, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan021510.pdf , K. Ward) Viewed in this light, political decentralization (being a process of transferring decision making power and authority) becomes a strong vehicle for championing local diversity and local autonomy. Through it, local interests are articulated, and local socio-cultural systems are strengthened. Decentralization provides a structural and institutionalized venue through which local people can participate and exert more influence in the formulation and implementation of policies and the determination of their development in general.4 If it is taken that democracy means the rule of the people, then political decentralization, by facilitating participation of the people in decision-making, promotes democracy.

Decentralization promotes democracy

Kauzya 05 - The Chief in the Division for Public Administration and Development Management, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (John Mary, Decentralization: Prospects for Peace, Democracy, and Development, September 2005, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan021510.pdf , K. Ward) When political decentralization is understood in the preceding sense, then it becomes clear that it can be a vehicle for promoting democratic participation. In fact, one would not see any value in political decentralization if it was not linked to the promotion of participation of local people or their representatives in the process of decision-making and implementation.

Page 288 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

In a general way, what is difficult about using political decentralization to promote democratic participation is not in understanding the linkage between the two but rather how to, through the process of decentralization, create structures that inspire as well as energize local people, and facilitate their participation in the decision-making and implementation process. The government is the root cause of civic disengagement Papworth 95 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Small is Powerful, The Monster, page 4-5, 1995) In posing such questions let us be clear how the argument is shaping. We are noting that society at large is afflicted with an increasing number of problems in almost every aspect of its affairs; we are suggesting that these problems taken together point to a general cause or causes from which they stem and that one aspect of those causes relates to the fact that our affairs are conducted on a mass basis rather than on a localised, empowered community basis. We are also saying that the mere existence of the mass form of society affirms the existence of a majority which is ignorant of any serious consideration of its problems and which is for the most part indifferent to any need to resolve them, and that this mass unconcern is the material which dominant forces are able to manipulate to achieve ends which are sharply at variance with the general interests of society; in so doing they are prompting governments to pursue courses which cannot fail to multiply problem areas which, in turn prompts the emergence of protest or reform groups of people who are informed, who do care about the general well-being of society and who, in empowered communities, as distinct from the mass form of society, would be the natural leaders who would be harkened to and followed by their neighbours. To this it needs to be added that the problems which now beset our societies are so numerous, as well as enormous, as to constitute an overall crisis of a magnitude which is no only causing the everyday workings of the social order to malfunction but which now threatens its prospects of survival as the sedulous process of social disintegration which is thus created gathers momentum. A mass democracy is an oxymoron. As the size of a political unit increases the moral judgement of each of its members because unimportant. Papworth 6 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review
(John, The Fourth World Review, The ABC's of Politics II,No 136, pg 2

http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwrp137.pdf) In terms of democratic comprehension

Democracy
power entities such as India, the USA, China, Russia, Germany, France, Britain etc. are simply a repudiation of any possibility of democratic practice .

is a moral concept implying a condition of human freedom, and morality in turn is wholly a function of human relationships, which is why the numbers of humans involved in asserting and upholding moral principles is all important. Numbers of a size that enables each persons moral judgement and decision to be significant must be limited if such decisions are to be operative. The mere existence of giant multi-million states, especially when power is concentrated in single centres, is an effective repudiation of any possibility of democratic practice. A mass democracy is an oxymoron. The centralization of power ensures that economic interests will triumph over those of the individual, killing democracy Papworth, Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review, 01, (John, The Fourth World Review, The
Community Revolution. Nos 109 &110) Radical activists really must wake up here. The sheer

scale and degree of centralised power of most governments puts them effectively

Page 289 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

beyond the reach of any prospect of citizen control; but governments are not, in any case, any longer masters of their own house. That office is now decisively in the hands of a mere score or so of globally operating boardrooms. In this light, however commendable it may be for radical activists to stage street protests or to petition governments to remedy this or that abuse, there is a need, more urgent than ever before, to define what we are protesting for and the kind of world we are seeking in which to live, one which rejects greed for profit or power as a motivating principle and one which restores power to the people. It is an objective which must imperatively reject any form of mass organisation, precisely the form which has robbed people of power and enabled boardroom greed to achieve its
dominance; it is one that commands imperatively a human-scale approach, one which enables personal decision-making again to become meaningful and vibrant. Revolutionary politics today is community politics, and its weapons are not guns and violence but clarity of thought and ever persistent peaceful persuasion.

Inefficiencies of the federal government are inevitable this is an inherent characteristic in federal enterprise tradition resulting in corruption and misallocation
Rothbard 04 Founder Center for Libertarian Studies, Doctor of Philosophy in Economics, Distinguished Professor at the University of Nevada (Murray N. the Myth of Efficient Government Service. The Ludwig von Mises Institute. 3-18-04. http://mises.org/story/1471)

The well-known inefficiencies of government operation are not empirical accidents, resulting perhaps from the lack of a civil-service tradition. They are inherent in all government enterprise, and the excessive demand fomented by free and other underpriced services is just one of the many reasons for this condition. Thus, free supply not only subsidizes the users at the expense of nonusing taxpayers; it also misallocates resources by failing to supply the service where it is most needed. The same is true, to a lesser extent, wherever the price is under the free-market price. On the free market, consumers can dictate the pricing and thereby assure the best allocation of productive resources to supply their wants. In a government enterprise, this cannot be done. Let us take again the case of the free service. Since there is no pricing, and therefore no exclusion of submarginal uses, there is no way that government, even if it wanted to, could allocate its services to the most important uses and to the most eager buyers. All buyers, all uses, are artificially kept on the same plane. As a result, the most important uses will be slighted, and the government is faced with insuperable allocation problems, which it cannot solve even to its own satisfaction. Thus, the government will be confronted with the problem: Should we build a road in place A or place B? There is no rational way by which it can make this decision.

Healthcare is the epitome of overcentralization. It's current practice denies the power of local communities, whilst sacrificing quality healthcare for profits.
Papworth 5 ( John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the Fourth World Review, Village Democracy) A further factor here is the role of drugs and drug companies in a national service. One medical authority has declared that 'In Europe and the USA the drug companies now control the medical profession. To a large extent doctors have become the marketing arms of the pharmaceutical industry. The same author asserts many widely used drugs are dangerous and often do more harm than healing. What stands out is that most drugs are excessively overpriced and that their cost, as well as the costs of medical equipment and mundane ancillary items such as bandages, plays a quite disproportionate role in health care budgets. A local health service would be free to break out of the current constraints

Page 290 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

imposed by giant drug companies. Local labour could be employed to make equipment and such items as bandages at a fraction of the prevailing charges, and the way would also be open to employ natural traditional remedies from local services such as herb gardens. There is a pronounced tendency to dismiss remedies based on natural ingredients as being so much hocus pocus; it is an attitude which ignores how much more hocus pocus there is in the promotion of high powered products of the giant pharmaceutical companies. The size of their advertising budgets is a key pointer here; the whole emphasis of the industry is not on healing but in making money, often in ways which are none too scrupulous with regard to the long term effects of repeated use. What is noticeable about a national service is its disregard of positive health promotion. It is really a National Sickness service. Very few people have any detailed understanding of how their bodies work and are generally ignorant of the needs of their respiratory, digestive, excretory and other organs; it is this ignorance which enables advertisers to persuade them to purchase highly flavoured, devitalised and chemicalised items masquerading as food on such a regular basis as to make one form of ill health or another inevitable. Most of the shelves in most food stores today are institutionalised assaults on any attempt to provide a proper health service; a locally run service would be aware of the relationship between this factor and the effect on its health budget and be concerned to promote locally-produced chemical-free food and to make people aware of the true conditions of bodily health. Helping people to understand you cannot buy good health, you can only Jive it, and a genuinely democratic local health authority would be a front runner in promoting the ways decent health can be attained. It may well be asserted, indeed it frequently is, that village people are apt to make mistakes with their limited knowledge and that these can carry a heavy cost in terms of both money and resources, mistakes which experts with their greater knowledge can avoid. this of course is only too true. Inadequate supervision of local building operations may prompt a contractor to install drainage pipes of smaller than specified dimensions, or to use substandard construction materials and so on, practices which only come to light after a lapse of time and when invoices have been finally processed. The centralization of power inevitably trades off with local power and results in gross inefficiency and a destruction of the value of life, turning case. Papworth 1 Senior Editor of the Ecologist and Founder of Fourth World Review, (John, Common Sense, Afterword http://www.cesc.net/radicalweb/scholars/papworth/afterword.html ) And the damage the boardroom brigands have done to work is reflected in what the politicians have done to our social structures. Local government once involved the energies, dedication, commitment and genuinely altruistic spirit of service to the community of a high proportion of local people. Today a kind of Fabian fascism has brushed all this aside as being of no account. Instead of members of a local community hospital or welfare committee being involved in the day-to-day running of local institutions, organising fetes and celebrations to raise funds and keeping the show on the road; doing it in ways which gave their lives meaning, status and, again that word, fulfilment, they are now relegated to the role of voting fodder in the mass political charade. We now have 'national' schemes and ministries for health, education, welfare and other essentially local matters. The evidence abounds and grows that these bodies are increasingly wasteful and inefficient, where they are not indeed riddled with the maggot of corruption, and not least of course they operate on organisational parameters which make a mockery of democratic principle. Somehow the illusion has been fostered, for example, that people who have devoted their lives to clambering to the top of the greasy pole are better qualified to ordain how children should be educated than are the parents and their local committees. So our public prints are loaded with otiose

Page 291 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

speculation about 'national' examination standards and results, and about the content of 'national' educational curricula; meanwhile, in rural areas, large numbers of children are bussed to giant 'comprehensive' schools where they learn about computers and nothing about how to grow food. Local government, instead of being a power in its own right but working in tandem, where necessary, with national government, is now the pawn of the latter, which is making a mess of the whole works.

The concentration of power makes populism inevitableall social movements will regress to ineffectiveness because of their demands for universality

Papworth 6 Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker and founder of the Fourth World Review (John, The Fourth World Review, The ABC's of Politics III,No 138139, pg 4 http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwrp138%26.pdf) A tennis club member can communicate on the clubs concerns with his fellow club member, perhaps in the club room bar or on its notice board; multi-million members of an electorate are dependent on communicating on their common concerns, if at all, through mass newspapers or TV programmes. But the power of such communication is not in the members hands, it is in the hands of those who own or control such means. On the basis of the personal nature of the relationships that prevail, the club member is in a position to exercise a significant measure of influence on its policies and programmes, the ordinary member of a mass electorate has none: If, by excessive wealth or talents, or of oratory or authorship, he can exercise significant influence he is not an ordinary member. In the tennis club the natural leaders and spokespersons communicate with their fellow members by the ordinary force of moral suasion, the member the mass is not a communicator to any significant degree at all, he is a recipient. This means that the moral force of his views inevitably becomes at a discount since they are subservient to the governing, determining and manipulating forces at the centre. These forces control the levers of power in the pursuit of money or power concerns which may be, as commonly they are, at variance with the interests of the citizen or indeed the basic moral concerns of civilisation. The moral implications of this, however carefully disregarded, are frightening; such moral force as may be given leadership in the tennis club will naturally appeal to what is best in people. Where mass leadership may be at stake it can only do so successfully by appealing to the most general propensity; the proportion of the highest common factor gives way to the promotion of the lowest common denominator. The mass society becomes inevitably an embodiment of institutionalised vulgarity. The aff can't solve without the alternative. All reform movements are doomed fail so long as governmental power remains centralizaed. Papworth 5 ( John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the Fourth World Review, Village Democracy) For generations the reformist agenda of policy change has held the stage on the assumption that if enough support can be garnered it will impel the necessary policy changes, meanwhile the general crisis of our civilisation has continued to deepen until today it overshadows the entire human adventure. The reformist agenda, whether for peace, for economic sanity or for much needed changes on many pressing problems is simply a diversion from the guts of the problem. That agenda has failed, and that failure stems from a single cause, that the scale of government or of economic activity has become so large as to be beyond any citizen capacity to exercise the control needed to make it work for the general interest. If we are serious about the need for change we need to recognise the sheer irrelevance of postulating high-minded moral goals when there is no form of power available to achieve them. We need to create those new forms of power, forms which put power where in democratic terms it belongs, in the hands of concerned citizens. The modern experience, and much ancient wisdom, is

Page 292 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

eloquent that for democratic power to be effective it must be locally based in local community hands. To that goal all serious political effort needs to be directed if moves for change are to have
any prospect of success.

Decentralization of power is key to solving the population crisis.

Papworth, Albery, and Sale 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review, Director of the Middlebury Institute, Founder of the institute for Social Inventions(John, Kirpatrick, Nicholas, Common Sense, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf) The largely unconscious biological mechanisms, which control numbers in the animal world were also operative in human societies until quite recent times. They operated on the basis of decisions made consensually (and frequently instinctively) in small groupings. Today there is a need for those responses to be reinforced by a conscious process of reasoning; instead we have largely destroyed the small communities, which were their basis. This is the real cause of the population crisis. No small self-governing community threatened to be swamped by its own numbers would fail to do something to prevent it if it had the power to do so. We declare that the need for base power in our village societies is imperative if the crisis in human numbers is to be resolved. No government of a mass society can solve this problem except by means, which are totalitarian and an assault on human dignity. Community responsibility for community affairs is a precondition for the control of community numbers. It follows that community power is a precondition for community survival.

We can't provide a blueprint for the world of the alternative. Doing so would only further the domination of centralized power.
Papworth, Albery, and Sale 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review, Director of the Middlebury Institute, Founder of the institute for Social Inventions (John, Kirpatrick, Nicholas, Common Sense, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf) To draw up a plan or a blueprint for the creation of a humanscale non-centralised global order would be as foolish as it would be futile. If the principle of the human scale is accepted then clearly each human scale community will be concerned to work out its own way of life, in accordance with its own judgements. Any suggestion of acting in accordance with a centralised plan would be the extension of a disease rather than the application of a remedy. People will only act in accordance with a principle if they understand and accept the principle itself and to that end a major and multifaceted drive to educate and to generally promote the principle of the human scale is now a task of the utmost urgency. While small communities might take sometimes take reprehensible action, their limited size ensures that the scope of negative action will be limited, but the positive action's is not. Papworth 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review (John, The Fourth World Review, The Community Revolution. Nos 109 &110, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwr109%26.pdf ) There is a tragic failure here to grasp some quite elementary factors relating to the political process; that, for example, affairs conducted on a small scale may well produce small-scale horrors, whereas when conducted on a giant scale they produce giant horrors. There is an equal failure to grasp that when affairs are conducted on a small, local scale they are capable of producing, as indeed they have done, glory unlimited in every sphere of human creativity, whereas on a giant, mass scale, the chief orientation of modern life of the last century or more, we have produced the first ugly civilisation in the human record.

Page 293 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Their evidence is biased- the media will use it's control of information to maintain its hold on power
Papworth 5 ( John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the Fourth
World Review, Village Democracy)

Two questions arise here; how can the media avoid using its immense power to cultivate and project the values which sustain its overall quest? How can it avoid conditioning the public consciousness to accept the mores of profit-seeking as a supreme social objective? Life in modern so called developed societies is dominated by the continuous and highly skilled propaganda of advertising in its promotion of an exaggerated emphasis on the acquisition of material goods, and the use of such services as travel, as an ultimate purpose of living. It does this regardless of the social consequences or indeed of any other consequences except its own enrichment. So the non-stop promotion of car ownership will ignore the effects on global warming, its effects on distorting and often destroying social relationships and community structures, on family life, on the deliberate run-down of finite resources such as oil and the consequent impoverishment of future generations, on the high rate of accidents;2 on the distortion of priorities in relation to public rail services, the extension of the working day by car commuting, with its concomitant of stress of mind and body and, not least, the perpetual ordeal of noise, stink and poisoned air suffered by millions who live alongside busy urban roads.

Centralization is being broken down in the status quo-technology allows individuals to reach large audiences
Lee 07 Affiliate of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University [Timothy B. Yochai Benkler and the Libertarian Center. The Cato Institute. 7-19-07. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2007/07/19/yochai-benkler-and-the-libertariancenter/] I found Jonah Goldbergs follow-up contribution particularly interesting. He points out that much of what was wrong with the progressive movement of the early 20th century was due to its infatuation with centralizing institutions that were ascendant at the time: the army, heavy industry, and later, large-scale scientific endeavors like the Manhattan Project. Bigness and centralization were in, and intellectuals believed that the entire country should be governed in a similarly hierarchical fashion. Goldberg thinks liberals will just discard the economic argument for central planning and move on to another one: public health, the environment, whatever. But I wanted to point out that there are also some liberals who are adopting a more appropriately skeptical attitude toward central planning itself. One reason to think the 21st century is going to be more libertarian than the 20th is that the defining technology of our generation, the Internet, is radically decentralizing. After a century in which our cultural and economic lives were dominated by large, vertically-integrated corporations, were entering an era in which decentralization and disintermediation are the dominant trends. Instead of producing components in house, they develop networks of independent suppliers, knit together by sophisticated supply chains. And instead of vertically-integrated media companies like the New York Times and NBC, were increasingly moving toward a world in which writers, musicians, and other creators can reach their audiences directly.

Page 294 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Centralization Good / States Bad**

Furthering the neoliberal agenda justifies genocide and extinction. Santos, Director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, 20 03 (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Collective Suicide?, Publicado na Folha de Sao Paulo em 28 de Marco de 2003, NM, http://www.ces.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php) According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of

indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war
against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the

radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it Federal devolution to the states exacerbates neoliberalism Boyer, Clinical Assistant Professor of Dept. of Science and Technology Studies at Resselaer Polytechnic, 2006
(Kate Boyer, Editorial Board of Antipode, Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space, Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform, NM) Welfare reform has been marked by a downward transfer of decisionmaking power regarding the content

and administration of welfare policy from federal, to state and local governments as well as the private sector (devolution). With this change has also come a shift in the level at which services themselves are provided, such that for- and not-for-profit organizations as well as faith-based groups now compete with the public sector for funds (Boyer, Lawrence and Wilson 2001). Devolution expresses the goals of a broader neoliberal agenda by enabling both inter-locality competition and, especially, privatization . By transferring some of the responsibilities that were once under the auspices of the federal government downward and outward to the private sector, devolution can be seen as an expression of hollowing out some of the responsibilities of the federal government under neoliberalism described by Jessop (1999). Devolutionary policies can lead to a full blown neoliberal shift Williams and Mooney, Prof of Social Justice at Keele University and Senior Social Policy Lecturer at the Open University in Scotland, 2008.
(Charlotte Williams, Decentring Social Policy? Devolution and the Discipline of Social Policy: A Commentary, NM, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?
type=1&fid=1897768&jid=JSP&volumeId=37&issueId=03&aid=1897760)

We are nonetheless faced with considering both the tensions and possibilities devolution portends for the discipline: to reflect it uncritically as an exercise in the technocratic pragmatism of the neo-liberal agenda is one possibility, or to engage with it
as part of the expanding the social policy imaginary approach (Lewis, 2000). We contend that

devolution represents a potential paradigmatic shift for the discipline if we engage with it as a new dimension in the rethinking story of contestation, conflicts and struggles over welfare arrangements, delivery and outcomes, through the forging of new arenas of analysis, new methodologies and concepts in a multi-nation, neo-liberal UK.

Page 295 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Policies passed to the state reinforce neoliberal ideologies UAAR, Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, 1997
(Volume 48, State Devolution in America: Implications For a Diverse Society edited by Lynn A. Staeheli, Janet E. Kodras, and Colin Flint, NM)

local states are left with less control to position themselves within a volatile global economy, even as the national stale passes off additional responsibility for them to attempt this (Peck & Tickell, 1994>. Devolution of the national state does open new "regulatory spates" for local initiative, and the geographic consequences of this particular mode of restructuring will reflect the relative capacities of local states to respond, as discussed above. But these regulatory spaces will be constrained in all places by competitive pressures imposed by global capital and reinforced by neoliberalism in the national slate
First,
(Peck, 1993). The accelerating global mobility of capital accentuates fine distinctions between place* (Harvey. 1989) and exerts "economic discipline- on locale* to conform to its demands (Harvey. 1985). The ensuing rivalry for investment among local states will require reducing the regulatory role previously played by government, while the taxes that underwrite governmental assistance will he kept to a minimum to ensure the area's boundaries. National stales increasingly operate within a global economy that they are unable to control (Clark & Dear, 1984) as nation-based fordist production, regulated by the Keynesian welfare stale, yields to globally extensive posttordisr production, emancipated through deregulation by the neoliberal state (Jessop. 13; Peck & Tickell, 1994). The neoliberal restructuring of the national slate, taking the particular forms of devolution and privatization in the United Slates, passes greater responsibility onto heal states, which are even less capable of exerting power within a globalized economy. Finally, despite the prospect of migration for some individuals, civil society remains the most place-bound and locally dependent- due to material, familial, and emotional tics to community (Bey non & Hudson, 1993; Cox & Mair. 1988). David Harvey (1989) nails the point; "Labor power has to go home every

interconnected trendsglobalization of capital, devolution and privatization of the state, and localization of civil societyshift power increasingly toward capital (Offe. 1985; Peck, 1995;
night" (p. 19) These

Storper & Walker, 1989), an asymmetrical power relation termed "glo-calization" by Swyngcdouw (1992).

Devolution to the states reinforces low-income disparities Boyer, Clinical Assistant Professor of Dept. of Science and Technology Studies at Resselaer Polytechnic, 2006
(Kate Boyer, Editorial Board of Antipode, Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space, Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform, NM)

In spite of the benefits devolution might offer as a laboratory for policy innovation at the state level, there are concerns about the potential for the downward transfer of decision-making power to intensify inequality of access to opportunity between different places (Cashin 1999; Karger 1991). Benefit levels vary widely between states, and are not calibrated to cost-of-living differences between states or between different areas within a state . We also find
considerable unevenness in what it means to be on welfare from state to state. As research from the Applied Research Center suggests, as of 2001 welfare recipients in Minnesota were allowed to earn

wages to supplement cash benefits, while clients in California were sanctioned and even imprisoned for doing the same (Gordon 2001). In this sense devolution is of a piece with neoliberal polices and practices which work to fix disenfranchised peoples in place to their detriment. According to Andrew Herod and Melissa Wright, such policies: localize poor peoples at a supposed time of growing planetary spatial integration of capital flows, goods and services, information, and wealthy people. Apparently, despite the one-world rhetoric of neoliberalism, some people face tremendous obstacles in linking their worlds and becoming fully-fledged citizens of the global village about which we hear so much (Herod and Wright 2002:12) These critiques suggest that devolution has the potential to exacerbate, rather than redress, gendered, racialized, and place-based disparities in access to social and economic opportunity. Devolution to the states destroys political influence for the low-income Winston, 2003
(Pamela Winston, Welfare Policymaking in the States The Devil in Devolution, NM, p. 3) The 1996 welfare law raises additional questions about our commitment to political selfdetermination. Devolution of welfare policy also may be making it more difficult for poor families

Page 296 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

or groups that represent them to have a role in shaping the policies that most affect them if, in
fact, it is harder for them to participate effectively in the states and localities than in the nation's capital. Americans commonly support the idea that parents should have a voice in

education policy, old people should have influence on the shape of Medicare and Social Security, and business organizations should effectively express their views about regulation. These groups
may not always get what they want, but it is regarded as entirely legitimatein fact, necessary that they have a role in the policymaking process in our pluralist system. If the effect of

devolution, however, is to send welfare policymaking to political spheres where representatives of poor families are weakest, it will further diminish their political voice. Passing jurisdiction to the states increases governmental control over individuals Peck, phD at University of Manchester, 2001
(Jamie Peck, Workfare States, NM, Guilford Press)

The political implications of this are nontrivial. While the politics of workfare advocacy have assumed an
increasingly aggressive, generic, and transnational form, for the most part anti-workfare politics remain defensive, particularized, and localized. Indeed, explicit objectives around the weakening, division, and localization of sources of political opposition are often reflected in welfare-restructuring strategies. It seems that once the national

defenses of welfarism have been breached, the path is opened decisively to downscale residual welfare and emergent workfare functions. This involves reregulation not only at the state and local scales but also at that of the individual bodies of welfare recipientsgiven the preoccupation in U.S. reforms, for example, with regulating the reproductive as well as the productive lives of welfare recipients, through such measures as the denial of aid to teen parents, "man in the house" rules, leamfare, family caps, and so forth. This downloading of risks and regulator)' responsibilities to the level of the individual is also evident in workfares laborregulatory functions, because as the epitome of supply-side policymaking it seeks to make a virtue of individualized, "flexible" labor relations. The ideology that frames these programs, indeed, is rooted in the notion of independence through wage labor. Devolutionary policies increase the stigmatization placed on the poor Winston, 2003
(Pamela Winston, Welfare Policymaking in the States The Devil in Devolution, NM, p. 3) The 1996 welfare law raises additional questions about our commitment to political self-determination. Devolution of welfare policy also may be making it more difficult for poor familiesor groups that represent them to have a role in shaping the policies that most affect them if, in fact, it is harder for them to participate effectively in the states and localities than in the nation's capital. Americans commonly support the idea that parents should have a voice in education policy, old people should have influence on the shape of Medicare and Social Security, and business organizations should effectively express their views about regulation. These groups may not always get what they want, but it is regarded as entirely legitimatein fact, necessarythat they have a role in the policymaking process in our pluralist system. If the effect of devolution, however, is to send welfare policymaking to

political spheres where representatives of poor families are weakest, it will further diminish their political voice. Certainly poor people are no longer regarded as a group with legitimate political grievances , as they were briefly during the New Deal and the Great Society. Most Americans do not appear to think a great deal about poor people, and when they do, it often is with pity or disapproval. Neither, however, are
Americans in general likely to be entirely comfortable with the prospect that in a range of jurisdictions the perspectives of low-income families may have virtually no influence on the design of policies that are vital to their well-being."

Devolutionary policies inherently bring destabilization and kills solvency Peck, phD at University of Manchester, 2001

Page 297 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

(Jamie Peck, Workfare States, NM, Guilford Press)

The mainsireaming of workfarist discourse and practice, of course, hardly ever occurs by way of quantum shifts in policy. Instead, change is typically more incremental and more complex. The course of workfare politics has run differently in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as powerful legacies of path-dependency remain alongside revealing convergences in rhetoric and practice. So this is not, nor is it ever likely to be, a story of simple convergence toward a unitary workfarist model, but an uneven process of mutually referential adjustment. In this context, PRWORA retains a talismanic significance, as a truly radical moment of reform. As Rodgers (2000: 5) puts it, " PRWORA completely changes the philosophy

of welfare policy." While this may understate some important continuities with past U.S. practice, it quite correctly draws attention to the potentially phase-shifting consequences of work enforcement by way of devolution to the states . The variegated and competitive local reform dynamic that this entails threatens to leave the postwelfare United States in a perpetual state of destabilization and ex perimentation. This, in turn, facilitates a continuation of the cafeteria-style reform process established under the waiver regime, broadening and deepening the workfarist repertoire and creating the basis for further rounds of fast-policy transfers . Facilitated by an increasingly technocratic
and essentialist evaluation literature, plus the earnest endeavors of consultants, this fast-policy regime has taken on an internationaland in an important sense interlocalcharacter (see Jessop and Peck, 2000; Peck and Theodore, 2001).

State policies are inefficient implementation differences Peck, phD at University of Manchester, 2001
(Jamie Peck, Workfare States, NM, Guilford Press)

local political struggles usually reflectthough are not determined bythe local form of work-fare strategies . Where workfare slots are located in the public
There is an important sense, then, in which sector, the strategy is exposed to the threat of unionization; where workfare relies on nonprofit-sector placements, then the obvious line of resistance is to choke off the supply of places through social-sector campaigning and lobbying; where workfare is oriented to wage employment in the exter nal labor marketin many ways its tendential formresistance is rendered difficult due to the diffuse and individualized nature of this strategy, but may take the form of boycotts, unionization drives, or research-based campaigns. At the very least, different workfare strategies call for different forms of local political response; they are also

differentially vulnerable to disruption, reform, and implementation failure at the local level, depending on their (inherently unpredictable) interactions with local political, economic, and institutional structures. And, of course, the geography of oppositional politics also reflects the uneven terrain of preexising political forces and resources at the local level . In Baltimore, for example, responses to workfare
have been shaped by previous patterns of activism around the city's "Living Wage" campaign.

Devolution inherently makes policies less equal UAAR, Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, 1997
(Volume 48, State Devolution in America: Implications For a Diverse Society edited by Lynn A. Staeheli, Janet E. Kodras, and Colin Flint, NM)

Devolution refers to the transfer, or decentralization, of government functions from higher to lower levels of the federal hierarchy. As a transformation internal to the state that alters the scale of
activities, devolution redefines government responsibilities for regulating civil society, transfers authority across levels and administrative units of government, redraws the map of government costs and benefits, and changes accessibility and entitlement to government services. In shift ing responsibilities and resources to lower tiers in the federal hierarchy, the national government still retains authority to set the direction for change, as "this complex subnational reconstitution of state power and regulatory structures is occurring within a set of political, discursive, and institutional parameters established by (or mediated by) the nation-state" (Peck, 1996, p. 3). Devolution is an inherently spatial

process of state changefirst, because the American federal structure is a hierar chical organization of territorially demarcated governments, and second, because the uneven development of different local states generates dissimilar initiatives in response to devolution according to local needs, perceptions, and abilities.

Page 298 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Enforcing neoliberalism causes endless wars Hardt and Negri, Professor of Comp. Lit. at Duke and Anarchist Intellectual, 2004,
(Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, NM, p.176-178

Big government actually never went away, but certainly it has become 'more clearly evident in recent years, especially since September 11, 2001 .' The various military and legal projects for global security led primarily by the United States since that date, for example, are oriented in part toward stabilizing and guaranteeing the global economic order. In some respects, after September 11 the private forms of authority over the global economy,
such as the new Lex mercatona, along with all the mechanisms or international trade and the macroeconomic equilibria that.make them possi-, J>le, went into crisis. The dominant nation-

states had to intervene to guarantee all levels of economic interactionsfinancial transactions, insurance relationships, air transportation, and so forth . The crisis gave a
quick reminder of just how much capital needs a sovereign authority standing behind it, a truth that rises up into view every time there are serious cracks in the market order and hierarchy. The big

government that guarantees market order must be in pan a military power. Capital occasionally has to call on an army to force open unwilling markets and stabilize existing ones. In the early nineteenth century, for example, British capital needed the British military
to open up the Chinese market with its victory in the Opium 'War. This is not to say, however, that all military actions are explained by specific economic interests. It is not adequate to think, for example, that the U.S.-led military ac-i dons in recent decadesAfghanistan and Iraq, much less Somalia, Haiti, and Panamawere primarily directed at a specific economic advantage, such as access to cheap oil. Such specific goals are secondary. The primary link between military action and economic

interest exists only at a much more general level of analysis, abstract from any particular national interest. Military force must guarantee the conditions for the functioning of the world market, guaranteeing, that is, the divisions of labor and power of the global political body. This effort is paradoxical, however, because the relationship between security and profits cuts two ways. On one hand, the deployment of state military power is necessary to guarantee the security of the global markets but, on the other hand, the security regimes tend to raise national borders and obstruct the global circuits of production and trade that had been the basis of some of the greatest profits . The United
States and other military powers must discover a way to make the interests of security and economic profits compatible and complementary. We should be clear that the newly prominent need for a big government to support the economy, especially since September 11, does not represent in any way a return to Keyncsianism. Under Keynesianism the nation-state supported the stability and growth of the economy by providing mechanisms to mediate the conflicts and interests of the working class and in the process expanded the social demand for production. The forms of sovereignty we see now, on the contrary, reside completely on the side of capital without any mediatory mechanisms to negotiate its conflictual relationship with labor. It is interesting in this regard how ambivalent the position of capital is when risk is the dominant characteristic of economic activity and development, and indeed of all social interaction. The world is a dangerous place, and the role of big government and military

intervention is to reduce risks and provide security while maintaining the pres ent order.> / W ? 8 Neoliberalism makes poverty inevitable Hardt and Negri, Professor of Comp. Lit. at Duke and Anarchist Intellectual, 2004,
(Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, NM, p.277-280)

After recognizing the extent of poverty in the world today, one has to recognize also its uneven geographical distribution. In each nation-state, poverty is distributed

Page 299 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

unequally along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. In many countries throughout the world, for example, there are significantly higher rates of poverty among women than men, and many ethnic minorities, such as the indigenous populations throughout the Americas, have significantly higher rates of poverty. Local and national variations in the rate of
poverty, however, are dwarfed by the inequalities of wealth and Dovcrtv on a global scale. South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa account for about 70 percent of the global population living on less than a dollar a day, up from about 60 percent ten yean ago. The average income of the richest 20 countries is thirtyseven times greater than the average in the poorest twentya gap that has doubled in the past forty years.68 Even when these figures are adjusted for purchasing powersince some basic commodities cost more in rich countries than in poorthe gap is astonishing. The construction of the global market

and the global integration of the national economies has not brought us together but driven us apart, exacerbating the plight of the poor. There are millions of specific expressions across the world of indignation and generosity with respect to die poor, often through courageous ^crs of charity and self-sacrifice. Nonprofit, and religious charity organizations provide enormous assistance for those in need, but they cannot change the system that produces and reproduces poverty. It is impressive, in fact, how so many people who begin in volunteer charity work pass to activism and protest against the economic system.fry. Some protests against the systemic reproduction of poverty, such as the Jubilee Movement International, focus on the fact that foreign debt obligations serve as a mechanism that keeps the poor countries poor and their populations hungry.69 It is clear that no matter what economic policies they enact the poorest countries cannot repay their current foreign debts or even keep up with interest payments, perpetuating an inescapable cycle of misery. Furthermore, many claim that these debts were incurred originally through dubious or illegitimate means. It is always the same story: debt serves as a legal mechanism of enslavement.70 The difference here is that this logic of bondage is applied not merely to the individual indentured worker or even to a specific racial group or indigenous population (where the assumption of a civilizing mission is the basis of debt) but rather to entire nations. ; In more general terms many economic grievances against the global system arc based on the assumption that the inequalities and injustices of the global economy result primarily from the fact that political powers are less and less able to regulate economic activity. Global capital, the argument goes, since its movement and reach extend well beyond the limits of national space, cannot be effectively controlled by states. Many labor unions, particularly in the dominant countries, protest the fact that the mere threat of the mobility of capitaldie threat, for example, of moving production and jobs to another country where state regulations anoVor labor costs are lower and more favorablecan convince states to abandon or temper their own regulatory powers. States conform to and even anticipate the needs of

capital for fear of being subordinated in the global economic system. This creates a son of race to the bottom among nation-states in which the interests of labor and society as a whole take a backseat to those of capital. Neoliberalisrn is generally the name given to this form of state economic policy. Neoliberalism, as we claimed in part 2, is not really a regime of unregulated capital but rather a form of state regulator that best facilitates the global movements and profit of capital. Once again in the era of neoliberalism, it might be helpful to think of the state as the executive committee assigned the task of guaranteeing the long-term wellbring of "collective capital The fundamental task of the neoliberal state, fron this perspective, like all forms of the capitalist state, Is to regulate "capitalist development in the interest of global capital itself. Even single policies risk a huge ideological shift empirically proven Williams and Mooney, Prof of Social Justice at Keele University and Senior Social Policy Lecturer at the Open University in Scotland, 2008.
(Charlotte Williams, Decentring Social Policy? Devolution and the Discipline of Social Policy: A Commentary, NM, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?
type=1&fid=1897768&jid=JSP&volumeId=37&issueId=03&aid=1897760)

There may be considerable disagreement as to the extent to which devolution represents a significant departure in terms of divergent policymaking . It is a simple
enough task to point to policy differences such as free personal care for the sick and elderly or the student fees policy in Scotland, or free prescriptions and the abolition of school league tables in Wales. Some would argue the differences are marginal to the overarching continuities ensured by Labour-dominated administrations (at least prior to the May 2007 elections) across the devolved

Page 300 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

polities, and the quiet manipulation of the policy strings by civil servants in Whitehall (Hudson and Lowe, 2004). It is clearly important to view devolution within the context of the New Labour modernising project and as a product of its wider socio-economic and neo-liberal agendas. The devolved Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland are part of this mission. However, it can be

argued that the devolved nations open up new sites of struggle and contestation, new processes and practices which challenge the ideological and geo-political boundaries of the British Welfare State, and this encapsulates a significant shift which impacts on the central concerns of the discipline . Interestingly, Clarke, writing within a
transnational frame, draws our attention to these very limits of neo-liberalism in practice as it forms an interface with particular geopolitical and cultural entities, when he says this philosophy may encounter diverse forms of resistance and refusals to go with the flow(2004: 9).

Page 301 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile
**Separation of Powers**

Collapse of constitutional balance of power risks tyranny and reckless warmongering Redish Professor of Law and Public Policy and Cisar Law Clerk 1991 Martin, at Northwestern, Elizabeth, at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, 41 Duke L.J. 449, p. 472-3
In any event, the political history of which the Framers were aware tends to confirm that quite often concentration of political power ultimately leads to the loss of liberty. Indeed, if we have begun to take the value of separation of powers for granted, we need only look to modern American history to remind ourselves about both the general vulnerability of representative government, and the direct correlation between the concentration of political power and the threat to individual liberty. The widespread violations of individual rights that took place when President Lincoln assumed an inordinate level of power, for example, are well documented. Arguably as egregious were the threats to basic freedoms that arose during the Nixon administration, when the power of the executive branch reached what are widely deemed to have been intolerable levels. Although in neither instance did the executive's usurpations of power ultimately degenerate into complete and irreversible tyranny, the reason for that may well have been the resilience of our political traditions, among the most important of which is separation of powers itself. In any event, it would be political folly to be overly smug about the security of either representative government or individual liberty. Although it would be all but impossible to create an empirical proof to demonstrate that our constitutional tradition of separation of powers has been an essential catalyst in the avoidance of tyranny, common sense should tell us that the simultaneous division of power and the creation of interbranch checking play important roles toward that end. To underscore the point, one need imagine only a limited modification of the actual scenario surrounding the recent Persian Gulf War. In actuality, the war was an extremely popular endeavor, thought by many to be a politically and morally justified exercise. But imagine a situation in which a President, concerned about his failure to resolve significant social and economic problems at home, has callously decided to engage the nation in war, simply to defer public attention from his domestic failures. To be sure, the President was presumably elected by a majority of the electorate, and may have to stand for reelection in the future. However, at this particular point in time, but for the system established by separation of powers, his authority as Commander in Chief to engage the nation in war would be effectively dictatorial. Because the Constitution reserves to the arguably even more representative and accountable Congress the authority to declare war, the Constitution has attempted to prevent such misuses of power by the executive. It remains unproven whether any governmental structure other than one based on a system of separation of powers could avoid such harmful results. In summary, no defender of separation of powers can prove with certitude that, but for the existence of separation of powers, tyranny would be the inevitable outcome. But the question is whether we wish to take that risk, given the obvious severity of the harm that might result. Given both the relatively limited cost imposed by use of separation of powers and the great severity of the harm sought to be avoided, one should not demand a great showing of the likelihood that the feared harm would result. For just as in the case of the threat of nuclear war, no one wants to be forced into the position of saying, "I told you so."

Lack of separation of powers causes nuclear war Forrester Professor @ Hastings College of the Law Ray, 1989 University of California August The George Washington Law Review 57 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1636 Presidential Wars in the Nuclear Age: An Unresolved Problem.
Abramson, Wherever President Goes, the Nuclear War 'Football' is Beside Him, Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1981, at 10, col. 1 (copyright, 1981, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by permission). On the basis of this report, the startling fact is that one man [person] alone has the ability to start a nuclear war. A basic theory--if not the basic theory of our Constitution--is that concentration of power in any one person, or one group, is dangerous to [humankind]mankind. The Constitution, therefore, contains a strong system of checks and balances, starting with the separation of powers between the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The message is that no one of them is safe with unchecked power.

Page 302 of 303

Julian Switala Part I

Cant Touch This

Mega LD Backfile

Yet, in what is probably the most dangerous governmental power ever possessed, we find the potential for world destruction lodged in the discretion of one person. As a result of public indignation aroused by the Vietnam disaster, in which tens of thousands lost their lives in military actions initiated by a succession of Presidents, Congress in 1973 adopted, despite presidential veto, the War Powers Resolution. Congress finally asserted its checking and balancing duties in relation to the making of presidential wars.

Page 303 of 303