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Animal Rights

Theory File

Ridge JW

A. Interpretation: the affirmative must specify which animal rights justice is recognizing. B. Violation: (Make links from CX & AC) C. Reasons to Prefer: 1. Key Ground a. Disadvantage Ground - without a clear idea of what rights the affirmative is defending, they can link out of any disadvantages I make. Disadvantage ground is key to fairness because it is the only way to independently generate offense off the affirmative case. Meaning, this limits my access towards the ballot and thus, limits my ability to win the round. b. Philosophical Ground if we do not know what specific rights the affirmative defending, we cannot make specific ethical objections to the affirmative case. This is especially important for fairness because this resolution is hinged upon philosophy and both of these link to education because these destroy substantive clash. 2. Strategy Skew a. The affirmative can become a moving target because they shift their advocacy in the 1AR. This means I cannot predict what advocacy that the debater will be running in the 1AR. This violates fairness because formulate a cogent. b. This means that that I can only make general indicts to the AC because I will not be able to make specific answers to the AC. This limits my ability to access legitimate argumentation that is in the topic literature. This makes the round unfair because I will not have the ability to access the best argumentation and make specific responses to the affirmative case. D. Impact/Voters 1. Education a. Education is inherently important to debate because it gives debaters skills that can 2 be utilized outside of rounds. Strait and Wallace explain, Education is the most important thing any debater will receive from the activity. Regardless of rounds won or lost, knowledge gained from years of researching and arguing about different issues will give individuals a great deal of information. Debate also educates students about how to properly construct arguments, how to speak in public, how to analyze arguments and quickly think of substantive responses, all of which are tools that can be applied in any aspect of life outside of debate. The more debaters who think they can win rounds by avoiding the topic, the less educational value received in each round and in the activity as a whole. b. Education is comparative and has value even if it lacks a threshold. Marginal Increases in education have intrinsic value in themselves as they instill both knowledge and skills in participants.

Animal Rights

Theory File

Ridge JW

2. Fairness a. The role of the judge is to evaluate which debater did the better debating. If the round is inherently biased toward one debater, the judge cannot fulfill his/her role because any issue a debater is winning on the flow couldnt be definitively attributed to his/her ability as a debater but could rather be an effect of a structural advantage. Because unfairness disables the judges ability to fulfill his/her purpose, issues of fairness must be adjudicated prior to the substance of the debate. b. Many rules in debate such as equal total speech times, the binding nature of crossex, and the inability to make new arguments demonstrate that the activity values fairness. In order for debate to be internally consistent, we must apply these norms and valuations to other areas of debate. Thus, fairness must be granted weight when evaluating competing claims.

And, Theory is a matter of competing interpretations, not reasonability. 1. Competing interpretations creates an incentive to promote fair debate because it forces debaters to defend their interpretations; defending the interpretation is the only way to generate offense on theory, so debaters have incentives to run advocacies consistent with the most fair interpretation, because otherwise they would lose the theory debate. 2. There is no bright-line for reasonability because we can never know at what point we are reasonable or unreasonable; the line which defines reasonability is always going to be arbitrary because there are no accepted norms for reasonability in debate, those norms are created by the debater trying to be reasonable. This demands judge intervention. Competing interpretations provide a way to evaluate reasonability because we can weigh between interpretations. Rules establish what is reasonable and unreasonable; the fact that your interpretation is worse in terms of fairness and education, then it is unreasonable. Furthermore, drop the debater, not the argument. Potential abusive is just as bad as actual abusive.

The only way to stop the abusive practice is to drop the debater. Dropping the argument makes the abusive practice more prevalent. Doug Sigel explains,
[Sigel, Doug. The Punishment Theory: Illegitimate Styles and Theories as Voting Issues Northwestern University. 1984]

Competitive equity is also restored by voting on punishment. Abusive tactics are employed to gain strategic advantage: conditional counterplans , for example, imply a geometric increase in the burdens placed upon the affirmative. Incoherent delivery is particularly unfair because a debater can never be sure if the bits and pieces of a speech he understood were the same bits and pieces the judge understood. The way to restore competitive equity is to vote against teams guilty of disrupting the natural competitive opportunity that existed in the absence of abusive tactics. To merely drop-out bad debate practices is to encourage their use--teams will run multiple counterplans, counterwarrants and the like and hope to draw lots of attacks on them to waste the maximum time possible, allowing victory on the other issues. It seems particularly unjust for a team to have to answer multiple counterplans, counterwarrants, and the like and to end up losing on topicality. Only by voting to punish teams employing tactics that are shown to be injurious to debate--in terms of education and fairness- can competitive equity be maintained.

And, rectifying the problem within the context of debate as an activity requires using the ballot to reject the unfair debater, not just the argument.

Animal Rights

Theory File

Ridge JW

Jessica Kulynych writes: (Kulynych, JESSICA, Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and postmodern participation Polity, Winter 1997 v30 n2)

Informal participation must not only indicate when problems need to be addressed, it must also provide an "effective problematization" of those issues. As Habermas argues, from the perspective of democratic theory, the public sphere must, in addition, amplify the pressure of problems, that is, not only detect and identify problems but also convincingly and influentially thematize them, furnish them with possible solutions, and dramatize them in such a way that they are taken up and dealt with by parliamentary complexes.

Thus, negate.

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