The standard is maximizing the protection of rights.
1) Policymaking is the hallmark of the critical thinking skills that allow us to become more
effective real world activists.
Keller, (Whittaker, and Burke, Thomas E., Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago, James K., professor of Social Work, and Tracy K., doctoral student School of Social
Work, “Student debates in policy courses: promoting policy practice skills and knowledge through active learning,” Journal of Social Work Education, Spr/Summer)
Policy practice encompasses social workers' "efforts to influence the development, enactment,
implementation, or assessment
of social policies" (Jansson, 1994, p. 8). Effective policy practice involves analytic
activities, such as defining issues, gathering data, conducting research, identifying and prioritizing policy options, and
creating policy proposals (Jansson, 1994). It also involves persuasive activities intended to influence opinions and outcomes, such as discussing and debating issues,
organizing coalitions and task forces, and providing testimony. According to Jansson (1984, pp. 57-58), social workers rely upon five fundamental skills when pursuing policy practice activities:
value-clarification skills for identifying and assessing the underlying values inherent in policy positions; conceptual skills for identifying and evaluating the relative merits of different policy options;
interactional skills for interpreting the values and positions of others and conveying one's own point of view in a convincing manner; political
skills for developing coalitions and
developing effective strategies and position-taking skills for recommending, advocating, and defending a particular
policy.
These policy practice skills reflect the hallmarks of critical thinking. The central activities of critical thinking are
[through] identifying and challenging underlying assumptions, exploring alternative
ways of thinking and acting, and arriving at commitments after a period of questioning, analysis, and reflection.
And, the government’s obligation is to its citizens.
Kennan, (Morality and Foreign Policy George F. Kennan From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1985/86 George F. Kennan is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Copyright ©
1985 by George F. Kennan.)
Second, let us recognize that the functions, commitments and moral obligations of governments are not the same as those of the individual.
Its
Government’s is an agent, not a principal.
primary obligation is to the interests of the national society it represents, not to the
moral impulses that individual elements of that society may experience. No more than the attorney vis-à-vis the client, nor the doctor vis-àvis the patient, can government attempt to insert itself into the consciences of those whose interests it represents. Let me explain.
government has to concern itself
people.
The interests of the national society for which
are basically those of its military security, the integrity of its political life and the well-being of its
These needs have no moral quality. They arise from the very existence of the national
state in question and from the status of national sovereignty it enjoys.
Policymaking dictates util as the only ethical theory of the state—even if your framework is true,
the state couldn’t act that way.
Woller, (Gary, Economics Professor at BYU, “Policy Currents,” June, http://apsapolicysection.org/vol7_2/72.pdf)
Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's expense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy
must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such justification cannot simply be assumed by invoking some a priori higher-order moral principle.
to a priori
moral
Appeals
principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies
inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the public in
any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers,
the policymakers' duty to the public interest
requires them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the
overall advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based [other] ethical systems have severe
practical limitations as a basis for public policy. 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
[reasonable assurance] 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.
This roleplaying is an independent reason to theoretically prefer my framework as it is the only thing we
can take from debate that can be applicable in the pragmatic world. All other philosophical thought
doesn’t matter when the timer stops as only important decisions in the state are made through util. Judges
have an obligation to endorse the most educational practices with the ballot. Just like a teacher would not
accept a paper that was plagiarized or had lots of spelling errors, judges shouldn’t accept things that don’t
maximize education.
A. Climate change is higher than ever and is caused by fossil-fuels.
Obama’s about to give the EPA the go ahead on new emissions regulations
that are consistent with international law promises, but Obama needs
political security to apprehend backlash.
Davenport 1-11 (Coral [is the energy and environment correspondent for National Journal.
Prior to joining National Journal in 2010, Davenport covered energy and environment for
Politico, and before that, for Congressional Quarterly. In 2010, she was a fellow with the Metcalf
Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting] “Obama Faces Dilemma on ‘Mother of all’
Climate-Change Regulations” The National Journal, Jan 11, 2013, MG)
On the night he won reelection, President Obama told a cheering crowd, “We want our children to live in an America that isn’t …
threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” He has since said that climate change will be one of the top three
priorities of his second term. This week, Obama heard a wailing siren warning him to stick to his [warming] pledge: On Monday, the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2012 was by far the hottest year on record in the
contiguous U.S. It was also
the nation’s second-most-extreme year for destructive weather events, with 11
new draft report by 13 U.S. federal agencies
concluded that rising temperatures caused by fossil fuel emissions have directly
contributed to increased wildfires, the spread of insect-transmitted disease, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and
decreasing water supply across the U.S. Scientists said the evidence is unequivocal that the heat and catastrophic
weather are linked to climate change caused by fossil-fuel pollution—and that without governmental action to stop that pollution,
worse destruction is on the way. But Obama’s chances of working with Congress on any kind of initiative seem
dubious at best. His last effort collapsed in 2010. The White House is not without weapons, however. Under
the terms of a Supreme Court ruling and the nation’s clean-air laws, the Environmental Protection Agency is
required to issue a regulation that will force existing industrial polluters, such as coal-fired power plants
and oil refineries, to slash their emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. The rule could
have a profound environmental impact by reducing the nation’s global-warming pollutants by up to
20 percent. The question the administration is grappling with is when to roll out the rule. The new
limits will ignite raging political opposition from the nation’s most powerful fossil-fuel interests and likely lead to
disasters sustaining $1 billion each in economic losses. On Friday, a
the shutdown of many of the dirtiest coal plants, possibly costing jobs in the process. It will also be met with an avalanche of efforts
by industry and lawmakers to overturn it, either in Congress or in the courts. “In terms of actual real emissions, this is the mother
of all climate rules,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of the advocacy group Clean Air Watch. The industry agrees. “If EPA
were to set a program for existing sources with fairly stringent standards and a fairly short timeline, the only way to comply is to shut
down coal units, and that would be hugely disruptive,” said John McManus, vice president of environmental services for American
Electric Power, a large coal-burning utility. Last April, Obama’s EPA proposed a rule to limit carbon pollution from new, rather than
existing, power plants. That rule, which is due to be finalized this April, also sparked industry grousing, but it won’t have an
immediate impact on polluters. It requires power companies to build low-polluting plants in the future but doesn’t affect how polluters
do business today. The Obama administration has sat on the rule affecting existing polluters for months to
avoid issuing a potential job-killer in an election year. That excuse is now gone. And advocates
know it. This week, in a rare show of unity, 70 environmental organizations sent a letter to the White House, insisting that Obama
has “the authority under existing law to achieve urgently needed reductions in the carbon pollution that is disrupting our climate and
damaging our health.” On Friday, 150,000 small businesses sent Obama a letter urging him to use his executive authority to enact
climate regulations on existing polluters. Environmental groups hope the State of the Union address will offer a clear signal on what
concrete steps Obama intends to take next. “We’re looking for the president to clearly indicate that EPA will put forward something
on coal plants as the biggest polluter,” said Dan Lashof, director of the climate and clean-air program for the National Resources
Defense Council. They may have to remain patient. EPA is not likely to offer such an explosive proposal until after budget and debtceiling standoffs are resolved, and the White House would ideally like to see the economy in better shape before introducing the
most restrictive regulation on the energy industry to date. But the president doesn’t have the luxury of time. The
rest of the world is awaiting action from Washington. At a 2009 United Nations summit, Obama
signed an accord pledging that the U.S. would reduce its carbon pollution 17 percent by
2020. And in 2015, the nations of the world are scheduled to come together to sign a landmark, binding global treaty
to cut carbon emissions enough to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change. There is no way, experts say, that
the U.S. can meet its existing climate pledge, let alone sign on with any credibility to a future global treaty,
without either a new climate law from Congress or new EPA rules on existing power plants. And if the United
States—historically, the largest global-warming polluter—fails to show it can meet its climate pledge, there’s no
reason to expect the rest of the world’s nations to live up to their obligations. “The new regulations on existing
plants are going to be essential for the U.S. to meet its commitment internationally,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate
and energy program at the World Resources Institute, a think tank. “If the U.S. is seen as not acting, then other countries can hide
behind the U.S. It will make it very difficult for the U.S. to have any credibility or influence.” That’s Obama’s choice, and it isn’t an
easy one: Risk damaging the fragile economy and outraging a powerful industry, or risk the collapse of a treaty that could help
change the world. It’s one that the White House will be wrestling with for months to come.
B. Shift in criminal justice policy kills political capital for five reasons.
Tridnick 12 (Richard [Oxford Jurisprudence graduate] “Why Won’t the Candidates Talk About
Prisons” article-3.com, Oct 17, 2012, MG)
1) It’s [Criminal Justice policy is] politically toxic. Any move to alter the current tough stance on
criminal justice is inevitably viewed as being ‘soft on crime’, regardless of how much sense a new policy
might make or how much it might reduce crime in the long-run. No politician, especially one running in a race as close as the
current match-up, wants to be seen as ‘soft on crime’. For Republicans, “the party of law and order”, it
would be sacrilege to even suggest a change in policy. For Democrats, especially Obama, the aim appears to
be to avoid looking “weak and liberal” and avoid alienating middle-class white voters. In addition, it lacks appeal — few voters (read
‘people likely to vote in swing states’) care about the issue as they perceive that it does not affect them and it requires hard choices
to be made. 2) People don’t like to have to think about it. This relates to the point above about having to make hard
choices, but there is more to it. By its very nature, criminal justice is difficult and unpleasant to think about and so
most people shy away from it — who wants to think about prison and criminals when there’s the new series of Homeland? The
majority of people will have no interaction with the criminal justice system, especially not on the ‘wrong’ side of it, and so they shut
their eyes, pretend they cannot see the problem and hope it will go away. The politicians and media know this and cater to the
demands of their audiences. 3) Changes would require the states and the Federal government to
work together. This shouldn’t be a deal-breaker, but it adds more complexity to an already difficult area. Both states
and the federal government maintain prisons and any systematic attempt to reduce the prison population
would require co-operation and negotiation between all the parties. In gridlocked Washington, this
would be unlikely even if the topic was not so politically explosive. 4) Criminal justice policy is hard. Really hard.
What should be the moral basis for imprisoning criminals — Deterrence? Rehabilitation? Proportionate punishment? Public
protection? Retribution? Economic reality? Most countries follow a mix of these, but a different balance of the justifications can alter
dramatically the policy pursued in a particular jurisdiction. Agreeing on the precise balance is something fraught
with potential for disagreement, even among those who have no political concerns, like academics. On top of this, of
course, is the fact that a different weighting of the justifications can have real cost implications — for example, both rehabilitation
programmes and capital punishment are hugely expensive. 5) The overlap with drug policy does not help.
Realistically the only way the USA is going to reduce its prison population by a meaningful amount
is either to legalise (some) drugs or to impose far lighter (non-custodial) sentences for most drug related offences.
While legalisation of (some) drugs may be a good idea, it is hardly an uncontroversial one and few, if any, politicians have the
gumption, or the political capital, to take on both reform of the criminal justice system and drug legalisation.
C. There’s three impacts:
1. Global warming means extinction – it’s real, anthropogenic, and
outweighs other threats.
Deibel 7 (Gary [International Relations @ Naval War College] “Foreign Affairs Strategy: Logic
and American Statecraft” Cambridge University Press, 2007, MG)
Finally, there is one major existential threat to American security (as well as prosperity) of a nonviolent nature,
which, though far in the future, demands urgent action. It is the threat of global warming to the stability of
the climate upon which all earthly life depends. Scientists worldwide have been observing the gathering of this threat for three
decades now, and what was once a mere possibility has passed through probability to near certainty. Indeed not one of
more than 900 articles on climate change published in refereed scientific journals from 1993 to
2003 doubted that anthropogenic warming is occurring. “In legitimate scientific circles,” writes Elizabeth
Kolbert, “it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming.” Evidence from
a vast international scientific monitoring effort accumulates almost weekly, as this sample of
an international panel predicts “brutal droughts, floods and violent
storms across the planet over the next century”; climate change could “literally alter ocean currents, wipe away huge
newspaper reports shows:
portions of Alpine Snowcaps and aid the spread of cholera and malaria”; “glaciers in the Antarctic and in Greenland are melting
much faster than expected, and…worldwide, plants are blooming several days earlier than a decade ago”; “rising sea temperatures
have been accompanied by a significant global increase in the most destructive hurricanes”; “NASA scientists have concluded from
direct temperature measurements that 2005 was the hottest year on record, with 1998 a close second”; “Earth’s warming
climate is estimated to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year” as disease
spreads; “widespread bleaching from Texas to Trinidad…killed broad swaths of corals” due to a 2-degree rise in sea
temperatures. “The world is slowly disintegrating,” concluded Inuit hunter Noah Metuq, who lives 30 miles from the Arctic Circle.
“They call it climate change…but we just call it breaking up.” From the founding of the first cities some 6,000 years ago until the
beginning of the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained relatively constant at about 280 parts per
million (ppm). At present they are accelerating toward 400 ppm, and by 2050 they will reach 500 ppm, about double pre-industrial
levels. Unfortunately, atmospheric CO2 lasts about a century, so there is no way immediately to reduce levels, only to slow their
increase, we are thus in for significant global warming; the only debate is how much and how serous the effects will be. As the
newspaper stories quoted above show, we are already experiencing the effects of 1-2 degree warming in more violent storms,
spread of disease, mass die offs of plants and animals, species extinction, and threatened inundation of low-lying countries like the
Pacific nation of Kiribati and the Netherlands at a warming of 5 degrees or less the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could
disintegrate, leading to a sea level of rise of 20 feet that would cover North Carolina’s outer banks, swamp the southern third of
Florida, and inundate Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village. Another catastrophic effect would be the
collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation that keeps the winter weather in Europe far
warmer than its latitude would otherwise allow. Economist William Cline once estimated the damage to the United States alone
from moderate levels of warming at 1-6 percent of GDP annually; severe warming could cost 13-26 percent of GDP. But the most
frightening scenario is runaway greenhouse warming, based on positive feedback from the buildup of
water vapor in the atmosphere that is both caused by and causes hotter surface temperatures. Past ice age
transitions, associated with only 5-10 degree changes in average global temperatures, took place in just decades, even though no
one was then pouring ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Faced with this specter, the best one can conclude is
that “humankind’s continuing enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect is akin to playing Russian roulette with the earth’s
climate and humanity’s life support system. At worst, says physics professor Marty Hoffert of New York University, “we’re just
going to burn everything up; we’re going to het the atmosphere to the temperature it was in the Cretaceous when
there were crocodiles at the poles, and then everything will collapse.” During the Cold War, astronomer Carl Sagan popularized a
theory of nuclear winter to describe how a thermonuclear war between the Untied States and the Soviet Union would not only
destroy both countries but possible end life on this planet. Global warming is the post-Cold War era’s equivalent of
nuclear winter at least as serious and considerably better supported scientifically. Over the long run it
puts dangers form terrorism and traditional military challenges to shame. It is a threat not
only to the security and prosperity to the United States, but potentially to the continued existence of life on this
planet.
2. Global warming increases crimes by astronomical rates – turns case.
Lean 12 (Geoffrey [Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent] “Does Global
Warming Increase Violent Crime? Here’s someone who says so” The Telegraph, September 13,
2012, MG)
Global warming has been blamed for many things. But crime? Improbable as it may seem, a paper recently published by
Harvard University is suggesting just that. The paper, from the University’s Kennedy School, puts up a fairly
convincing case that violent crime rises with the thermometer. In fact, that’s nothing new and other
researchers has demonstrated so in the past. But Matthew Ranson, a PhD student and the author of the paper, seems to have done
a particularly comprehensive job, analysing monthly crime, temperature and rainfall records across
2,972 US counties for the entire half century, 1960 to 2009 – including from 17,000 law enforcement agencies.
He found “a striking relationship between monthly weather patterns and crime rates”, with
murders, rapes, assaults and similar crimes increasing in step with temperature. Property crimes, like burglary and larceny, similarly
increase as it gets warmer, but only up to the modest level of 40 degrees Fahrenheit, after which the rising thermometer has little
effect. What’s the explanation? Some believe that warmer weather brings more people out on the streets,
giving greater opportunities for mugging and conflict, but if that were true it should also presumably make theft
from them more common. Or it may be that increased heat would simply make people more aggressive;
there is some scientific evidence for this, finding people in laboratory conditions more likely to try to hurt someone who has criticise
them when it is hotter. Be that as it may, if rising temperatures do boost crime, it might be logical for them to go on doing so and
thus Ranson predicts that “climate change will cause a substantial increase”. However he then – and
this is where credulity become seriously strained – he goes on to suggest that, if
global temperatures rise by some
five degrees Fahrenheit between now and 2099, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has suggested “there
will be an additional 35[k],000 murders, 216[k],000 cases of rape, 1.6 million aggravated
assaults, 2.4 million simple assaults, 409,00 robberies, 3.1 million burglaries, 3,8 million cases of larceny and 1.4
million cases of vehicle theft” in the US over what would have occurred without the climate change.”
3. Upholding international law is necessary to solve almost every impact.
IEER (Institute for Energy and Environment Resources and the Lawyer’s Committee on
Nuclear Policy, “Rule of power or rule of law?” IEER, 2002, MG)
The evolution of international law since World War II is largely a response to the demands of states and individuals
living within a global society with a deeply integrated world economy. In this global society, the repercussions of the
actions of states, non-state actors, and individuals are not confined within borders, whether we look to greenhouse
gas accumulations, nuclear testing, the danger of accidental nuclear war, or the vast massacres of civilians that
have taken place over the course of the last hundred years and still continue. Multilateral agreements increasingly have
been a primary instrument employed by states to meet extremely serious challenges of this kind, for several reasons.
They clearly and publicly embody a set of universally applicable expectations, including prohibited and required practices and
policies. In other words, they articulate global norms, such as the protection of human rights and
the prohibitions of genocide and use of weapons of mass destruction. They establish predictability
and accountability in addressing a given issue. States are able to accumulate expertise and confidence by participating in
the structured system offered by a treaty. However, influential U.S. policymakers are resistant to the idea of a treaty-based
international legal system because they fear infringement on U.S. sovereignty and they claim to lack confidence in compliance and
enforcement mechanisms. This approach has dangerous practical implications for international cooperation and compliance with
norms. U.S. treaty partners do not enter into treaties expecting that they are only political commitments by the United States that
can be overridden based on U.S. interests. When a powerful and influential state like the United States is seen to
treat its legal obligations as a matter of convenience or of national interest alone, other states will see
this as a justification to relax or withdraw from their own commitments. If the United States wants to require another
state to live up to its treaty obligations, it may find that the state has followed the U.S. example and opted out of compliance