Gonzaga Debate Institute 1
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Human Rights Shunning – GDI 2013
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
****NEG****
Gonzaga Debate Institute 3
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
1NCs
Gonzaga Debate Institute 4
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
1NC—Cuba
The Cuban government engages in multiple human rights violations such as torture,
unexplained deaths, arrests of dissidents without any judicial orders, and more
Tamayo, Political Writer at the Miami Herald, 12
Juan O. Tamayo, 6/2/12, The Miami Herald, “UN panel blasts Cuba on human rights abuses,”
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/02/v-fullstory/2828219/un-panel-blasts-cuba-on-human.html, accessed 7-2-13, KB)
The U.N.’s Committee Against Torture hammered Cuba on Friday for a lengthy string of human rights
abuses and repeatedly complained the island had provided few or none of the details about specific
allegations of abuses that it had requested.¶ The panel noted that it was “concerned by reports
denouncing the use of coercive methods during (police) interrogations, particularly the denial of
sleep, detention under conditions of isolation and exposure to sudden changes in temperatures.Ӧ On
Cuba’s prisons, it wrote that it “continues to be supremely concerned by the reports received about
the … overcrowding, malnutrition, lack of hygiene and healthy conditions (and) adequate medical
attention.Ӧ There have been thousands of complaints of short-term detentions of dissidents, it added,
singling out José Luis Ferrer García and Oscar Elias Biscet. And Cuban officials never explained the deaths
of dissidents Orlando Zapata Tamayo and Juan Wilfredo Soto García.¶ Cuba should establish an
independent body to gather, investigate and report on allegations of government abuses, and should
meet its promise to allow a visit by the U.N.’s top official on several types of mistreatments, the
committee noted in a 6,000-word report.¶ The report summed up the panel’s conclusions after its May
22-23 hearings in Switzerland on Cuba’s compliance with the Convention against Torture and Other
Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Marked “unedited,” it was issued by the U.N.
media office in Geneva.¶ Using the U.N.’s typically diplomatic language, the report noted the panel
“laments,” “expresses concern,” “still worries,” “disagrees,” “has serious reservations,” “views with
concern,” “considers it indispensable” and is “seriously concerned.”¶ But the report Friday amounted to
a harsh and detailed indictment of Cuba’s human rights record, especially in areas that involve
physical punishments or abuses, such as the justice and prison systems and the harassment of
dissidents.¶ Cuba’s own report on its compliance with the convention on torture, presented to the
panel in May, was more than nine years late and “does not fully meet the guidelines” set by the panel,
it noted. The 10-member committee reviews countries’ records on a rotating basis.¶ In a sharply worded
section, the report urged Cuba “to investigate, without delay, exhaustively, without bias and in an
efficient way, all deaths of prisoners.” Cuba told the panel that prison officials were not responsible for
any of the 202 such deaths in 2010-2011, but gave no further information.¶ The report also blasted
Cuba for the rapid increase in the use of short-term arrests of dissidents without any judicial orders,
usually to keep opposition activists away from activities. Cuban officials told the panel last month that
all detentions follow due process.¶ Despite Havana’s denials, panel member Fernando Mariño told a
news conference Friday, “it seems that this has been generalized of late.” Human rights activists in
Havana reported the number of such arrests doubled from 2010 to 2011.¶ The panel also condemned
the “restrictions on freedom of movement, invasive security operations, physical aggressions and
other acts of intimidation and harassment presumably committed by the National Revolutionary
Police or members of the Organs of State Security.”
Gonzaga Debate Institute 5
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Torture is an intrinsic evil that destroys human dignity—uniquely bad when
government endorsed.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 12
[ 2012, USCCB, “TORTURE IS AN INTRINSIC EVIL,” http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-lifeand-dignity/torture/upload/torture-is-an-intrinsic-evil-study-guide.pdf, accessed 7/9/13, MC]
Torture destroys our human dignity in multiple ways. An act of such violence pushes individuals and
members within a society towards two different forms of dehumanization: savagery, when feelings of
anger or fear overwhelm principles of ethics and human rights; and barbarism, when perceived needs
for security and supremacy destroy feelings of faith, solidarity and compassion. In fact, torture
compromises the human dignity of both the victim and the perpetrator, estranging the torturer from
God, and debasing the integrity of the tortured.
What is more, when members of a society allow violent, dehumanizing practices to occur within their
social sphere, that society’s collective integrity and social fabric are greatly eroded. When a government
not only allows, but sponsors, degrading, dehumanizing acts of violence, it sets a dangerous precedent
that undermines the respect for everyone’s human dignity and human rights.
The Catechism of the Church makes clear that torture is a grave sin which violates the
Fifth Commandment. In his 1993 Encyclical, Veritas Splendor, Pope John Paul II
included physical and mental torture in his list of social evils that are not only shameful,
but “intrinsically evil.”
Vote Neg: Engagement with human rights abusers makes you complicit with Evil, no
political end is worth this compromise.
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, xvi-xvii, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
Put differently, this book is also about us, a man and a woman who, often with others, have for years
been struggling for freedom, for dialogue, for justice, for human rights in Israel and in the Middle East,
and about what we have learned from Sartre that has helped us to conduct this daily struggle. Yet it
should also be clear: We are not standard do-gooders. When we use the word "struggle," we mean
fighting, attacking, pointing at evildoers, demanding that they be prosecuted. We mean accepting the
profound loneliness that often characterizes such struggles. We mean living with the stupid decisions
and the mistakes that we have often made, and, we hope, learning from them. We mean knowing that
we too have done Evil. Like Sartre we do not need to be identified with a party or an organization or a
large group when we attack an evildoer, although we are, at times, happy when such occurs. For
instance, when human rights are blatantly abused in the Gaza Strip, or when violence against women
is ignored by the Israeli police, we are unwilling to compromise such a destruction of human freedom
with the goals of a party or an organization so that the organization or party can attain its political
ends from this Evil. Learning from Sartre, we condemn the Evil and the oppression and exploitation as
loudly and clearly as possible. And like Sartre, our condemnations often fall on deaf ears. Again and
again we have failed, as this book will often indicate. The Israeli military administration in Gaza, the
Israeli press, Israeli politicians, other intellectuals and academics, and even other human rights
organizations have often made us feel frustrated, impotent, stuck, irrelevant. But we continue. It is in
this kind of struggle, we believe, that one can learn much from Sartre's writings. Hence, in what
follows, while we shall discuss in detail and in depth quite a few philosophical themes central to Sartre's
Gonzaga Debate Institute 6
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
writings, we shall always attempt to suggest how these themes can help in the day-to-day struggle
against Evil. To do so, we often add to our discussion of Sartre's insights on Evil an instance from our
personal experiences or from events in the world that these insights have helped to clarify. It is in this
kind of struggle, we believe, that one can learn much from Sartre's writings. Hence, in what follows,
while we shall discuss in detail and in depth quite a few philosophical themes central to Sartre's writings,
we shall always attempt to suggest how these themes can help in the day-to-day struggle against Evil.
To do so, we often add to our discussion of Sartre's insights on Evil an instance from our personal
experiences or from events in the world that these insights have helped to clarify. We firmly believe that
Sartre would have preferred such a book to a strict scholarly study of his relationship to Evil. He
repeatedly pointed out that he was deeply concerned with the relevance of his writings to day-to-day
praxis, to day-to-day struggles, to the situation in which persons find themselves. He wanted his
writings to make a concrete difference in the world, not only to be a topic of analysis and discussion
among scholars and philosophers. We also believe that Sartre would have liked a book that at times
reeks of the blood, sweat, and tears -- and yes, the rage, the passion, the debilitating loneliness, and
the ongoing fight against impotence -- that characterize any worthy struggle for freedom today.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 7
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
1NC—Mexico
Mexican officials complicit in Human Trafficking
Department of State 10, OFFICE TO MONITOR AND COMBAT TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS from the
State Department, 6-14-2010, “Trafficking in Persons Report 2010”
http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/142760.htm Accessed: 7-2-2013 BK)
NGOs, members of the government, and other observers continued to report that corruption among
public officials, especially local law enforcement and judicial and immigration officials, was a
significant concern. Some officials reportedly accepted or extorted bribes or sexual services, falsified
identity documents, discouraged trafficking victims from reporting their crimes, or tolerated child
prostitution and other human trafficking activity in commercial sex sites. Two immigration officials
arrested in 2007 for their alleged leadership of an organized criminal group involved in human
trafficking were convicted during the reporting period and remain incarcerated pending sentencing. A
highlevel immigration official was investigated for suspected involvement in human trafficking.
We have a moral obligation to fight human trafficking – it is the most fundamental
assault on humanity
Pryce, U.S. Representative 06 –
[Deborah, U.S. Representative, May 8, “COMBATING MODERN-DAY SLAVERY”
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=14618]Date Accessed: 7-4-2013 BK
We have a moral obligation to fight this evil. Trafficking in human beings is an assault on our most
cherished beliefs, that every human being has freedom and dignity and worth. A nation that stands for
the freedom and dignity of every human being cannot tolerate the exploitation of the innocent on its
own soil. This needs to be a national priority, because it is a global outrage. In 2005, I led a
congressional delegation to Italy, Greece, Albania and Moldova to meet with trafficking victims and
government officials and discuss ways to end this crime and protect its victims. During this trip, and later
during hearings I held as chairman of a House financial services subcommittee, I heard testimony on the
economic and financial implications of human trafficking, as well as the heartrending stories of
trafficking victims. Their stories of rape, torture and routine brutality are simply beyond description.
Congress passed, and the President signed, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. This
legislation strengthens the original Trafficking Victims Protection Act to keep the U.S. at the forefront of
the global war on this modern-day slavery. Included in the $360-million package is an expansion of the
Operation Innocence Lost program, a nationwide initiative that aggressively pursues sex traffickers and
child prostitution rings. Over the last two years, the program has rescued more than 200 child victims
and helped uncover the Toledo sex trafficking ring. Congress has also recently taken steps to target
demand for sex trafficking. Provisions of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act that I authored along with
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D.-N.Y.) will provide state and local law enforcement with new tools to target
demand and investigate and prosecute sex trafficking, fund a national conference on best practices for
reducing demand for sex trafficking and fund a review of the incidence of sex trafficking in the U.S., to
provide us with a more accurate picture of the scope of this problem. Our law enforcement strategy
must be wedded to a vigorous partnership between government agencies and private and religious
organizations on the front lines of this struggle. For years these groups have helped rescue and support
Gonzaga Debate Institute 8
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
trafficking victims and raise awareness about the fight against human trafficking. Human trafficking is a
heinous crime, a betrayal of one of the most basic obligations of morality -- the obligation to defend
the innocent. The presence of this scourge in our midst cannot and will not be tolerated. But those
who would so debase themselves and the human family by buying and selling women and children
are beyond mere reproach. They will not respond to outrage, but to action.
Vote Neg: Engagement with human rights abusers makes you complicit with Evil, no
political end is worth this compromise.
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, xvi-xvii, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
Put differently, this book is also about us, a man and a woman who, often with others, have for years
been struggling for freedom, for dialogue, for justice, for human rights in Israel and in the Middle East,
and about what we have learned from Sartre that has helped us to conduct this daily struggle. Yet it
should also be clear: We are not standard do-gooders. When we use the word "struggle," we mean
fighting, attacking, pointing at evildoers, demanding that they be prosecuted. We mean accepting the
profound loneliness that often characterizes such struggles. We mean living with the stupid decisions
and the mistakes that we have often made, and, we hope, learning from them. We mean knowing that
we too have done Evil. Like Sartre we do not need to be identified with a party or an organization or a
large group when we attack an evildoer, although we are, at times, happy when such occurs. For
instance, when human rights are blatantly abused in the Gaza Strip, or when violence against women
is ignored by the Israeli police, we are unwilling to compromise such a destruction of human freedom
with the goals of a party or an organization so that the organization or party can attain its political
ends from this Evil. Learning from Sartre, we condemn the Evil and the oppression and exploitation as
loudly and clearly as possible. And like Sartre, our condemnations often fall on deaf ears. Again and
again we have failed, as this book will often indicate. The Israeli military administration in Gaza, the
Israeli press, Israeli politicians, other intellectuals and academics, and even other human rights
organizations have often made us feel frustrated, impotent, stuck, irrelevant. But we continue. It is in
this kind of struggle, we believe, that one can learn much from Sartre's writings. Hence, in what
follows, while we shall discuss in detail and in depth quite a few philosophical themes central to Sartre's
writings, we shall always attempt to suggest how these themes can help in the day-to-day struggle
against Evil. To do so, we often add to our discussion of Sartre's insights on Evil an instance from our
personal experiences or from events in the world that these insights have helped to clarify. It is in this
kind of struggle, we believe, that one can learn much from Sartre's writings. Hence, in what follows,
while we shall discuss in detail and in depth quite a few philosophical themes central to Sartre's writings,
we shall always attempt to suggest how these themes can help in the day-to-day struggle against Evil.
To do so, we often add to our discussion of Sartre's insights on Evil an instance from our personal
experiences or from events in the world that these insights have helped to clarify. We firmly believe that
Sartre would have preferred such a book to a strict scholarly study of his relationship to Evil. He
repeatedly pointed out that he was deeply concerned with the relevance of his writings to day-to-day
praxis, to day-to-day struggles, to the situation in which persons find themselves. He wanted his
writings to make a concrete difference in the world, not only to be a topic of analysis and discussion
among scholars and philosophers. We also believe that Sartre would have liked a book that at times
reeks of the blood, sweat, and tears -- and yes, the rage, the passion, the debilitating loneliness, and
the ongoing fight against impotence -- that characterize any worthy struggle for freedom today.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 9
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
1NC—Venezuela
Venezuela is anti-semitic—Maduro will continue Chavez’s policies
Cohen, staff writer, 13
[Ben, 5/6, Haaretz, “Will Venezuelan anti-Semitism die with Hugo Chavez?”,
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/will-venezuelan-anti-semitism-die-with-hugo-chavez.premium1.507785, accessed 7/2/13, VJ
Under Chavez, Venezuela became a source of incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric that spilled over into open
hostility towards the dwindling Venezuelan Jewish community, and his successors seem likely to
continue to stoke anti-Semitism as a useful political tool. Over the several months that preceded
yesterday's announcement by the Venezuelan government of the death of Hugo Chavez, there was one
overarching theme in the discussion of the country's political future: to what extent will Chavismo – a
term that encapsulates both Chavez's authoritarian governing style and his radical ideology – survive
into the post-Chavez era? It's a question that is especially pertinent for Venezuela's Jewish community
as well as the State of Israel. During his fourteen years in power, Chavez's foreign policy was grounded
on alliances with some of the world's most bellicosely anti-American states, like Cuba, Iran and Syria.
Inevitably, given the close relationship between America and Israel, Venezuela became the source of
some of the most incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric heard during the last decade and a half. Just as
inevitably, this antagonism towards Israel spilled over into open hostility towards the dwindling
Venezuelan Jewish community, which found itself cast in the role of a fifth column seeking to undermine
Chavez's Bolivarian revolution. Now that Chavez has departed from this world, will the Jew-baiting
tendencies of Chavismo persist or subside? At the moment, sadly, there is little reason for optimism
on this front. Those Jewish organizations in the United States who maintain close contact with the
Venezuelan Jewish community point out that, bar some major unforeseen developments, there is
unlikely to be a further mass exodus now that Chavez is dead. The current size of the community is
estimated at between 7-9,000, an enormous dip from the peak of 30,000 at the start of the Chavez era.
The remnant that has stayed put will, for the time being, watch political developments closely, in the
hope that Chavez's successors might adopt a more pragmatic and conciliatory approach. "It's difficult to
predict the future of anti-Semitism in Venezuela," Daniel Duquenal, the author of Venezula's leading
dissident blog, told me. Should Nicolas Maduro, the current Vice-President and Chavez's chosen
successor, become Venezuela's next leader, Duquenal argues, there is little reason to believe that antiSemitism will dissipate. Maduro, a former bus driver, is an orthodox follower of Chavez, but he lacks
the late Comandante's charismatic touch. Against that weakness, "the pro-Iran, knee jerk antiAmerican and anti-Israel currents may want to use anti-Semitism as an 'argument,'" Duquenal said.
Vote neg- Anti-Semitic expression must never be tolerated, this kind of Evil must be
repeatedly and publicly confronted.
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, 117-118, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
Sartre opens his essay Anti-Semite and Jew, which was published immediately after World War II, with
the rejection of the broadly accepted approach in French society at that period that anti-Semitism is
Gonzaga Debate Institute 10
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
merely a personal opinion, or an idiosyncratic view. 1 No, he argues, it is wrong to relate to a person
who expresses a blatant hatred of Jews on the same level as that of a person who despises artichokes
or finds Mondrian's art boring. Anti-Semitism is not a personal taste or opinion. It is a personally
destructive way of life sustained by a wholehearted commitment to annihilate the freedom of Jews.
All Jews. Hence, Sartre holds, anti-Semitic views cannot and never should be legitimized within a
society that respects freedom. In short, anti-Semitism is the expression of an evil way of life -- antiSemites, he says, are a bunch of hooligans -- and one must never hesitate to fight against this way of
life and the Evil that it continually spreads. Straightforwardly. There is no other way. But to fight an
enemy it is wise to learn his or her manner of being-inthe-world, and also the ways such an enemy
conducts battle. In a general essay Sartre cannot give much more, since all battles are specific battles.
Only in the day-to-day fight against Evil does one learn how to act in particular situations against specific
instances of Evil. But Sartre's detailed description of the being-in-the-world of the anti-Semite can
indicate how to evade pitfalls while fighting against the Evil of bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination; it
may also suggest where such an evildoer may be vulnerable. As we have shown, Sartre already
introduced his readers to the beingin-the-world of the anti-Semite in his description of Lucien in his
story "The Childhood of a Leader". In Anti-Semite and Jew, he goes much further and provides what may
be called a phenomenological sketch of the anti-Semite. We shall not fully repeat that sketch here. We
will concentrate instead on specific characteristics of the anti-Semite that may help one understand how
to fight such evildoers. One conclusion can already be mentioned. Since racism is not an opinion or a
taste, the person who fights this Evil must never allow racist statements to be relegated to the realm
of social small talk or intellectual discourse. If one permits racist views to be aired in such social
interactions, the racist has already won the first battle: he or she has attached the legitimacy of a
taste or an opinion to the evil wish to annihilate the freedom of Jews or blacks or members of other
minorities. From our experience, only by a straightforward immediate branding of the racist as Evil -to his or her face, in society -- can one break down the general willingness of many of the racist's
listeners to accept racism as merely another opinion or taste. Here it is perhaps appropriate to cite the
locution from Paul Nizan that Sartre quotes in his Foreword to a reissuing of Nizan Aden Arabie: "False
courage awaits great occasions; true courage consists of overcoming small enemies every day." 2 (We
return to this Foreword in the next chapter.) The racist whom one meets at a cocktail party or in the
grocery store may be a small enemy, but true courage consists of struggling to overcome him or her
immediately, on the spot.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 11
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Links
Gonzaga Debate Institute 12
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Topic Links- Generic
Gonzaga Debate Institute 13
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Engagement
Compliance with dictators under the pretense of engagement ensures that no change
takes place. Only shunning human rights violators until they meet basic demands can
offer hope
Rotberg ’00
(Title: Africa's Mess, Mugabe's Mayhem., By:, Robert I., Foreign Affairs, 00157120, Sep/Oct2000, Vol.
79, Issue 5)
One recipe to curb the rise of future Mugabes is to hold strictly to conditions for help. To curb autocratic excesses, international lending
institutions should use tough love: an absolute refusal to lend and donate in the absence of the rule of law, good governance, and sensible
bilateral donors should cease supporting those who self-aggrandize or abuse
human rights. Better yet, donors and international lending agencies should shun all dealings with
those who breach their own national norms. There should be no state visits for the Mugabes of the
world or their foreign ministers or finance ministers. Ostracism can be a powerful weapon,
especially if the refusal to pursue business as usual with dictators and illiberal democrats becomes
widespread.
Continuing big-power relations with the Mugabes of the world is usually excused by the term
"constructive engagement." Better to retain some influence, however limited, with despots -- thus
runs the usual rationale. But it almost never works. Mugabe grew more and more insufferable because he could
economic policy. Likewise,
thumb his nose at the international lending institutions, the Commonwealth, and the big powers. No one has yet called his bluff. In May
and June 2000, even Mbeki -- heir to Mandela, the continent's shining light -- consciously refrained from publicly criticizing Mugabe.
Good leadership in Africa should be rewarded, participatory leadership supported, and sensible economic management backed -- but not
bad leadership and bad policy. Mugabe's growth as an unlimited autocrat just might have been checked by enough international cold
shoulders. If he had been made persona non grata abroad, especially in Europe and the United States, Zimbabwean civil society might have
taken heart. So might his critics in and out of government. At the very least, the IMF and the World Bank should have abided by the letter
and spirit of their own conditions. Depriving Mugabe's Zimbabwe of foreign aid because of his proclivities might have made a difference.
All of those snubs were certainly worth trying. Constructive
engagement, in other words, ought to be employed
in Africa only sparingly and surgically.
Globalized economic engagement perpetuates exploitation, doesn’t solve
Forcese, Associate Professor at University of Ottowa and Research on international
law, human rights, and democratic accountability, 2001
[Craig, 6-10-01, “Globalizing Decency: Responsible Engagement in an Era of Economic Integration”, Yale
Human Rights & Development Law Journal, Volume: 5, p. 3, AJM]
That said, there remains a very vigorous dissenting view on the moral advantages of economic
engagement. Though difficult to isolate with any certainty, the shared vision of the loose amalgam of
globalization opponents, labor unions and non-governmental groups protesting in the streets of Seattle,
Prague, Washington, Quebec City and elsewhere, is that economic integration undermines national
sovereignty, entrenches social disadvantage between social classes and between North and South,
debases national labor and environmental standards, and sometimes props up repressive regimes. If
true, the natural consequence of such liberalized trade and investment will be continued class and
North/South exploitation, some form of political backlash and a measure of political instability.
Clearly, assessing the merits of these two contrasting visions – economic engagement as panacea versus
economic engagement as villain – is an empirical exercise. Yet, the empirical evidence, such as it is, is
neither entirely dismissive nor completely supportive of either position, at least when examined with
an eye to human rights. Instead, these data tend to support a nuanced approach to constructive
Gonzaga Debate Institute 14
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
engagement, one that might be termed “responsible engagement.” In particular, engagement is
appropriate so long as it does not induce the very human rights ills it is said to cure. Where
constructive engagement via economic integration augments the staying power of a human rightsabusing regime, or prompts it to engage in additional human rights abuses, the net impact of that
integration may not be positive. In these circumstances, the appropriate policy response will be
economic disengagement. Accordingly, under a responsible engagement model, there remains an
important role for economic sanctions, both as a means of affecting the behavior of nation-states and
to stave off the possibility that citizens of one country are contributing to the persistence of a repressive
regime in another nation.
Engagement with repressive regimes uniquely increases human rights abuses
Forcese, Associate Professor at University of Ottowa and Research on international
law, human rights, and democratic accountability, 2001
[Craig, 6-10-01, “Globalizing Decency: Responsible Engagement in an Era of Economic Integration”, Yale
Human Rights & Development Law Journal, Volume: 5, p. 10, AJM]
Past experience suggests that there are several ways in which economic integration with a nation with
an oppressive government can encourage the regime to increase its repressive activity and engage in
human rights abuses that would otherwise not occur. For example, the regime may use repressive
means to produce infrastructure designed for use by multinational business. In Burma, for example,
the military dictatorship – now known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) – has been
accused of using forced labor to build infrastructure for the Yadana pipeline, a project involving major
U.S. and French multinational companies. 41 Further, the regime may use repressive means to
guarantee a firm access to resources. In Sudan, a November 1999 report from the U.N. Rapporteur on
Sudan indicated that the Sudanese regime has used its military to “clear a 100-kilometre area around
the oilfields” operated by a consortium of multinational companies.42 More recently, the Canadian
government-sponsored “Harker mission” to Sudan concluded that “there has been, and probably still is,
major displacement of civilian populations related to oil extraction . . . . Sudan is a place of
extraordinary suffering and continuing human rights violations, even though some forward progress
can be recorded, and the oil operations in which a Canadian company is involved add more
suffering.”43 Amnesty International confirmed these findings very graphically in May 2000. In its report,
Amnesty noted that Sudanese forces have used ground attacks, helicopter gunships and indiscriminate
high-altitude bombardment to clear the local population from oil-rich areas. Government troops,
notes Amnesty, have reportedly committed mass executions of male villagers. Women and children
are said to have been nailed to trees with iron spikes. There are reports from villages north and south
of the oilfields that soldiers slit the throats of children and killed male prisoners who had been
interrogated by hammering nails into their foreheads.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 15
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Latin America Links
The aff’s strategy of economic engagement is complicit with the Evil governments and
corporations that have locked Latin America into a reality of poverty, exploitation, and
violence.
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, 132-134, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
The result: a false optimism prevailed. The psychological categorical imperative that seems to have been
accepted by each participant was, Let us join each other on our ego trips centered on the topic of Evil.
Such an ego trip is precisely what Sartre described himself and his friends pursuing immediately after
World War II. And the danger of it is that it allows, in the name of a false, impotent humanism, for the
killing and inflicting of suffering upon the weak, the exploited, and the oppressed to continue
unmolested and unchallenged. How can it be otherwise, since these false humanists have chosen to be
impotent? In his chaffing attack against himself and against most members of his generation, Sartre
points out that after World War II they were so puffed up with their acclaimed virtues that they never
sensed their basic mistake: instead of fighting the evildoers directly, "protecting the innocent, that
was our business." 3 Indeed, one of the most potent and successful lies prevailing in contemporary
politics is that one can make it one's business to protect the innocent without at all indicating that
someone must be doing the Evil that causes these innocent persons to require protection. In medieval
legends people were honest. The knight protected the innocent damsel from the wrath of the firebreathing dragon. Dragons have since disappeared. Evil is now done solely by human beings. Yet in
contemporary political life, which includes organizations whose role is to struggle for human rights,
almost no one mentions this brute, unpleasant fact -- especially not those respectable people with
beautiful souls who often sit on the boards of directors for many of these human rights organizations.
These respectable board members and their supporters quietly embrace mendacity. At most, they will
cry out that the suffering and the innocent need assistance and protection, which is, of course, the
truth. But they will never indicate clearly who is responsible for the terrible Evil done to the innocent.
Nor will they try to fight these evildoers. Nizan, Sartre indicates, knew the truth: people who make it
their business to protect the innocent are almost always sneaking away from fighting Evil. Sartre does
not at all mean that there should not be asylums for battered women, shelters for the homeless, or
social services and foster homes that care for abused children. But rather, together with these muchneeded social services, there should be a recognition that there are evildoers who have brought about
this Evil, and these evildoers need to be fought -- here and now. Otherwise, Sartre indicates, a person
is stealing away from one's responsibilities. Again, there are a thousand examples of such sneaking
away. Here is one that appeared in the October 19, 1992, issue of Newsweek. The week's interview is
with Luis Rivera, deputy regional director of UNICEF for Latin America and the Caribbean and the
coordinator of a newly published study, "Children of the Americas." Rivera is a psychologist who resides
in Bogotá. In the interview Rivera reports that close to one million children under five years of age die
each year in Latin America as a result of malnutrition, infection, and violence. Furthermore, he points
out, at least 30 million children aged ten to fourteen work in Latin America, and about 15 million of
them work in the streets, where they are exposed to criminal violence, which quite often results in
deaths. Such a report should arouse a profound horror at the terrible outcomes of injustice and Evil in
Latin America, which is an area with much natural wealth and the resources to feed its inhabitants
very well if distribution of the resources were fair and just. It should also arouse a demand that the
Gonzaga Debate Institute 16
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
situation change immediately, and that the evildoers who plundered the wealth of the people and
created the widespread poverty be punished. Not for Luis Rivera. His job is merely to protect the
innocent. Hence in his interview, no evildoers are mentioned. Nor does he express any moral
indignation. He is detached and supposedly objective. Statistics and general trends are what concern
him. A million children under the age of five are dying each year, primarily from malnutrition -- children
with names like Juan and Anita, children with parents who loved them. Rivera has accepted
responsibility for the area for UNICEF, that is, for a world organization -- and no one is to blame! Sartre
would have said that Luis Rivera's beautiful soul stinks to high heaven. Indeed, Rivera is worthy of
ridicule, but also of hatred. He is purposely embracing mendacity and myopia. He does his best to give
the impression that nobody is responsible for the fact that in most of Latin America many millions of
people live in abject poverty, ruthlessly exploited by a small, affluent, greedy, and wicked elite, which
is supported by ruthless multinational corporations and banks and by the governments, and at times
the armed forces, of Western Europe and the United States. Also, Rivera's interview indicates, nobody
is responsible for the fact that large multinational corporations and banks brutally exploit these poor
and needy, thus helping to create the cruel reality of malnutrition and slave labor for millions of
children. In short, Evil has disappeared, swallowed up by Rivera's supposedly virtuous striving to
protect the innocent. Hence, by making it his business to merely protect the innocent, Rivera has
become a quiet accomplice of the evildoers. He is their fig leaf. Through his supposedly charitable
activities, Rivera slyly provides a cover-up for those who are responsible for the suffering of the
innocent; in the meantime, 2700 children die every day.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 17
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Cuba Links
Gonzaga Debate Institute 18
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Engagement Link- Cuba Specific
Engagement can’t change totalitarian regimes, but it does make you compromise your
values- shunning the Cuban regime is the best way to support democracy movements.
Cardenas, former assistant administrator for Latin America at the U.S. Agency for
International Development, 12
[Jose, Foreign Policy, 10/9/12, “Obama defends, then changes, Cuba policy”,
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/09/obama_defends_then_changes_cuba_policy,
Accessed 7/8/13, HW]
Such an assertion is patently false and only demonstrates the dishonest degree trip organizers will go to
pretend they are serving a higher cause in traveling to Cuba -- and receive their coveted license to travel.
And in it they provide the most salient lesson of all: that engagement with totalitarian regimes rarely
changes them, but it does change us. It forces people to obfuscate their language, to compromise
their values, and to accept unjust and immoral situations and arrangements they wouldn't tolerate
anywhere else in the world. It remains to be seen if the Obama administration will restore some sanity
to its liberalized travel regime to Cuba by truly making it purposeful and people-to-people. They have an
opportunity to act to demonstrate they really are working to help the Cuban people have more of a
say in their own future and to support democracy movements on the island. Because the status quo is
having the exact opposite effect: by further enabling the Castro brothers to suffocate the Cuban
people's legitimate aspirations for freedom and a better future.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 19
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
HR Violation Laundry List
Cuba constantly violates human rights – government officials torture and assault
prisoners and political activist groups
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 11 (4/8/11, U.S. Department of State, “2010 Human
Rights Report: Cuba,” http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/wha/154501.htm#, accessed 7-2-13, KB)
The law prohibits abusive treatment of detainees and prisoners. However, there were verified reports
that members of the security forces harassed and sometimes physically assaulted human rights and
prodemocracy advocates, dissidents, detainees, and prisoners, and did so with impunity. Some
detainees and prisoners endured physical abuse, sometimes by other inmates with the acquiescence
of guards, or long periods in isolation cells.¶ The government continued to stage public protests to
harass and abuse activists and their families. Although the government characterized the mobs as
spontaneous, participants frequently arrived in government-owned vehicles or were recruited by local
CP leaders from nearby workplaces or schools. In extreme cases, government-orchestrated mobs
assaulted the targets or damaged their homes or property. Undercover police and agents from the
Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for State Security (DGSE) were often present and
coordinated activities with mob leaders. Government officials at the scene did not arrest those who
physically attacked the victims or respond to victims' complaints. On more than one occasion, officials
took part in the beatings.¶ Many of these state-orchestrated "acts of repudiation" were directed
against the Damas de Blanco ("Ladies in White"), a group of mostly female relatives and supporters of
political prisoners, many of those prisoners were arrested in the spring of 2003.¶ During the week
leading up to the March 18 anniversary of the 2003 arrests, the Damas held daily marches to
commemorate the anniversary. On March 16, the government bused in approximately 100 counterdemonstrators who surrounded the Damas and shouted insults and progovernment slogans. On March
17, the Damas attempted to march through a neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, but as the
march progressed, approximately 300 progovernment counterdemonstrators arrived on buses,
surrounded the Damas, shouted insults, and physically assaulted the marchers. Plainclothes police
formed a ring around the Damas, providing protection from the worst of the blows, while state security
officers were observed coordinating with mob leaders. Eventually, the mob completely blocked the
path of the Damas, and police dragged the marchers onto a waiting bus. Foreign diplomats also
observed state security officials drag a male relative of one of the marchers away, then repeatedly kick
and punch him. All participants in the march were detained briefly and then released without charges.¶
In the first half of the year, the government also tried to prevent the Damas from staging their weekly
march after Sunday Mass, which they had been doing unimpeded since their spouses were arrested in
2003. The confrontation escalated over the subsequent weeks, as the crowd of counterdemonstrators
swelled in numbers and intensity, while police prevented all but a handful of Damas from reaching the
church. On April 18, progovernment forces surrounded the Damas as they left the church and
prevented them from marching, screaming insults and obscenities while banging on pots and pans. On
April 25, they again were surrounded after leaving church, forced into a nearby public park where they
were assaulted, taunted, including with sexual and ethnic insults, and prevented from moving for
more than seven hours. State security officials intervened and forced the ladies onto a public bus. The
standoffs ended the following week, when Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega received assurances from
President Castro that the Damas would be allowed to resume their Sunday marches.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 20
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
The Cuban regime is responsible for countless number crimes; they are even a
terrorist threat. We should not engage with Cuba.
Cardenas, Chair of American Conservative Union and Cuban-American, 13
[Al, 4/30/13, The Human events Group, “WHY CAN’T WE VACATION IN CUBA? BECAUSE IT’S A TERROR
STATE,” http://www.humanevents.com/2013/04/30/presidents-got-more-than-99-problems-and-jay-zstrip-to-cuba-is-one/, accessed 7/2/13, AK]
Cuba is a terrorist nation. China didn’t seize our assets or deploy nuclear weapons 90 miles off our
coast. Cuba continues to actively promote hostility towards the U.S. in our hemisphere and our tourist
dollars help prop up the Castro regime and prolong the agony of 11 million people. U.S.-Cuba relations
since 1959 have gone from strained to severe, to the closest we have ever come to nuclear
Armageddon. Its always included provocations on Castro’s end of one degree or another and periodic
rapprochements have been a colossal waste of time — except for an immigration accord which most
Cuban exiles consider unwise. The Castro brothers remain the longest lasting living dictators in the
world — 54 years and counting. So far they have survived nine U.S. presidents, the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the death of Hugo Chavez. According to them they have also survived numerous death
plots emanating from the U.S., the failed Bay of Pigs invasion as well as the Kennedy/Khrushchev stare
down in the 1962 October missile crisis. At the beginning of their reign of terror they executed
thousands of freedom-loving patriots, confiscated (without compensation) all private property in the
island — including billions of dollars of U.S.-owned assets — and launched the “Mariel boat exodus”
during president Jimmy Carter’s tenure, releasing tens of thousands of Cubans from criminal jails and
mental institutions and sending them over by boats to Miami and surrounding areas. Let’s not forget
the downing of small private single engine planes killing in cold blood four American citizens during
president Bill Clinton’s administration. To this day, they jail thousands of patriotic Cubans, including
the well-known “Ladies in White,” whose only provocation has been to peacefully voice their
objections to the treatment of the Cuban people. They have used the Cuban people as chattel sending
their unwilling young men to fight and die in faraway lands (such as Angola); thousands of
unsuspecting doctors to Venezuela and thousands others to forced labor camps to harvest sugar cane
— all in return for financial resources to keep their ruthless regime afloat. They are listed as a terrorist
country by our U.S. Department of State for good reason: they harbor terrorist leaders from the
Middle East; train and supply intelligence officers to other ruthless governments such as Nicaragua
and Bolivia; and are at the ideological epicenter of all efforts to undermine America and the values for
which we stand.
A multitude of human right violations reported in Cuba – multiple warrants
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 11 (4/8/11, U.S. Department of State, “2010 Human
Rights Report: Cuba,” http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/wha/154501.htm#, accessed 7-2-13, KB)
The government denied citizens the right to change their government. In addition, the following
human rights abuses were reported: harassment, beatings, and threats against political opponents by
government-organized mobs and state security officials acting with impunity; harsh and lifethreatening prison conditions, including selective denial of medical care; arbitrary detention of human
rights advocates and members of independent organizations; and selective prosecution and denial of
fair trial. Authorities interfered with privacy and engaged in pervasive monitoring of private
communications. The government also placed severe limitations on freedom of speech and press,
constrained the right of peaceful assembly and association, restricted freedom of movement, and
limited freedom of religion. The government refused to recognize independent human rights groups or
Gonzaga Debate Institute 21
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
permit them to function legally. In addition, the government continued to place severe restrictions on
worker rights, including the right to form independent unions.
Many human right violations like torture and inhumane punishment in Cuba –
especially in the prisons of political prisoners
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 11 (4/8/11, U.S. Department of State, “2010 Human
Rights Report: Cuba,” http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2010/wha/154501.htm#, accessed 7-2-13, KB)
Prison conditions continued to be harsh and life threatening. The government did not permit
independent monitoring of prison conditions by international or national human rights groups and did
not permit access to detainees by international humanitarian organizations. Food shortages were
widespread, available food was often spoiled or infested with vermin, and many prisoners relied on
family parcels of up to 30 pounds of food and other basic supplies that were brought during each visit.¶
Prison cells lacked adequate water, sanitation, space, light, ventilation, and temperature control.
Running water was rare and, if available, generally ran only for a limited time. Water for drinking and
bathing was foul and frequently contaminated with parasites. Many prisoners reported receiving only
one small glass of water per day, even when confined to sweltering cells during the summer. Vermin
and insect infestations were common, with inmates reporting rats, cockroaches, fleas, lice, bedbugs,
stinging ants, flies, and mosquitoes. Prisoners reported that they lacked access to basic and emergency
medical care, including dental care. Prisoners engaged in hunger strikes throughout the year to demand
medical treatment.¶ Reports of beatings of prisoners were commonplace, and included beatings by
prison officials as well as among prisoners. There were some reports of prisoner-on-prisoner sexual
assaults, generally due to lax security by prison guards, and at least one report of rape by prison guards,
although reports of sexual abuse were generally rare.¶ On February 24, political prisoner Orlando
Zapata Tamayo died in government custody after conducting an 11-week hunger strike. Zapata's
family alleged that prison officials denied him adequate care and medical treatment during the strike.
Government officials, including President Castro, countered that Zapata received adequate treatment
and had been informed of the health risks of a hunger strike.¶ On June 12, the government released
political prisoner Ariel Sigler Amaya, who suffered from paraplegia as a side effect of severe
malnutrition, after seven years in prison. On July 28, Sigler Amaya departed the country to seek medical
treatment abroad.¶ Prison cells were overcrowded, requiring prisoners to sleep on the floor and
limiting freedom of movement during the day. Prisoners often slept on concrete bunks without a
mattress. Where available, mattresses were thin and often infested with vermin. Prisoners reported that
slight improvements at the end of 2009 (such as increases in mattress distributions and some alleviation
of overcrowding) did not continue during the year.¶ Prisoners, family members, and nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) reported inadequate health care, which led to or aggravated hypertension,
diabetes, heart conditions, asthma, skin disease, infections, digestive disorders, and conjunctivitis,
among other maladies. Prisoners also reported outbreaks of dengue, tuberculosis, and hepatitis. Prison
health workers often reused syringes, despite the existence of communicable diseases among
inmates.¶ The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN) reported
multiple prison deaths from heart attacks, asthma attacks, and other chronic medical conditions, as well
as from suicide.¶ The government did not publish the number of prisoners or detainees, nor did it
provide information regarding the number or location of detention centers, which included not only
prisons but also work camps and other kinds of detention facilities. Estimates from unofficial sources of
the prison and detention center population size vary widely, from as low as 30,000 to as high as 80,000.
Men and women were held in separate prisons and police detention facilities. Generally, women
reported suffering the same poor prison conditions as men, including lack of access to basic and
Gonzaga Debate Institute 22
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
emergency medical care. Women also reported lack of access to feminine hygiene products and
adequate prenatal care. The government did not release information on the treatment of minors at
either youth or adult prisons or detention centers. There were reports of inmates as young as 15 in
maximum-security prisons.¶ Political prisoners and the general prison population were kept in similar
conditions. By refusing to wear standard prison uniforms, political prisoners frequently were denied
certain privileges such as access to prison libraries and standard reductions in the severity of their
sentence (for example, being transferred from a maximum security to a medium security prison, or to a
work camp). Political prisoners also reported being threatened or harassed by fellow inmates whom
they thought were acting on orders of prison authorities.¶ Prisoners reported that solitary confinement
was a common punishment for misconduct and that some had been held in isolation for months or
even years at a time. In general prisoners in isolation had restrictions on family visits. The government
sometimes placed healthy prisoners in cells with mentally disturbed inmates.¶ Prisoners and pretrial
detainees had access to visitors, although some political prisoners' relatives reported that prison officials
arbitrarily canceled scheduled visits. Prisoners were permitted limited religious observance. Both the
Catholic Church and the Cuban Council of Churches (CCC) reported improved access to prisoners during
the reporting period. In 2009 member churches of the CCC began holding regular services in selected
prisons, mostly in the province of Havana. The CCC reported that the government allowed continued
expansion of this program during the year, with services offered in most if not all provinces. As in 2009,
there were isolated reports that prison authorities did not inform inmates of their right to religious
assistance, delayed months before responding to such requests, and limited visits to a maximum of two
or three times a year.
Human right violations are explicit in Cuba
Jimenez, Political Analyst, 12 (Miguel Jimenez, 1/1/12, Reader Supported News, “Cuba and the U.S.: Legitimized
Human Rights Violations?” http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/125-125/9224-cuba-and-the-us-legitimized-humanrights-violations, accessed 7-2-13, KB)
For people who sympathize with the Cuban government or with the Cuban Revolution’s triumph against
U.S. imperialism, there is one thing that cannot be denied—human rights violations are evident in
Cuba. For example, Amnesty International reported in 2010 that a “climate of fear” existed among
political activists and dissident journalists living in Cuba. A 2010 U.S. Department of State report also
found similar findings where it was apparent that Cuban prisoners are often beaten and live in horrible
prison conditions, and political opponents encounter systemic oppression. According to CNN
journalist, David Ariostoso, this is to be expected since the “Cuban government has traditionally viewed
dissidents as mercenaries in pay of foreign governments.” Unfortunately, this is the reality that
dissidents often face in Cuba, and Saul Landau agrees that it is a serious problem, but he also expresses
a level of sympathy for the Cuban government in which he is aware “that [Cuba] has real enemies who
have attacked it violently for years.” If human rights violations in Cuba are indeed attributed to the
government’s fear of potential enemy attacks, then it seems that its northern neighbor has also used
similar, if not identical, levels of repression to prevent another terrorist attack.
Cuba violates even most basic human rights
United States Department of State 11
[The U.S. Department of State submits reports on all countries receiving assistance and all United
Nations member states to the U.S. Congress in accordance with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and
the Trade Act of 1974.,“Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011”,
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/186717.pdf, Accessed 7/2/13 I.K]
Gonzaga Debate Institute 23
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Cuba is a totalitarian state led by Raul Castro, who is the chief of state, president of the council of state
and council of ministers, and commander in chief of the armed forces. At the Sixth Communist Party
Congress held in April, delegates also elected Castro as party first secretary. The constitution recognizes
the Communist Party (CP) as the only legal party and “the superior leading force of society and of the
state.” The 2008 legislative elections were neither free nor fair. A CP candidacy commission
preapproved all candidates, and all 614 members ran unopposed. Security forces reported to a national
leadership that included members of the military. The principal human rights abuses were:
abridgement of the right of citizens to change their government; government threats, intimidation,
mobs, harassment, and detentions to prevent citizens from assembling peacefully; and a significant
increase in the number of short-term detentions, which in December rose to the highest monthly
number in 30 years. The following additional human rights abuses continued: beatings, harsh prison
conditions, and selective prosecution and denial of fair trial. Authorities interfered with privacy and
engaged in pervasive monitoring of private communications. The government also placed severe
limitations on freedom of speech and press, restricted freedom of movement, and limited freedom of
religion. The government refused to recognize independent human rights groups or permit them to
function legally. In addition, the government continued to place severe restrictions on worker rights,
including the right to form independent unions. Most human rights abuses were official acts committed
at the direction of the government, and consequently the perpetrators enjoyed impunity for their
actions.
Cuba is dangerous- no value for human rights
Sires, New Jersey U.S. Representative, 9
[Albio, 6/10/09, US House of Representatives, “Human Rights Violations in Cuba,”
http://sires.house.gov/6102009-human-rights-violations-cuba, accessed 7/2/13, AK]
I rise today to speak for those oppressed in Cuba that cannot speak for themselves. As the
Administration is moving forward with immigration talks, as the Organization of American States is
welcoming Cuba, I rise to remind my colleagues in Washington, and my friends abroad that when you
deal with Cuba, you are not dealing with a benign regime, you are dealing with a dangerous regime.
The regime’s most recent crackdown has surfaced in the oppression of religion. In May 2008, Pastor
Omar Gude Perez was arrested and charged with human trafficking. When no evidence was found to
support the charges, the Cuban regime simply changed the charges. He is now on trial for “counterrevolutionary conduct.” A man, who has been dedicated to his religion for twenty years, now faces
years in prison for crimes he never committed. Last week, 30 evangelical, non-political, pastors were
arrested by Cuban authorities. This is a clear attack on religion by the Castro Regime. On top of these
atrocities, we hear that two Castro spies may have been working among us in our government for
decades! It is crucial that the United States government move slowly and cautiously in our
relationship with Cuba. In light of this, the Administration must not make any further decisions
regarding Cuba until a comprehensive damage assessment is completed and Congress is fully briefed.
No human rights in Cuba- people are being arrested for crimes they might commit in
the future.
Ellingwood, Staff Writer for LA Times, 9
[Ken, 11/19/09, LA Times, “Human Rights Groups Slam Cuba,”
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/19/world/fg-cuba-rights19, accessed 7/2/13, AK]
Gonzaga Debate Institute 24
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Restrictions on civil liberties in Cuba have continued to be harsh since President Raul Castro assumed
power from his brother Fidel three years ago, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday. Authorities have
jailed scores of dissidents, protesters and others, often through the use of a "dangerousness"
provision that allows the detention of Cubans on suspicion that they might break the law in the
future, the rights group said in a 123-page report.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 25
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Free Speech/Dissident Crackdowns
Castro’s gov’t constantly restricts the rights of expression and free speech in its
people, subjecting them to various abuses for any forms of political dissent.
Freedom House, Civil Rights organization, 12
[Freedom House, an Independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of
freedom around the world established in 1941, 2012, “Cuba,”
http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2012/cuba, accessed 7/2/13,
MC]
However, in a report published in July 2011, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) claimed that the
government had not in fact abandoned the kind of repressive practices intended to stifle the free flow
of information. The CPJ investigation found that the government continued to aggressively persecute
critical journalists, using methods such as arbitrary arrests, short-term detentions, beatings, smear
campaigns, and surveillance. During March and April, CPJ found that journalists were targeted in more
than 50 instances of repression. Often, these journalists were detained on their way to cover a
demonstration or political event and were held in local police stations for hours and in some cases days.
In at least 11 cases, the arrests were carried out with violence. A particular focus of state-sponsored
intimidation was Hablemos Press, an independent Havana-based news center. Between April and June,
14 of its correspondents were threatened and 10 briefly detained on at least one occasion. In late
September, Hablemos Press correspondent Calixto Ramón Martínez Arias was arrested and held at the
Alternative Penal Center in Havana. Martínez had already been arrested three times in 2011—on April
23, May 25 and June 2—and was said to be awaiting deportation to his home town of Camagüey. The
hounding of Hablemos Press journalists appeared to be part of a new crackdown on anyone trying to
express dissident views.
Foreign journalists continued to be censored and harassed. In April, Spanish journalist Carlos Hernando,
a contributor to El Mundo and the maker of a short documentary about Cuban dissident journalist
Guillermo Fariñas, was arrested and held for five hours in Havana. Accused of “counterrevolutionary
activity,” he was ordered to leave Cuba within 48 hours. In early September, the government decided
not to renew the press credentials of Mauricio Vincent, a 20-year veteran correspondent for the Spanish
daily El País and radio network Cadena SER.
The government owns all traditional media except for a number of underground newsletters. It
operates three national newspapers, four national television stations, six national radio stations, and
one international radio station, in addition to numerous local print and broadcast outlets. All content is
determined by the government, and there is no editorial independence. Cubans do not have the right
to possess or distribute foreign publications, although some international papers are sold in tourist
hotels. Private ownership of electronic media is also prohibited.
Approximately 23 percent of the Cuban population accessed the internet in 2011. However, the vast
majority of internet users have access only to a closely monitored Cuban intranet, consisting of an
encyclopedia, email addresses ending in “.cu” used by universities and government officials, and a few
government news websites. Outside hotels, only a few privileged individuals have a special permit to
access the international network of the World Wide Web. The regime threatens anyone connecting to
the internet illegally with five years in prison, while the sentence for writing “counterrevolutionary”
articles for foreign websites is 20 years. However, the authorities do not have the means to set up a
systematic filtering system. This forces the government to count on several factors to restrict internet
Gonzaga Debate Institute 26
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
access, including the exorbitant cost of connections—about $1.50 per hour from the points of access to
the state-controlled intranet and $7 per hour from a hotel to access the international network (the
average monthly salary is $20)—and infrastructural problems, particularly slow connections. The CPJ
report found that many independent journalists make daily or weekly trips to foreign embassies to use
free internet connections, but noted that this practice put them under further government scrutiny.
It had been hoped that a $70 million fiber-optic cable project would open up internet access, particularly
by increasing connection speeds. Work on the project, financed by the Venezuelan government and laid
by the French company Alcatel-Lucent, began early in 2011 and was supposed to have been completed
by the middle of the year. However, by the end of 2011, the state media was making no further mention
of it, leading to speculation that the project was never completed due to corruption in the Cuban
government. Despite the difficulties in gaining unfettered internet access, there is a small but vibrant
blogging community. Bloggers in Cuba have yet to be jailed for their work, but they often face
harassment and intimidation. Some, such as Yoani Sanchez, have also been prevented from traveling
abroad to receive awards for their work.
Cuban gov’t uses arbitrary detention to control dissenters.
Human Rights Watch, 13
[World Report 2013, Human rights organization that yearly summarizes human rights
conditions in over 90 countries, “Cuba,” http://www.hrw.org/worldreport/2013/country-chapters/cuba, accessed 7/2/13, MC]
In addition to criminal prosecutions, the Cuban government has increasingly relied on arbitrary
detention to harass and intimidate individuals who exercise their fundamental rights. The Cuban
Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation—an independent human rights group that
the government views as illegal—received reports of 2,074 arbitrary detentions by state agents in 2010,
4,123 in 2011, and 5,105 from January to September 2012.
The detentions are often used preemptively to prevent individuals from participating in events viewed
as critical of the government, such as peaceful marches or meetings to discuss politics. Many
dissidents are subjected to beatings and threats as they are detained, even though they do not try to
resist.
Security officers virtually never present arrest orders to justify the detentions and threaten detainees
with criminal sentences if they continue to participate in “counterrevolutionary” activities. Victims of
such arrests are held incommunicado for several hours to several days, often at police stations. In some
cases, they are given an official warning, which prosecutors may later use in criminal trials to show a
pattern of delinquent behavior. Dissidents said these warnings are aimed at discouraging them from
participating in future activities seen as critical of the government.
In July, at least 40 people were arbitrarily detained in Havana at the funeral of dissident Oswaldo Payá,
who died in a car accident. Police officers broke up the non-violent procession and beat participants.
The detainees were taken to aprison encampment where they were held incommunicado for 30 hours
before being released without charge.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 27
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Cuba—2NC AT HR violations decreasing/Reform Now
Number of human right abuses increasing in Cuba now – doubling every year
Martinez, Journalist, 13 (Guillermo I. Martinez, 2/7/13, Sun Sentinal, “Guillermo Martinez: No matter what is said,
rights abuses abound in Cuba,” http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2013-02-07/news/fl-gmcol-oped0207-20130207_1_ra-l-castrocuban-exiles-castro-regime, accessed 7-3-13, KB)
Last week two of them spoke out: Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch. It was a solid
one-two punch; one that should have shaken the naiveté of those who believe in the fairy tales parsed
out by Cuba's propaganda machine.¶ It didn't, for the two reports got little coverage in the American
media. Human rights abuses in Cuba are old news. What is new is the possibility Cuba is changing under
Raúl Castro; that somehow we are close to seeing the day when representatives of the two
governments hug each other publicly after more than half a century of animosity.¶ Reporters Without
Borders, a French-based organization, was the first to prick the bubble of those who believe that
Communism in Cuba can survive with a free press or that the Castro clan would ever permit it.¶ In its
annual report, the organization said Cuba was one of the top 10 regimes in world for its lack of respect
for freedom of expression. It pointed out that repression against its dissidents had grown significantly
in 2012.¶ Two days later Human Rights Watch – also in its annual report – said Cuba was the "only
country in Latin America" where almost all form of political dissent is repressed. This came only a few
days before Cuba held its elections to the National Assembly where the voters are given the opportunity
to vote for a single candidate for each job.¶ The HRW report published last Thursday said that during
2012, Raúl Castro's government "continued to impose political consensus" by force. It cited the
government "detained Cuban citizens arbitrarily, although for brief periods of time; subjected
dissidents to public beatings, and goon squads that repudiated them in public."¶ It also said Cuba
restricted travel of its citizens and forced others into exile.¶ Cuba announced new travel policies in
January, but still grants permission for some to leave while denying it to others. Call it the right to
travel Cuban style – that is, providing the government says you can do it.¶ The importance of reports like
these is that often they quantify the abuses. HRW said that Cuba had increased dramatically the
number of arbitrary short term detention of dissidents – from 2,074 in all of 2010 to 5,105 between
January and September of 2012.
Cuba can be a prosperous country but human rights violations stop this – many abuses
in Cuba now
National Endowment for Democracy, 13 (4/9/14, Soft Power Organization to Promote Democracy
“Democracy and Human Rights in Cuba: The Legacy of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas,” http://www.ned.org/events/democracy-andhuman-rights-in-cuba-the-legacy-of-oswaldo-payá-sardiñas, accessed 7-3-13, KB)
Ms. Paya stressed that Cuba has the capacity, resources and imagination to create a prosperous nation
but are without the human rights required to make those progressive steps.¶ “What we need is
democracy,” she said.¶ Cantón said the protection of human rights could be advanced through building a
stronger civil society sector in Cuba and complimented the work of Ms. Payá and others who promote
civil society on the island.¶ Cantón said the Cuban government has been successful at concealing
human rights violations in Cuba. He added that the Cuban government use articles in the penal code
and the Constitution of Cuba, which violate human rights, to suppress the rights of its citizens. He
cited Article 73 of the penal code which classifies individuals exhibiting “anti-social conduct” as
dangerous, allowing for their detention.¶ Cubans faces inherent challenges to promoting human rights
Gonzaga Debate Institute 28
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
and democratic development—the Cuban people have neither basic freedom of expression nor an
ability to do business or travel freely. Cuban people face a fear of violence and arbitrary arrest, are
without an independent judicial system, and live under laws created to restrict people’s political
participation.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 29
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Mexico Links
Gonzaga Debate Institute 30
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Military Jurisdiction
Military jurisdiction on human rights violations creates worse conditions for the
abused and Congress refuses to change this, regardless of civil society pressure
Buckhout, Latin American Working Group intern, 2013 (Emma, 4/16/2013, “Human Rights
Challenges in Mexico, Part 3: Military Jurisdiction” Latin American Working Group
http://www.lawg.org/action-center/lawg-blog/69/1169#sthash.8nH3xx3g.dpuf, 7/3/13- JM)
“One of the historical themes on the human rights agenda is military jurisdiction and the impacts of
militarization in the country. Since the nineties, the United Nations and the Inter-American System have
issued warnings on several occasions: first, that the use of the armed forces in public safety has
consequences; second, that they should not be used; and third, that in the legislative context of the
country, the use of military jurisdiction creates impunity and permissibility for elements of the armed
forces to conduct themselves outside of the established order.
I work in the Human Rights Center of the Mountain Tlachinollan, an organization located in Guerrero
State in the south of Mexico. Guerrero is a state historically impacted by the army since the 1960s,
where execution and enforced disappearance cases remain in impunity. Over the years, such cases
continue to be registered while the military makes no internal changes and civil institutions allow [their
human rights abuses] to continue. One question that always arises when we talk about the importance
of reforming military jurisdiction is, ‘Why, if the civilian judicial system does not work? Why do you want
human rights violations committed by the military to be judged in civilian courts?’ Unfortunately, we
have found that the military judicial system is even worse [than the civilian court system]. Beyond
obstructing investigations, military jurisdiction generates worse conditions for victims of human
rights violations and their families. Military behavior in the most recent extrajudicial cases for which
we have accompanied the relatives of victims, have exemplified the problems. [The military’s]
protection, impunity, and distance from any accountability or civilian control allow them to act as
they please. Normally they alter the evidence at the scene where the human rights violation occurred
and make up stories that twist the facts so that the civilian system cannot get involved. In the best
case scenario, the victims of human rights violations can eventually approach public or human rights
organizations that can begin to help them, but that is only in the minority of cases. This is a bit of the
general context. For many years we have been petitioning for reform of the military justice code. From
civil society’s perspective, the Mexican constitution ensures that cases of human rights violations
committed by military personnel be tried in civilian courts. However, the military justice code has
broadly established the possibility for [the military] to define and decide when they will be judged.
Usually, cases of human rights violations by the military are processed under military jurisdiction. The
work of many people has brought this issue to the attention of the Inter-American Human Rights Court,
which has ordered Mexico to concretely reform its military justice code. There have been four sentences
since 2009 reiterating the Mexican state’s obligation to said reform. Civil society organizations have
been pushing for military justice code reform particularly in the last four years and we always
encounter the same obstacle: there is a fear in Congress to confront the military. With this new
administration, it remains unclear what their position is regarding the military. Yesterday [during the
Inter-American Human Rights Commission hearings], we heard that a certain distrust and fear of directly
confronting the military institution still exists. Despite the fact that there is a series of
Gonzaga Debate Institute 31
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
recommendations, about fifteen initiatives presented in the last six or seven years that establish clear
standards for how to reform the military justice code to ensure that they do not continue remitting
these investigations, [the Mexican government] continues having discussions with the military. That is
the clearest evidence that government officials are still afraid of how to attempt to control the military.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 32
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Arraigo Detention
Arraigo detention deprives people of their basic liberty and should be completely
stricken from the Mexican Constitution
Human Rights Watch 4-25-2013,
(Human Rights Watch 4-25-2013, “Mexico: Abolish “Arraigo” Detention from Constitution”
<http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/25/mexico-abolish-arraigo-detention-constitution> Date
Accessed: 7-2-2013, BK)
Mexico’s congress should reject a proposed constitutional change on preventive detention, Human
Rights Watch said today. The proposed change, which would reduce the maximum preventive
detention period from 80 days to 40, would not meet international human rights standards. Instead,
Mexico’s Congress should move to eliminate the practice, known as “arraigo,” Human Rights Watch
said. “The practice of arraigo contradicts some of the most sacred principles of Mexico’s Constitution,
such as freedom from arbitrary detention, gives prosecutors a perverse incentive to deprive people of
their liberty before thoroughly investigating them, and undermines basic safeguards against torture,”
said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The only way to ensure more
effective, professional investigations and curb the negligence and abuse that this preventive detention
has fostered is to strike it from the constitution altogether.”
Current pre-charge detention or “Arraigo” violates human rights and the detained are
routinely tortured and raped during this detention time
Human Rights Watch 4-25-2013,
(Human Rights Watch 4-25-2013, “Mexico: Abolish “Arraigo” Detention from Constitution”
<http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/25/mexico-abolish-arraigo-detention-constitution> Date
Accessed: 7-2-2013, BK)
Neither the proposal to reduce the arraigo detention period to a maximum of 40 days, nor the
proposal to replace it with up to 10 days of pre-charge detention under judicial control, complies with
international human rights standards, Human Rights Watch said. Both the United Nations Human Rights
Committee and the European Court of Human Rights have indicated that a period in excess of four days
before a person is brought before a judge to be charged or released is prima facie too long. While the
Inter-American Court has only had to give judgment in a case involving a 15-day detention period with
a 30-day maximum and ruled that it violated the American Convention on Human Rights, it has
explicitly endorsed the approach of the European Court and Human Rights Committee on the
importance of promptness in judicial control over detention. The UN Committee on Torture, the UN
Group on Arbitrary Detentions, the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, and the UN
special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers are among the international entities
that have called for the abolition of pre-charge detention in Mexico. “Any additional time before a
detainee is brought before a judge for charging – whether days or weeks, and whether it is called
arraigo or another name – would constitute an unreasonable infringement on fundamental rights, and
will create an environment ripe for more abuse,” Vivanco said. Human Rights Watch has documented
scores of cases in which victims have been subjected to serious abuses – including torture and rape –
in the period before and during preventive detention under the existing provision. For example, four
men from Baja California – Ramiro Ramírez Martínez, Rodrigo Ramírez Martínez, Orlando Santaolaya
and Ramiro López Vázquez – were arbitrarily detained in June 2009 and taken to an Army base, where
Gonzaga Debate Institute 33
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
military personnel applied electric charges to their genitals, asphyxiated them, pulled out their
toenails, and beat them in front of one another until they signed false confessions. The confessions
were then used against the men to obtain pre-charge detention orders from a judge. They were held
during that period on a military base, where they were subjected to additional abuses.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 34
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Human Trafficking
Government actions against Human Trafficking are inadequate and don’t provide
enough assistance
Department of State 10, OFFICE TO MONITOR AND COMBAT TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS from the
State Department, 6-14-2010, “Trafficking in Persons Report 2010”
http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/142760.htm Accessed: 7-3-2013 BK)
However, according to NGOs, victim services were lacking in some parts of the country and remained
inadequate in light of the significant number of trafficking victims. The government continued to issue
renewable one-year humanitarian visas to foreign victims who assisted with the investigation and
prosecution of their traffickers, and last year nine trafficking victims received temporary humanitarian
parole when they agreed to press charges against their traffickers. Foreign victims who declined to
assist law enforcement personnel, however, were repatriated to their home countries and were not
eligible for victim aid or services in Mexico. Although authorities encouraged victims to assist in
trafficking investigations and prosecutions, many victims in Mexico were afraid to identify themselves
or push for legal remedies due to their fears of retribution from trafficking offenders. Furthermore,
victims had little incentive to participate due to a culture of impunity, reflected by official complicity,
the limited number of trafficking prosecutions and convictions, and the fact that no trafficking victim has
been awarded compensation for damages. The law establishes legal protections for trafficking victims,
though in practice, according to NGOs, witnesses were not offered sufficient protection. The
government provided limited victim services to some repatriated Mexican citizens upon request, and
FEVIMTRA directed identified victims to local resources for assistance.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 35
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Indigenous Peoples
The Mexican government terrorizes indigenous peoples
Randall, Prof. of Law at the University of Dayton, 2001 (Vernellia, Sept. 2001, “Racial
Discrimination: The Mexican Record , Executive Summary, 1-20, 2-5”,
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/06hrights/georegions/northamerica/Mexico01.htm, 7/4/13- JM)
An estimated 80 percent of Mexico's indigenous people live in extreme poverty. The southern state of
Chiapas has a very high concentration of indigenous people, and is Mexico's poorest state. The 1995
census showed that over half of the 3.6 million people of Chiapas lived on either no wage, or less than
the minimum salary of US$4 a day. Indigenous homes have the lowest levels of running water and
electrification. Indigenous populations also endure extremely poor health conditions, with little
access to health resources. In 1990, for example, the state of Chiapas reported the largest number of
new cases of malaria in the country@ Indian children have an estimated 41 per cent malnutrition rate.
Language barriers preclude meaningful participation of indigenous peoples in the public education
system. The General Education Act promotes teaching in the national language (Spanish), which most
Indians do not speak. For those people, education is often essentially unavailable. As a result, the
illiteracy rate among indigenous peoples in Mexico is six times the national average. Spanish illiteracy
particularly disadvantages indigenous peoples in the political process, as ballots and voter information
are only available in Spanish. If citizens of Mexico cannot read or understand Spanish, they are not able
to cast their votes. In addition, Indians' inability to speak Spanish means that they face widespread
employment discrimination in Spanish-speaking areas. Indians are also over represented in lowincome jobs; 40 per cent of migrant farm workers in the country are Indian. Even among menial jobs,
employment discrimination persists. For example, one report indicates that Indians are often not
allowed to do the easier plant packing work; ostensibly because they are "too short" to reach the
vegetables to sort and pick them. Migrant farm workers in the south have been subjected to
discriminatory police brutality. These people claim that police specifically target them for abuse. Reports
indicate that the police target those with "markers" of being Indian, such as skin colour and height.
Indigenous women suffer many instances of "double discrimination." The illiteracy rate among
indigenous women has been reported at nearly 20 per cent higher than the average rate among
indigenous peoples, meaning even lower employment prospects and further removal from the political
system. There are also reported incidences of rape and sexual assault on the indigenous women in the
regions of military presence. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights also notes that justice is
not administered fairly after women report abuse, and that the outcome is often heavily in favor of the
male defendants. The government has perpetuated disorder and paramilitary activity by maintaining a
draconian military presence in many indigenous areas, where property rights and land ownership laws
disadvantaging indigenous peoples have sparked rebellion. The Chiapas rebellion was spearheaded in
1994 by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Human Rights Watch reported aggressive
human rights violations by the Mexican troops sent to the area; more than 150 people died in battle as
the troops moved in. Approximately 80,000 Mexican army personnel continue to patrol the area, in an
effort to keep the EZLN contained.
Indigenous people in Mexico are forced to endure horrible treatment- laundry list
Minority Rights Group International 2009 (2/26/09, “Indigenous peoples”, MRGI,
http://www.minorityrights.org/?lid=4456&tmpl=printpage, 7/4/13- JM)
Gonzaga Debate Institute 36
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
After the 2000 election, the dismantling the 71-year reign of the PRI presented a political opportunity in
which EZLN leaders demanded that the new Fox administration implement the San Andres Accords and
withdraw troops from Chiapas. On 11 March 2000, over 250,000 people gathered in Mexico City in what
was the largest ever march of indigenous people in Mexico, to pressure the Fox administration to
comply with the San Andres Accords. Although Fox did dismantle a number of military encampments in
Chiapas, the government’s 2001 constitutional reforms fell short of what the EZLN and other indigenous
groups wanted. The demands for autonomy, the right to territory, access to natural resources and the
election of municipal authorities were all ignored, leading the EZLN and other important indigenous
groups to refuse to recognize the new constitution. Indigenous farmers have been harassed or attacked
by paramilitary groups as they work their land. Police brutality and mistreatment by the justice
system are commonly reported. Some indigenous communities have been prevented from electing
their customary representatives. Attempts by communities to defend their lands against illegal
loggers or to campaign for their rights have met with violence on the part of armed groups who
appear to operate with impunity. Leaders who speak out for political change are singled out for
persecution by powerful landowners who wield inordinate influence over the local police, political and
judicial systems. The repression can range from incarceration and expulsion from communities to
torture and murder. ‘Disappearances’ and massacres of unarmed peasants have been reported .
Indigenous people are also over-represented in the country’s prison system, languishing in jail as
proceedings stagnate and often spending more time behind bars than a sentence would require were
they actually convicted and sentenced. In many cases, they are not provided with interpreters, even
though a considerable percentage of indigenous people do not speak Spanish and despite guarantees
of such basic protection under the law. Courts often accept confessions extracted under duress as the
main evidence for sentencing. Indigenous women are particularly marginalized in many communities.
About one-third of people who speak an indigenous language are illiterate, which is three times the
national average. Still, the illiteracy rates for women are 20 per cent higher than for their male
counterparts. This pattern can be seen across a broad range of socio-economic indicators, including
education, employment, earnings and income. In addition to persistent poverty and lack of access to
health services, which more markedly affects indigenous women, they also suffer domestic violence.
Although indigenous women are increasingly migrating themselves, males who migrate to cities in
search of work sometimes leave women abandoned and with increased economic hardship. Alcoholism,
child abuse and incest are also reported as significant problems affecting indigenous families. Women
are also more vulnerable to exploitation by their employers, government officials and the judicial
system. According to the 2005 National Household Survey, indigenous women had about half as much
education and were less likely to speak Spanish than indigenous men. Conditions have been exacerbated
by a structural economic crisis that has left indigenous people, who had traditionally sustained
themselves mainly in the agricultural sector, subject to increasing privation. The government has
moved to erode the rights of indigenous peoples to communal lands, which was further exacerbated
by the implementation of NAFTA. This has also contributed to increased migration by indigenous
peoples to Mexico’s urban centres.
Mexican military engages in systematic oppression of indigenous people
Randall, Prof. of Law at the University of Dayton, 2001 (Vernellia, Sept. 2001, “Racial
Discrimination: The Mexican Record , Executive Summary, 1-20, 2-5”,
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/06hrights/georegions/northamerica/Mexico01.htm, 7/4/13- JM)
Gonzaga Debate Institute 37
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
An estimated 80 percent of Mexico's indigenous people live in extreme poverty. The southern state of
Chiapas has a very high concentration of indigenous people, and is Mexico's poorest state. The 1995
census showed that over half of the 3.6 million people of Chiapas lived on either no wage, or less than
the minimum salary of US$4 a day. Indigenous homes have the lowest levels of running water and
electrification. Indigenous populations also endure extremely poor health conditions, with little
access to health resources. In 1990, for example, the state of Chiapas reported the largest number of
new cases of malaria in the country@ Indian children have an estimated 41 per cent malnutrition rate.
Language barriers preclude meaningful participation of indigenous peoples in the public education
system. The General Education Act promotes teaching in the national language (Spanish), which most
Indians do not speak. For those people, education is often essentially unavailable. As a result, the
illiteracy rate among indigenous peoples in Mexico is six times the national average. Spanish illiteracy
particularly disadvantages indigenous peoples in the political process, as ballots and voter information
are only available in Spanish. If citizens of Mexico cannot read or understand Spanish, they are not able
to cast their votes. In addition, Indians' inability to speak Spanish means that they face widespread
employment discrimination in Spanish-speaking areas. Indians are also over represented in lowincome jobs; 40 per cent of migrant farm workers in the country are Indian. Even among menial jobs,
employment discrimination persists. For example, one report indicates that Indians are often not
allowed to do the easier plant packing work; ostensibly because they are "too short" to reach the
vegetables to sort and pick them. Migrant farm workers in the south have been subjected to
discriminatory police brutality. These people claim that police specifically target them for abuse. Reports
indicate that the police target those with "markers" of being Indian, such as skin colour and height.
Indigenous women suffer many instances of "double discrimination." The illiteracy rate among
indigenous women has been reported at nearly 20 per cent higher than the average rate among
indigenous peoples, meaning even lower employment prospects and further removal from the political
system. There are also reported incidences of rape and sexual assault on the indigenous women in the
regions of military presence. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights also notes that justice is
not administered fairly after women report abuse, and that the outcome is often heavily in favor of the
male defendants. The government has perpetuated disorder and paramilitary activity by maintaining a
draconian military presence in many indigenous areas, where property rights and land ownership laws
disadvantaging indigenous peoples have sparked rebellion. The Chiapas rebellion was spearheaded in
1994 by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Human Rights Watch reported aggressive
human rights violations by the Mexican troops sent to the area; more than 150 people died in battle as
the troops moved in. Approximately 80,000 Mexican army personnel continue to patrol the area, in an
effort to keep the EZLN contained.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 38
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Venezuela Links
Gonzaga Debate Institute 39
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Anti-Semitism
Engaging with Venezuela is morally wrong – anti-Semitism.
Cohen, writer on Jewish and international affairs for the Wall Street Journal, 13
[Ben, 7-3-13, IG News, “Will Venezuelan anti-Semitism die with Hugo Chavez?”,
http://itongadol.com/noticias/val/69578/will-venezuelan-anti-semitism-die-with-hugo-chavez.html,
accessed 7/2, CC]
Itongadol.- Over the several months that preceded yesterday's announcement by the Venezuelan
government of the death of Hugo Chavez, there was one overarching theme in the discussion of the
country's political future: to what extent will Chavismo – a term that encapsulates both Chavez's
authoritarian governing style and his radical ideology – survive into the post-Chavez era?¶ It's a question
that is especially pertinent for Venezuela's Jewish community as well as the State of Israel. During his
fourteen years in power, Chavez's foreign policy was grounded on alliances with some of the world's
most bellicosely anti-American states, like Cuba, Iran and Syria. Inevitably, given the close relationship
between America and Israel, Venezuela became the source of some of the most incendiary anti-Israel
rhetoric heard during the last decade and a half. Just as inevitably, this antagonism towards Israel
spilled over into open hostility towards the dwindling Venezuelan Jewish community, which found
itself cast in the role of a fifth column seeking to undermine Chavez's Bolivarian revolution.¶ Now that
Chavez has departed from this world, will the Jew-baiting tendencies of Chavismo persist or subside? At
the moment, sadly, there is little reason for optimism on this front.¶ Those Jewish organizations in the
United States who maintain close contact with the Venezuelan Jewish community point out that, bar
some major unforeseen developments, there is unlikely to be a further mass exodus now that Chavez
is dead. The current size of the community is estimated at between 7-9,000, an enormous dip from the
peak of 30,000 at the start of the Chavez era. The remnant that has stayed put will, for the time being,
watch political developments closely, in the hope that Chavez's successors might adopt a more
pragmatic and conciliatory approach.¶ "It's difficult to predict the future of anti-Semitism in Venezuela,"
Daniel Duquenal, the author of Venezula's leading dissident blog, told me. Should Nicolas Maduro, the
current Vice-President and Chavez's chosen successor, become Venezuela's next leader, Duquenal
argues, there is little reason to believe that anti-Semitism will dissipate. Maduro, a former bus driver, is
an orthodox follower of Chavez, but he lacks the late Comandante's charismatic touch. Against that
weakness, "the pro-Iran, knee jerk anti-American and anti-Israel currents may want to use antiSemitism as an 'argument,'" Duquenal said.¶ Sammy Eppel, a leading Venezuelan Jewish human rights
activist, feels similarly. Those state-controlled Venezuelan media outlets that have promoted antiSemitism in the past will continue to do so "unless they get a clear directive to the contrary," Eppel
said.¶ Eppel is particularly concerned by Maduro's statement that the cancer which claimed Chavez's life
was deliberately implanted. In making this bizarre declaration, Maduro, who told reporters that a
"scientific commission will prove that Comandante Chavez was attacked with this illness," explicitly
invoked the death of the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Echoing the insistence of many Palestinians that
Arafat was poisoned, Maduro said that like Chavez, Arafat was also "inoculated with an illness." Said
Sammy Eppel: "The canard that Chavez's cancer was induced by some foreign conspiracy is troubling."¶
Thus far, Maduro has not linked the poisoning allegations to Israel or the local Jewish community.
However, fears that he might do so can't simply be dismissed as paranoia. Especially over the last ten
years, a clear pattern of anti-Jewish harassment has become visible. In 2004 and again in 2007,
Venezuelan security services raided Jewish institutions, among them the Jewish school in Caracas and
the Hebraica Jewish Community Center. Just last month, an Argentine website revealed that SEBIN, the
Gonzaga Debate Institute 40
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Venezuelan intelligence agency, had been spying on the Espacio Anne Frank, a non-profit center that
uses Anne Frank's experiences under the Nazis as the basis for its human rights and tolerance
programs.¶ A SEBIN dossier asserted that the center "operates as a strategic arm of the Israeli
intelligence in the country...operating in the field of subversive socio-political influence through
representatives of far-right Zionist groups and economic elites." In an email the JTA Jewish news
service, Paulina Gamus, the director of Espacio Anne Frank, candidly responded that, "[T]hey accuse
us of belonging to the Mossad and the Israeli secret services only because we are an institution that
promotes respect of different religions and cultures and has a Jewish component, although we are all
Venezuelans."
Venezuela spies on its Jewish population
Shefler, writer, 13
[Gil, 2/5, Jewish Journal, “Documents show Venezuela spying on Jewish community”,
http://www.jewishjournal.com/world/article/documents_show_venezuela_spying_on_jewish_communi
ty, accessed 7/3/13, VJ]
The Venezuelan human rights group Espacio Anna Frank says its goal is to promote tolerance by
teaching the life story of the teenage diarist murdered by the Nazis. But is there something sinister
lurking behind the organization’s benevolent facade? SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service, seems
to believe so. According to a dossier attributed to SEBIN, the Caracas-based group is actually part of an
Israeli cloak-and-dagger operation aimed at undermining the leftist government of President Hugo
Chavez. "We conclude that [Espacio Anna Frank] operates as a strategic arm of the Israeli intelligence in
the country ... operating in the field of subversive socio-political influence through representatives of
far-right Zionist groups and economic elites,” said the 34-page report. The document, which includes
surveillance photographs of the group’s offices and personal details of its board members, goes on to
suggest that Espacio Anna Frank poses a security threat and should be kept under surveillance
through hidden cameras and listening devices. The report is part of a massive cache of material
obtained by Analises24, an Argentinian media outlet opposed to Chavez, that includes intelligence
reports, clandestinely recorded photos and videos and even personal information on Chavez's family.
Nicolas Solano, Analises24’s editor, told JTA that the website received the material from “a former highranking SEBIN source.” On Jan. 22, the website published 50 documents from the cache that focus on
Venezuelan Jews, Israel and the Middle East. Many more documents will be released soon. “This
material is absolutely genuine,” Solano told JTA. Venezuelan officials at the country's embassy in
Washington would not comment on the documents, forwarding an inquiry to Caracas, which has not
responded. But if the documents are indeed authentic, it would confirm what Venezuelan Jews have
long suspected: That their own government considers them to be a fifth column and is spying on
them. "As part of the security apparatus of the regime, many Venezuelans are under surveillance," said
Sammy Eppel, a Jewish columnist at the Venezuelan daily El Nacional, a leading opposition newspaper.
“The Jewish community is obviously perceived as some sort of threat that warrants those actions.”
Paulina Gamus, one of the directors of Espacio Anna Frank and a former member of the Venezuelan
parliament, said the allegations against her and her organization were spurious. "They accuse [Espacio
Anna Frank] of belonging to the Mossad and the Israeli secret services only because we are an
institution that promotes respect of different religions and cultures and have a Jewish component,
although we are all Venezuelans," she wrote in an email. Venezuelan Jews told JTA they were not
surprised that SEBIN, the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, has been spying on them. State security raided
Jewish institutions twice, in 2004 and 2007, and Chavez has accused Israel of financing the "counterrevolution" in Venezuela. In 2009, a Caracas synagogue was ransacked by an angry mob -- including
Gonzaga Debate Institute 41
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
several police officers -- following Operation Cast Lead, the 2009 Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
Chavez condemned the synagogue attack and several suspects were arrested.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 42
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Human Rights Violations
Venezuela is a human rights violator.
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE 13
[6-16-13, News Daily, “Capriles warns pope of rights violations in Venezuela”,
http://www.newsdaily.com/article/2279d31026a151f74485eb33a5765729/capriles-warns-pope-ofrights-violations-in-venezuela, accessed 7/2, CC]
Venezuela's opposition leader told Pope Francis that the government was violating basic democratic
and human rights, just two days before President Nicolas Maduro visits the Vatican.¶ "We Venezuelans
are subject to repeated human rights violations, without the government bodies in charge of
guaranteeing and protecting those rights taking action, and quite often they are actually parties to the
abuses," Henrique Capriles charged in a letter dated June 12.¶ Maduro was proclaimed the winner of
Venezuela's April 14 presidential elections by a 1.5 percent margin hours after polls closed, but Capriles
has refused to concede, saying the elections were stolen.¶ An audit of the results found no flaws in the
snap vote to replace the late Hugo Chavez, the head of the National Electoral Commission reported
Tuesday.¶ When he learned Maduro would travel to Rome for a UN meeting and to meet with the
Argentine pope, Capriles said he would send Francis a report on the tense political situation in
Venezuela.¶ Capriles charged that Maduro's government was violating rights, and undermining
people's faith in democracy.¶ "A real democracy does not just arise from technically respecting the
rules; it has to grow out of popular belief that the values that inspire democratic processes are being
upheld," Capriles wrote in his letter.¶ Maduro's government is seeking to impose a "collectivist
venture" disregarding democratic values, since it "makes everything conditional upon one's
acceptance of what the government calls 'building socialism,'" Capriles charged.
Venezuela does not respect human rights.
Vyas, Venezuela correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, 13
[Kejal, 5-4-13, Wall Street Journal, “Venezuela's Maduro Rejects Obama's Comments”,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324266904578463752918508658.html, accessed 7/2,
CC]
Street clashes between rival supporters left nine people dead in the immediate aftermath of the
election, and tensions remain high. Each side accuses the other of trying to hijack power and inciting
violence. The government has arrested at least one opposition figure accused of conspiring against the
state.¶ In an interview with U.S. Spanish-language television network Univision, Mr. Obama
questioned whether the "principles of human rights and democracy and freedom of press and
freedom of assembly" in Venezuela were being observed. He noted that the "entire hemisphere has
been watching the violence, the protests, the crackdowns on the opposition."¶ In response, Mr.
Maduro accused Mr. Obama of financing the political opposition and "giving his approval and orders to
the fascist right wing that attacks the people of Venezuela."
Venezuela allows human rights violations – the police.
OLIVARES, Editor of El Universal, 12
[Francisco, 11-24-12, EL UNIVERSAL, No human rights in Venezuela,
http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/121124/no-human-rights-in-venezuela, accessed 7/4,
CC]
Gonzaga Debate Institute 43
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Everyday, eleven citizens who live in the Metropolitan area of the capital city will not be lucky enough
to come back home or will be killed in their own homes. The same prediction is applicable for 53
Venezuelan citizens from other cities.¶ Daily reports of accidents and crime show the variety of
circumstances and scenarios in which Venezuelans are murdered. Some of them are killed in the
streets, whereas others are killed in their own living places, but their stories appear to be accepted as
some kind of unknown unstoppable force that override people's choices. It concerns 53 victims from the
several millions of citizens that accept such events as a forced phenomenon, and who seem to be
chosen randomly by an unknown force. In the distance, the phenomenon is accepted as some kind of
misfortune which Venezuela cannot escape from. Last year stood out as the most violent year of all
times, the "tribute" was paid by 19,336 people.¶ Venezuela was recently accepted to join the United
Nations Human Rights Council; an event that represents -for Venezuelan Ambassador Jorge Valero- a
recognition of the achievements made by the Bolivarian Revolution regarding Human Rights, without
taking into consideration that such incumbency belongs to Venezuela and not to the Government. It is
also worth highlighting that belonging to such organization does not stand for a certificate or warranty
which states that Venezuela complies with the international guidelines in this field.¶ One of the most
relevant tasks that a Government should work on is the advocacy of the right of life, which for the
record- appears to be absent in Venezuela; this is demonstrated in the numbers estimated by the UN,
which places Venezuela as the third most violent country in the Americas, after the two leading
countries: Honduras and Salvador.¶ Leading the billboard as one of the most violent countries¶ The UN
Office on Drugs and Crimes places Venezuela as one of the countries with the highest violence rate in
the world. In 1995, Venezuela's murder rate was 12 homicides per one hundred thousand habitants,
whereas in 2011, we reached the leading places with a number of 45.1 homicides per one hundred
thousand habitants. Nevertheless, the number provided by the UN is quite conservative, if we take
into consideration that this organization bases its data by establishing an average in the data
estimated by the NGOs and the official state-run organizations. In contrast, the National Statistics
Institute (INE) records a much higher rate for 2011. According to its calculations, Venezuela recorded 75
homicides per every one hundred thousand habitants. "This is insane" upholds the president of NGO
Cofavic a human rights advocate. The expert indicates that the UN considers a rate above 10 as an
"epidemic."¶ That is to say, with such numbers, there is no reason to celebrate our entry into the UN
Council; instead, we should pronounce the country in national emergency and then explain why 19
security plans have made no significant progress in 14 years of government.¶ Although President Hugo
Chávez has maintained that violence in Venezuela has been a matter of perception, holding the media
responsible for the spreading and manipulation of the numbers, besides the ones calculated by INE,
the murder numbers provided by the last current plan named "Misión a Toda Vida Venezuela," (Mission
at All Life) equally show the steadily rising murder rate that goes from 12 homicides per every one
hundred thousand habitants in 1991 to 50 homicides per every one hundred thousand habitants in
2009.¶ Cofavic recently submitted in the regular session of hearings before the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) a report on "violence and impunity," where the matter of "the
right of life and personal integrity," is highlighted. The report focused mainly on the numbers provided
by the very members of state-led organizations. Eventually, some of them reported numbers above the
ones presented by some NGOs.¶ Venezuela and Human Rights¶ Vice-President Nicolás Maduro expressed
during the TV program Contragolpe broadcasted by state-run TV channel VTV (Venezolana de
Televisión) when celebrating the position reached by Venezuela- that Venezuela "greatly ensures
Human Rights" and highlighted that Venezuela deserves to be in the UN Human Rights Council, in a year
of victory for the Bolivarian Revolution.¶ However, the numbers regarding human rights violations do not
support the statements made by the Venezuelan Government, which also seem to be great defenders of
people's rights.¶ Liliana Ortega, the president of Cofavic, explains that the Venezuelan Public Ministry
Gonzaga Debate Institute 44
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
admitted that thirty thousand new cases of human rights abuses had been submitted to the
government authority in 2006-2010. In other words, based on the lodged complaints, the Attorney
General's Office took a note in their annual reports for the aforementioned years. In such material, it is
not possible to determine whether they are cases related to torture or violation of the right to life or
freedom of speech; however, they all belong to the same field: human rights abuses.¶ What happens
to these cases? Liliana Ortega explains that according to the data provided by the Public Ministry, 93%
ends up dismissed or overruled, the remaining 7% gets to attend a hearing and make their accusations
before a judge; whereas only 4% is punished. That 7% is formed by those victims who have been lucky
enough to see a judge, and have been able to be listened by the court.¶ In 2011, the Attorney General's
Office received 8,813 new cases of human rights violations. They officially assume that these are
denounced cases. Then, what happens? Well simply put that, 97% ended up dismissed and stored in
prosecutor files, which constitutes a rising 4%. In this sense, only 3% was taken to court, but there are
not numbers of conviction. "This shows a trend to reduce justice in Venezuela," Ortega points out.¶
Extrajudicial executions¶ Another aspect highlighted in the report provided by Cofavic before the InterAmerican Commission is the participation of police officers in the so-called extrajudicial executions. The
Venezuelan Government estimates that between 20 % and 25 % of the police officers have been
involved in criminal activities. In the same sense, the very Public Ministry indicates that between 2000
and 2008, a number of 1,000 annual cases of deaths due to abuse of authority were recorded. In the
meantime, in 2010, the very Ministry of Interior and Justice recorded 3,492 cases of killings
perpetrated by the police.¶ It is worth noting that these rising deaths are not added to the homicide
numbers, as most cases are identified as "resisting arrest."
Maduro misuses the National Guard.
AP 13
[4-18-13, USA Today, “Venezuela crackdown deemed worst in years”,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/04/18/report-venezuela-crackdown/2095321/,
accessed 7/2, CC]
CARACAS, Venezuxela (AP) — National Guard troops beat dozens of opposition supporters inside a
barracks for refusing to accept the government-certified electoral victory of Hugo Chavez's heir, a
leading human rights lawyer charged Thursday in what he called Venezuela's worst political
repression in six years.¶ Alfredo Romero said his group's lawyers also compiled evidence supporting
opposition activists' claims that National Guard troops had used excessive force against protesters,
including shooting some point-blank with plastic shotgun pellets.¶ As details of the crackdown
emerged, Nicolas Maduro prepared to be sworn in as president and the speaker of the National
Assembly again threatened to bar the opposition from its only remaining political platform, the
legislature, unless it recognized Maduro's legitimacy.¶ Romero said the beatings occurred at National
Guard barracks No. 47 in the western city of Barquisimeto after at least 300 protesters were arrested
across Venezuela for backing opposition candidate Henrique Capriles' demand for a recount of all the
votes cast Sunday.¶ Interrogators "put baseball caps on these kids' heads with a pro-government
insignia ... and made them say they recognized the Maduro government, and if they said 'No' they
were beaten," Romero said, adding that most of the detainees ranged in age from 15 to 22.¶ Asked
about the allegations, Interior Ministry spokesman Jorge Galindo called them "totally false, absurd and
without basis." He said the detainees, though in a military barracks, were being overseen by ministry
officials to "guarantee their rights."¶ Romero called the crackdown Venezuela's worst since Chavez shut
down the opposition TV station RCTV in 2006 when more than 250 people were arrested. His 12-yearold group, Foro Penal Venezolano, has more than 200 lawyers who represent without charge people
they consider political prisoners.¶ He said the group has complained to the Inter-American Human
Gonzaga Debate Institute 45
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Rights Commission, whose rulings Venezuela's government no longer recognizes, and is preparing a
complaint to the International Criminal Court.¶ One of the worst cases of excessive force this week
occurred in the central city of Valencia, members of the opposition's youth wing said in Caracas. ¶ They
said National Guardsmen fired plastic pellets at extremely close range at a group protesting the
regime-friendly National Electoral Council's decision to ratify the victory of Nicolas Maduro.¶ Maduro is
to be sworn in Friday in the National Assembly at a ceremony being boycotted by the opposition
because its deputies are not being allowed to address the body unless they recognize his presidency as
legitimate.¶ The government says 15 countries including Iran, China and Saudi Arabia were sending highlevel delegations. Brazil said its president, Dilma Rousseff, was attending as was Argentina's Cristina
Fernandez, but it was not clear whether the president of neighboring Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos,
would attend.¶ On Thursday, Maduro headed to Lima, Peru, for an evening meeting of presidents of the
Union of South American Nations, UNASUR, to discuss Venezuela's post-election tensions.¶ The meeting
was convened by Peru's president, Ollanta Humala, who holds the organization's rotating chair, and
every leader on the continent save Ecuador's Rafael Correa, who was traveling in Europe, was attending,
said Peru's deputy foreign minister, Fernando Rojas.¶ The youth opposition wing members displayed
photographs showing deep, bloody wounds on the skin the hand and arm of Jonny Alvarado, a local
leader of the centrist Proyecto Venezuela party who they said had been shot three times in the arm and
undergone two surgeries in an attempt to save his hand.¶ The AP confirmed Alvarado's non-lifethreatening injuries with the director of the hospital where he was treated.¶ At least 10 other activists
were hit by pellets, some in the head, but not hurt as seriously, said Carlos Graffe, Proyecto Venezuela's
youth leader. He said other protesters were punched or hit with batons by National Guardsmen.¶ A total
of 400 were injured nationwide by authorities and government backers, said Juan Requesens, national
coordinator of the opposition's youth wing.¶ In Monagas state, a group of 30 to 40 protesters was
attacked by pro-government forces, then detained by authorities when they tried to flee, said Diego
Scharifker, president of the youth wing of the Nuevo Tiempo party. He said virtually all were antigovernment, but National Guard members had even swept up a handful of pro-government youth
during sweeps of streets.¶ Romero said other activists described being arrested as they were walking
home from peaceful protests.¶ The government alleges Capriles' backers have incited all the
postelection violence, which it says has caused eight deaths and 70 injuries. It also charges the
opposition loyalists have burned eight health clinics and several offices of the ruling United Socialist
Party of Venezuela.¶ Non-government media and private citizens have published photos of unmolested
clinics and party offices that they said disproved the claims.¶ Chief Prosecutor Luisa Ortega reiterated on
Thursday the government's contention that neither it nor its supporters were to blame for any of the
violence that followed Sunday's vote.¶ "A common denominator is that the wounded and injured are all
supporters of Chavismo," she said in an interview on state TV.¶ Romero said 71 youths in all were
arrested in Barquisimeto on Monday and Tuesday, when opposition supporters marched on regional
offices of the electoral council, while 83 were arrested in Valencia over those two days.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 46
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Socialism
Socialism is evil and a form of Slavery
Williams, professor of economics at George Mason Univeristy, 2008
[Walter E., 11/19/08, WND, WHY SOCIALISM IS EVIL, http://www.wnd.com/2008/11/81349/, 7-2-13,
GZ]
Evil acts can be given an aura of moral legitimacy by noble-sounding socialistic expressions such as
spreading the wealth, income redistribution or caring for the less fortunate. Let’s think about
socialism. Imagine there’s an elderly widow down the street from you. She has neither the strength to
mow her lawn nor enough money to hire someone to do it. Here’s my question to you, and I’m almost
afraid for the answer: Would you support a government mandate that forces one of your neighbors to
mow the lady’s lawn each week? If he failed to follow the government orders, would you approve of
some kind of punishment ranging from house arrest and fines to imprisonment? I’m hoping that the
average American would condemn such a government mandate because it would be a form of slavery,
the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.¶ Would there be the same
condemnation if instead of the government forcing your neighbor to physically mow the widow’s lawn,
the government forced him to give the lady $40 of his weekly earnings? That way the widow could hire
someone to mow her lawn. I’d say that there is little difference between the mandates. While the
mandate’s mechanism differs, it is nonetheless the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of
another.¶ Probably most Americans would have a clearer conscience if all the neighbors were forced to
put money in a government pot and a government agency would send the widow a weekly sum of $40
to hire someone to mow her lawn. This mechanism makes the particular victim invisible, but it still boils
down to one person being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another. Putting the money into a
government pot makes palatable acts that would otherwise be deemed morally offensive.¶ This is why
socialism is evil. It employs evil means, coercion or taking the property of one person, to accomplish
good ends, helping one’s fellow man. Helping one’s fellow man in need, by reaching into one’s own
pockets, is a laudable and praiseworthy goal. Doing the same through coercion and reaching into
another’s pockets has no redeeming features and is worthy of condemnation.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 47
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT Maduro isn’t Chavez
Maduro will continue Chavez’s policies
O’Brian-Bours, writer, 13
[Robinson, March, PolicyMic, “Venezuela Election: Why Nicolas Maduro Won't Improve Relations With
the United States”, http://www.policymic.com/articles/29758/venezuela-election-why-nicolas-madurowon-t-improve-relations-with-the-united-states, accessed 7/3/13, VJ]
With it not being enough to accuse the U.S. of murdering Chavez, Maduro has resurrected the all-toofamiliar rants of his socialist mentor. “Sooner rather than later the imperialist elites who govern the
United States will have to learn to live with absolute respect with the insurrectional peoples of
America,” declared Maduro. “We’ve decided to be free, and nothing and no one will take that
independence that was re-conquered with our commander Hugo Chavez at the helm.” Worried by the
charisma and support of Henrique Capriles Radonski, the acting president has decided on two obvious
paths to victory. The first is playing on the public sympathy and mourning for Chavez, building a cult
around the man's memory to help keep his movement alive. The second is to focus his hatred on the
United States, blaming the Americans for the world's ills and distracting the Venezuelans from the
sordid state of affairs that their socialist strongman left them. As a sign of things to come, Maduro
expelled several American diplomats from Venezuela. The United States has returned the favor,
booting two Venezuelan diplomats out of the country. Maduro has also kowtowed to that particularly
sleazy fraternity of world leaders that his predecessor so very much adored, indicating continuation of
Venezuela's disastrous support for human rights abusers and anti-American regimes.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 48
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Impacts + Solvency
Gonzaga Debate Institute 49
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Dehumanization
Acts of evil transform people into objects—we have the responsibility to fight this in
every situation
Gordon & Gordon, 95 (Haim & Rivca, Department of Education, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva,
Israel, Sartre & Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle, Questia)
How do we define Evil? If asked, Sartre would probably say that Evil is any attempt to purposely
destroy the freedom of a person; attaining this goal often requires oppressing, exploiting,
enslaving, or killing him or her. Implied in this definition is that the evildoer intentionally makes
persons into objects whose freedom is disregarded or not respected. Note that both statements
include the possibility of doing Evil to oneself. We accept both statements as working definitions that
we shall use throughout this book. Indeed, this book may be viewed as a limited discussion of
Sartre's definition of Evil by persons who wish to learn how to perceive and to fight Evil. Underlying
this definition of Evil is our acceptance of Sartre's tenet that human beings are condemned to be
free, hence human existence means the assuming of responsibility for every situation in which one
finds oneself.
Dehumanization is the worst comprehensible impact: it outweighs everything
Montagu & Matson, anthropologist and professor of American Studies, 83
(Ashley and Floyd, “The Dehumanization of Man,” 1983)
This book is concerned with an invisible disease, an affliction of the spirit, which has been ravaging
humanity in recent times without surcrease and virtually without resistance, and which has now
reached epidemic proportions in the Western world. The contagion is unknown to science and
unreckognized by medicine (pyschiatry aside); yet its wasting symptoms are plain for all to see and its
lethal effects are everywhere on display. It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm,
yet the extent of its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or
natural calamity on record-and it's potential damage to the quality of human life and the fabric of
civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason the sickness of the soul might well be called
the "Fifth horseman of the apocalypse." It's more conventional name, of course, is
dehumanization.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 50
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Must Reject
Complicity or rejection of evil occurs in specific, concrete struggles
Gordon & Gordon, 95
(Haim & Rivca, Department of Education, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel, Sartre & Evil:
Guidelines for a Struggle, Questia)
And finally, although we fight Evil, we are definitely not Manichean. Rather, we are engaged in
specific, concrete, down-to-earth struggles against the destruction of freedom here in the world.
Of course, we have made many mistakes in our attempts to fight evil. Still, in relating to Good and
Evil, we have been guided by what the elderly Sartre said to Simone de Beauvoir in one of her
interviews with him:
Essentially, the Good is that which is useful to human freedom, that which allows it to give their full
value to objects it has realized. Evil is that which is harmful to human freedom, that which holds men
out as not being free and which, for example, creates the determinism of the sociologists of a certain
period. 5
These points lead to probably the most important conclusion of this book, which can be stated at the
outset. Our study of Sartre's writings has in a somewhat roundabout manner proved that
engagement in the world for a better world can be a way of life, while also being central to a
philosophical approach -- even in the twentieth century, with its degradation of existence and its
multitude of horrors. Moreover, one need not be a genius like Sartre to attempt to live such an
engaging and worthy life, informed by a philosophy that respects and struggles for freedom. Sartre
repeatedly indicated that lucidity, courage, authenticity, and the willingness to see, to confront, and
to fight evil are possibilities that are open to many, if not to all people, who choose to be engaged.
We hope that this book will help a few such people benefit from Sartre's valuable insights and
profound guidance while choosing to fight Evil.
Individuals share responsibility with the government for policies supporting repressive
regimes
Filice – 1990
(Carlo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York, Geneseo, Human Rights
Quarterly, August, Vol. 12, No. 3. pp. 397-414, “On the Obligation to Keep Informed about Distant
Atrocities,” JStor)
Has the average citizen contributed to a tiny degree, and in an unfair way, to the moral atrocities
committed by foreign governments and the US government in Vietnam? Those who would answer
"yes" can advance the following argument:
1. In a democratic country, the government speaks for citizens and invests some of their tax money
in foreign affairs. It performs this general function with their knowledge and approval. It is, thus,
their agent or broker.
2. The US government has helped, and continues to help, many brutal foreign regimes, often with
some of its citizens’ tax money.
3. Therefore, US citizens' agent has clearly supported brutal foreign regimes.
4. A person shares responsibility with the agent for what the latter does while carrying out the
duties with which it is charged; and the responsibility is shared even when the agent's actions are
taken without the person's knowledge, so long as the agent is granted broad powers of action.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 51
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
5. The US government is given broad powers of action, especially in foreign affairs, and often does
not fully inform the citizens about its foreign policies.
6. Therefore, the average US citizen shares responsibility with the government for its foreign affairs
policies which often support brutal foreign regimes.
Having thus contributed to moral atrocities, US citizens are morally obligated to help the victims of
such atrocities by way of compensation, if nothing else.12
Citizens have a moral obligation to reject support for governments that engage in
major human rights violations
Filice – 1990
(Carlo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York, Geneseo, Human Rights
Quarterly, August, Vol. 12, No. 3. pp. 397-414, “On the Obligation to Keep Informed about Distant
Atrocities,” JStor)
But what if the government, as our agent, conceals from us or at least fails to explicitly inform us
about its activities in other parts of the world? Would this not relieve us of the responsibility for the
related atrocities despite our contribution to these atrocities through, for example, unwitting
financial support? To answer this, we would have to know how actively we tend to seek the relevant
information from our agent; how willing we are to close our eyes to its practices; and whether there
are sources which can, if necessary, provide us with the relevant information. What has already been
said on these issues shows that we can uncover our government's role in foreign atrocities. In that
case we, the citizens, remain partially responsible for its foreign deeds, and our compensatory
obligation stands. In fact, once the moral obligation is seen as deriving from the principle of
compensatory justice, our duty to help alleviate systematic human rights abuses becomes much
stronger than would be the case if it derived merely from a general obligation to prevent harm to
people we have in no way affected. Our actions and omissions have affected and do affect distant
people, however unwitting we may be in this.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 52
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Human Rights Impacts
Democracy and human rights are the utmost important qualities in humanity
Gyatso, The XIV Dalai Lama, 2008
[Tenzin, 12-10-08, The Dalai Lama, Human Rights, Democracy and Freedom,
http://www.dalailama.com/messages/world-peace/human-rights-democracy-and-freedom, 7-9-13, GZ]
This year, 2008, marks the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948–2008).
This declaration affirms that all human beings have the right to freedom from want and freedom from
fear. These human rights are inclusive, interdependent and universal.¶ Whether we are concerned with
suffering born of poverty, with denial of freedom, with armed conflict, or with a reckless attitude to the
natural environment everywhere, we should not view these events in isolation. Eventually their
repercussions are felt by all of us. We, therefore, need effective international action to address these
global issues from the perspective of the oneness of humanity, and from a profound understanding of
the deeply interconnected nature of today's world.¶ At birth, all human beings are naturally endowed
with the qualities we need for our survival, such as caring, nurturing and loving kindness. However,
despite already possessing such positive qualities, we tend to neglect them. As a result, humanity faces
unnecessary problems. What we need to do is to make more effort to sustain and develop these
qualities. Therefore, the promotion of human values is of primary importance. We also need to focus
on cultivating good human relations, for, regardless of differences in nationality, religious faith, race, or
whether people are rich or poor, educated or not, we are all human beings. When we are facing
difficulties, we invariably meet someone, who may be a stranger, who immediately offers us help. We all
depend on each other in difficult circumstances, and we do so unconditionally. We do not ask who
people are before we offer them help. We help because they are human beings like us.¶ Closing the Gap
Between Rich and Poor¶ Our world is increasingly interdependent, but I wonder if we truly understand
that our interdependent human community has to be compassionate; compassionate in our choice of
goals, compassionate in our means of cooperation and our pursuit of these goals. The awesome power
that economic institutions have acquired in our society, and the distressing effects that poverty
continues to wreak, should make all of us look for means of transforming our economy into one based
on compassion. This form of compassion affirms the principles of dignity and justice for all embodied in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.¶ Wherever it occurs, poverty is a significant contributor to
social disharmony, ill health, suffering and armed conflict. If we continue along our present path, the
situation could become irreparable. This constantly increasing gap between the ‘haves' and ‘havenots' creates suffering for everyone. Concerned not only for ourselves, our families, our community and
country, we must also feel a responsibility for the individuals, communities and peoples who make up
the human family as a whole. We require not only compassion for those who suffer, but also a
commitment to ensuring social justice.¶ If we are serious in our commitment to the fundamental
principles of equality that I believe lie at the heart of the concept of human rights, today's economic
disparity can no longer be ignored. It is not enough merely to say that all human beings must enjoy
equal dignity. This must be translated into action.¶ Democracy and Peace¶ Today, the values of
democracy, open society, respect for human rights, and equality are becoming recognized all over the
world as universal values. To my mind there is an intimate connection between democratic values and
the fundamental values of human goodness. Where there is democracy there is a greater possibility
for the citizens of the country to express their basic human qualities, and where these basic human
qualities prevail, there is also a greater scope for strengthening democracy. Most importantly,
democracy is also the most effective basis for ensuring world peace.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 53
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Torture Evil
Torture is an intrinsic evil that destroys human dignity—uniquely bad when
government endorsed.
USCCB, 12
[United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2012, USCCB, “TORTURE IS AN INTRINSIC
EVIL,” http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-anddignity/torture/upload/torture-is-an-intrinsic-evil-study-guide.pdf, accessed 7/9/13,
MC]
Torture destroys our human dignity in multiple ways. An act of such violence pushes individuals and
members within a society towards two different forms of dehumanization: savagery, when feelings of
anger or fear overwhelm principles of ethics and human rights; and barbarism, when perceived needs
for security and supremacy destroy feelings of faith, solidarity and compassion. In fact, torture
compromises the human dignity of both the victim and the perpetrator, estranging the torturer from
God, and debasing the integrity of the tortured.
What is more, when members of a society allow violent, dehumanizing practices to occur within their
social sphere, that society’s collective integrity and social fabric are greatly eroded. When a government
not only allows, but sponsors, degrading, dehumanizing acts of violence, it sets a dangerous precedent
that undermines the respect for everyone’s human dignity and human rights. 
The Catechism of the Church makes clear that torture is a grave sin which violates the
Fifth Commandment. In his 1993 Encyclical, Veritas Splendor, Pope John Paul II
included physical and mental torture in his list of social evils that are not only shameful,
but “intrinsically evil.”
Gonzaga Debate Institute 54
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Rape Evil
Rape is an indisputably evil crime against humanity
Amnesty, 10
[Amnesty International, an international group dedicated to providing equality for
everyone in the world, with leaders from around world, and more than 3 million
members, “DOCUMENT - RAPE AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE: HUMAN RIGHTS LAW AND
STANDARDS IN THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT,”
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/IOR53/001/2011/en/e9e2dea0-f74f-46b58376-f30c32a0b3b6/ior530012011en.html, accessed 7/9/13, MC]
Human rights law and standards requires that investigations and prosecutions of the crimes of rape
and sexual violence must be undertaken with careful attention given to the task of challenging
stereotypes, which tend to undermine women’s equality before the law. The integrity of investigations
and prosecutions should not be tainted by stereotypical assumptions, including assumptions about
sexual violence towards men and boys, as well as towards women and girls.
All references to the term ‘consent’ within the Elements of Crimes must be interpreted consistently with
a fuller, more accurate and human-rights based understanding of the word consent – that a consensual
decision is a decision made without force, threat of force, coercion, or taking advantage of a coercive
environment. Where evidence of force, threat of force or coercion is present, there should absolutely be
no additional element of law of consent for the prosecution to prove.
Acts of rape which are committed in the jurisdiction of the Court can be identified as war crimes and
crimes against humanity of rape and torture. The requirement in human rights law to eradicate
stereotypes requires all acts of rape within the jurisdiction of the Court to be prosecuted as torture, in
order to address stereotypical assumptions that rape, particularly rape of women and girls, is not a
serious crime, and to acknowledge and make clear the perpetrators’ use of rape and sexual violence to
intimidate, discriminate and humiliate victims.
Condoning sexual violence creates voiceless victims who fear speaking up due to fear
of stigma.
[Amnesty International, an international group dedicated to providing equality for
everyone in the world, with leaders from around world, and more than 3 million
members, “DOCUMENT - RAPE AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE: HUMAN RIGHTS LAW AND
STANDARDS IN THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT,”
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/IOR53/001/2011/en/e9e2dea0-f74f-46b58376-f30c32a0b3b6/ior530012011en.html, accessed 7/9/13, MC]
Sexual violence, including rape, is one of the most significant aspects of discriminatory violence
against women.2 The realities of rape and sexual abuse in armed conflict3 and in peacetime4 have
been documented extensively over many years. The right to equality, including equality before the
law, are violated by such crimes and the impunity that the perpetrators enjoy in the overwhelming
majority of cases.5 Men and boys who are raped frequently fear bringing complaints of rape to the
attention of the authorities, due to the victim’s fear of stigma.6
Gonzaga Debate Institute 55
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Reject Oppression of Women
The aff’s moral tunnel vision papers over the oppression of women—refusal of the
plan is key
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, 129-130, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
One cannot struggle actively against Evil in society without expressing moral indignation and without
abandoning a detached objective stance. The so-called detached objective stance, which has become
so acceptable in contemporary society, is often a flight from perceiving Evil; when such occurs it is
merely another manner of supporting the status quo. As already emphasized, not very many twentiethcentury philosophers have proved willing to abandon the comforts of a detached objective stance;
consequently, few have expressed moral indignation. (We have already shown how Anglo-Saxon social
scientists conform to the approach of the rightthinking man and flee moral judgments and moral
indignation.) Even among the few philosophers who forcefully expressed moral indignation, Sartre is
quite exceptional. Because, like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, his moral indignation has an original tone. It
is this unique tone that often helps Sartre to provide valuable insights on how to perceive Evil in society
and how to struggle against it. An important characteristic of Sartre's tone that distinguishes it from the
tone of, say, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is the abundance of selfcriticism and self-derision. Sartre, like
Socrates, loved to question everything, including himself. What is more, Sartre is a critic of himself who
delights in showing his readers his past weaknesses and stupid failings. Such questioning and delight in
self-criticism is one of the prominent tones of his autobiography The Words, and often accompanies the
moral indignation that appears in many of Sartre's other social and political writings. In the following
section, we discuss one such essay. It contains concise, specific, and valid insights for the struggler
against Evil: Sartre's Foreword to a reissuing of Paul Nizan Aden Arabie. A word of caution: Sartre's
Foreword to Paul Nizan Aden Arabie is a mixed bag. The first pages include, together with his poignant
selfcriticism, some of Sartre's most penetrating insights on the dangers we must evade while struggling
against Evil; in contrast, the last pages reveal Sartre making a host of mistakes, some of them of the kind
that he himself attacks in the first part of the Foreword and in other writings. Here we shall discuss
Sartre's helpful insights. In the last chapter of this section, in which we criticize Sartre, we shall return to
the gross insensitivities and unexcusable myopia that appear in the latter part of this essay. "Don't
believe in Santa Claus," Nizan repeatedly told Sartre, and looked down at his fingernails with graceful
insolence. But as Sartre shows through ridiculing some of his own past political mistakes, that is exactly
what persons sensitive to Evil often do. These persons insist upon believing in Santa Claus, in
someone who will bring them the presents to which they aspire -- including the presents of justice and
freedom. Such a belief is stupid; it includes nothing of the innocence of children hanging up their
stockings above the fireplace on Christmas Eve. Sartre forcefully demands that we evade such stupidity
in struggling against Evil, especially since such a belief often leads many people to seek reconciliation
with their evil enemies. But as long as the enemies are continuing to destroy freedom, to oppress, and
to exploit, in short, to do Evil, such a reconciliation is a sellout. As is every compromise with a prevalent
Evil. It is also a fleeing from the justified hatred of Evil that Nizan was willing to fervently express in his
life and books. Consider the widespread oppression of women. Every compromise with this
oppression, any reconciliation with the male oppressors is a sellout. Moreover, there is no Santa Claus
who will bring women in the world justice, equality, and freedom. What members of the women's
movement and the men who support them face is a long, difficult day-to-day struggle against the
Gonzaga Debate Institute 56
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
basic Evil of gender oppression and exploitation of women. Therefore, women or men who believe in
a Santa Claus who will bring women justice, freedom, and equality are fools. And those who do not
believe in Santa Claus, who continue to struggle for freedom and equality for all women, must not flee
from hating those men and those institutions that continue to oppress, exploit, debase, and degrade
women.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 57
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Reject Anti-Semitism
Tolerance of discrimination guarantees error replication
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, 118-119, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
One of the reasons that it is important to confront racism immediately is that the racist, as Sartre
describes him or her, fears truth. All truth, any truth. Because what usually characterizes truth is
rational reasoning about facts, and such reasoning will always undermine the anti-Semite's unflexible,
opaque being-in-the-world. How? By demanding that the anti-Semite think! And that is exactly what
all racists refuse to do. Thinking requires the acceptance of rational reasoning as compelling; in addition,
it is done in general terms. Furthermore, as Kant has shown, such rational reasoning and thinking can
lead a person to the practical knowledge of a morality that sees each person as an end. Thus, even
though it would probably be hard to find a racist who has read Kant, and we doubt that any committed
racist has ever understood Critique of Practical Reason, from our limited experience with racists, they all
sense intuitively that rational reasoning about facts and about human morality condemns their being-inthe-world. This fear of the truth is one of the secrets of the broad appeal of racism. Truth, after all, is
rarely flattering. It will usually not pet my ego; it may demand that I utterly change some of my
cherished views, and perhaps even my way of life. To evade the encounter with Truth many mediocre
people will flee into bad faith and self-deceit. Enter the racist. Through his or her being-in-the-world,
which has embraced bad faith and self-deceit as a way of life, such a flight attains the legitimacy of a
possible way of being. The mediocre person who flees the truth of one's inferiority basks in the racist's
embodied legitimacy. It is just one step to the question, Why not be tolerant of these racist and antiSemitic "opinions" and "tastes"? Truth, however, can be and should be a powerful aid in struggling
against racism. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre does not explicitly describe how to attain assistance from
Truth in these struggles, although such an approach is in the background of the essay. We can make this
approach explicit: standing up for Truth has an integrity of its own that many people will look up to, or
at least appreciate -- for one reason. Pursuit of Truth, as the ancient Greeks already noted and as most
people will sense, is worthy in itself. Not for the committed racist, of course. Such people have put
themselves beyond such attitudes. For them manipulation of lies is a way of being. Perhaps we should
add that some of the thinkers of ancient Greece called persons who do not consider Truth worthy in
itself barbarians. Instead of pursuit of Truth the racist will repeatedly emphasize the importance of
one's feelings. These feelings are the anti-Semite's excuse for one's hatred of Jews. Such a person will
describe in detail an intolerable repugnance that engulfs him whenever one of the children of Israel
crosses one's path. Sartre vehemently disagrees with the word "engulf." He points out that the feelings
that the anti-Semite or racist describes as "arising" in one's self are the result of a deliberate choice.
They are a major element of the initial project that the racist has chosen to live, a project that Sartre
describes in detail. Hence these feelings have no unique ontic status that deserves respect; nor do they
deserve tolerance.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 58
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Freedom of Expression
Freedom of Expression is an unalienable human right and suppressing it is an act of
tyranny and evil. Any and all infringements on the freedom of expression must be
rejected.
American Library Association, 1991
[1-16-91, American Library Association, The Universal Right to Free Expression,
http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/universalright, 7-9-13, GZ]
Freedom of expression is an inalienable human right and the foundation for self-government.
Freedom of expression encompasses the freedoms of speech, press, religion, assembly, and
association, and the corollary right to receive information.¶ The American Library Association endorses
this principle, which is also set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the
United Nations General Assembly. The Preamble of this document states that “. . . recognition of the
inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the
foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world. . .” and “. . . the advent of a world in which
human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been
proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people. . . .”¶ Article 18 of this document states:¶
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to
change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or
private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. ¶ Article 19
states:¶ Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to
hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any
media regardless of frontiers.¶ Article 20 states:¶ Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful
assembly and association.¶ No one may be compelled to belong to an association.¶ We affirm our belief
that these are inalienable rights of every person, regardless of origin, age, background, or views. We
embody our professional commitment to these principles in the Library Bill of Rights and Code of Ethics,
as adopted by the American Library Association.¶ We maintain that these are universal principles and
should be applied by libraries and librarians throughout the world. The American Library Association’s
policy on International Relations reflects these objectives:¶ “. . . to encourage the exchange,
dissemination, and access to information and the unrestricted flow of library materials in all formats
throughout the world.Ӧ We know that censorship, ignorance, and limitations on the free flow of
information are the tools of tyranny and oppression. We believe that ideas and information topple the
walls of hate and fear and build bridges of cooperation and understanding far more effectively than
weapons and armies.¶ The American Library Association is unswerving in its commitment to human
rights and intellectual freedom; the two are inseparably linked and inextricably entwined. Freedom of
opinion and expression is not derived from or dependent on any form of government or political
power. This right is inherent in every individual. It cannot be surrendered, nor can it be denied. True
justice comes from the exercise of this right.¶ We recognize the power of information and ideas to
inspire justice, to restore freedom and dignity to the oppressed, and to change the hearts and minds of
the oppressors.¶ Courageous men and women, in difficult and dangerous circumstances throughout
human history, have demonstrated that freedom lives in the human heart and cries out for justice even
in the face of threats, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, exile, and death. We draw inspiration from
their example. They challenge us to remain steadfast in our most basic professional responsibility to
promote and defend the right of free expression.¶ There is no good censorship. Any effort to restrict
free expression and the free flow of information aids the oppressor. Fighting oppression with
Gonzaga Debate Institute 59
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
censorship is self-defeating.¶ Threats to the freedom of expression of any person anywhere are threats
to the freedom of all people everywhere. Violations of human rights and the right of free expression
have been recorded in virtually every country and society across the globe.¶ In response to these
violations, we affirm these principles:¶ The American Library Association opposes any use of
governmental prerogative that leads to the intimidation of individuals that prevents them from
exercising their rights to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive, and impart
information and ideas. We urge libraries and librarians everywhere to resist such abuse of governmental
power, and to support those against whom such governmental power has been employed.¶ The
American Library Association condemns any governmental effort to involve libraries and librarians in
restrictions on the right of any individual to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive,
and impart information and ideas. Such restrictions pervert the function of the library and violate the
professional responsibilities of librarians.¶ The American Library Association rejects censorship in any
form. Any action that denies the inalienable human rights of individuals only damages the will to
resist oppression, strengthens the hand of the oppressor, and undermines the cause of justice. ¶ The
American Library Association will not abrogate these principles. We believe that censorship corrupts the
cause of justice, and contributes to the demise of freedom.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 60
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
2NC Answers to Aff Args
Gonzaga Debate Institute 61
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
2NC Masking Links
The aff’s attempt to minimize and trivialize instances of Evil makes them complicit.
Don’t believe in Santa Claus, there can be no reconciliation with evildoers.
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, 129-130, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
One cannot struggle actively against Evil in society without expressing moral indignation and without
abandoning a detached objective stance. The so-called detached objective stance, which has become
so acceptable in contemporary society, is often a flight from perceiving Evil; when such occurs it is
merely another manner of supporting the status quo. As already emphasized, not very many twentiethcentury philosophers have proved willing to abandon the comforts of a detached objective stance;
consequently, few have expressed moral indignation. (We have already shown how Anglo-Saxon social
scientists conform to the approach of the rightthinking man and flee moral judgments and moral
indignation.) Even among the few philosophers who forcefully expressed moral indignation, Sartre is
quite exceptional. Because, like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, his moral indignation has an original tone. It
is this unique tone that often helps Sartre to provide valuable insights on how to perceive Evil in society
and how to struggle against it. An important characteristic of Sartre's tone that distinguishes it from the
tone of, say, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is the abundance of selfcriticism and self-derision. Sartre, like
Socrates, loved to question everything, including himself. What is more, Sartre is a critic of himself who
delights in showing his readers his past weaknesses and stupid failings. Such questioning and delight in
self-criticism is one of the prominent tones of his autobiography The Words, and often accompanies the
moral indignation that appears in many of Sartre's other social and political writings. In the following
section, we discuss one such essay. It contains concise, specific, and valid insights for the struggler
against Evil: Sartre's Foreword to a reissuing of Paul Nizan Aden Arabie. A word of caution: Sartre's
Foreword to Paul Nizan Aden Arabie is a mixed bag. The first pages include, together with his poignant
selfcriticism, some of Sartre's most penetrating insights on the dangers we must evade while struggling
against Evil; in contrast, the last pages reveal Sartre making a host of mistakes, some of them of the kind
that he himself attacks in the first part of the Foreword and in other writings. Here we shall discuss
Sartre's helpful insights. In the last chapter of this section, in which we criticize Sartre, we shall return to
the gross insensitivities and unexcusable myopia that appear in the latter part of this essay. "Don't
believe in Santa Claus," Nizan repeatedly told Sartre, and looked down at his fingernails with graceful
insolence. But as Sartre shows through ridiculing some of his own past political mistakes, that is exactly
what persons sensitive to Evil often do. These persons insist upon believing in Santa Claus, in
someone who will bring them the presents to which they aspire -- including the presents of justice and
freedom. Such a belief is stupid; it includes nothing of the innocence of children hanging up their
stockings above the fireplace on Christmas Eve. Sartre forcefully demands that we evade such stupidity
in struggling against Evil, especially since such a belief often leads many people to seek reconciliation
with their evil enemies. But as long as the enemies are continuing to destroy freedom, to oppress, and
to exploit, in short, to do Evil, such a reconciliation is a sellout. As is every compromise with a
prevalent Evil. It is also a fleeing from the justified hatred of Evil that Nizan was willing to fervently
express in his life and books. Consider the widespread oppression of women. Every compromise with
this oppression, any reconciliation with the male oppressors is a sellout. Moreover, there is no Santa
Claus who will bring women in the world justice, equality, and freedom. What members of the
women's movement and the men who support them face is a long, difficult day-to-day struggle
Gonzaga Debate Institute 62
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
against the basic Evil of gender oppression and exploitation of women. Therefore, women or men who
believe in a Santa Claus who will bring women justice, freedom, and equality are fools. And those who
do not believe in Santa Claus, who continue to struggle for freedom and equality for all women, must
not flee from hating those men and those institutions that continue to oppress, exploit, debase, and
degrade women.
Stop trying to understand evil–their tactics only paper over ongoing violence
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, 57-59, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
In summary, it is indeed often very difficult to intuitively perceive bewitching evildoers because, as
Sartre shows, they constantly flee their horror and the disclosure of themselves as evil. Quite often
this flight is accompanied by a striving to be smooth, cunning, and evasive. Furthermore, bewitching
evildoers frequently know how to insidiously appeal to another person's innocence and weaknesses
or to that person's dormant wishes. Yet Sartre's fiction also suggests that it is, at times, possible to
intuitively perceive the bewitcher -- if one has the daily courage to choose a worthy, honest existence.
Such a choice requires that one not fear to confront Evil, that one strive to retain lucidity, that one
reject the lure of weird and imaginary realities, that one be suspicious of persons who are always in
control of themselves and their situation or who play with their horror, that one be wary of persons
who appeal to one's sentimentality and pride. Orestes in The Flies is an example of a person who has
chosen to live thus. Hence, his criminal act does not condemn him as a person. (Such also seems to
emerge in Aeschylus's Oresteian trilogy, where Orestes was acquitted of bloodguiltiness with the help of
the vote of the goddess Athene.) We should perhaps add that Sartre's writings also indicate that
choosing such a way of life is no simple challenge. We could stop here. In this section we have presented
the major lessons that we have learned from Sartre on horror and bewitching and on the entire problem
of intuitively grasping Evil. Yet we feel uncomfortable; something important is missing in our discussion
of grasping Evil intuitively. In our guts we sense that lucidity and the act of confronting Evil are not
enough. Somewhere along the road, one must also learn to hate the instigators and supporters of Evil
in our world. With all one's heart. Sartre suggested no less. One of the most moving scenes in his trilogy
is when Mathieu, together with half a squad of French soldiers stationed in the belfry of a church, try to
hold up the advance of a Nazi motor column. When the column appears, Mathieu and his comrades
start shooting Nazi soldiers. The Germans regroup and respond with machine guns, grenades, and
cannon fire. Soon Mathieu's comrades are all killed. Alone in the destroyed belfry, Mathieu continues
shooting, telling himself who each shot is for. "One for Lola whom I dared not rob; one for Marcelle
whom I ought to have left in the lurch; one for Odette whom I didn't want to kiss. This for the books I
never dared to write, this for the journeys I never made, this for everybody in general whom I wanted to
hate and tried to understand." 3 Until this moment, we suddenly learn, Mathieu often wanted to hate.
Instead, he tried to understand. This attempt to understand again and again blocked his ability to see
Evil, to confront it, to struggle against it. Giving one's understanding to the evildoer is often not only a
flight from confrontation but a manner of compromising with the stark reality of his or her evil deeds.
Indeed, Mathieu's relations of understanding, which were devoid of confrontation with Daniel, with his
brother, Jacques, and with others, are merely manners in which he compromised with their Evil. Hating
Evil and evil persons, of course, means judging -- from which Mathieu persistently fled into
understanding. Yes, Sartre indicates, one should hate the instigators and supporters of Evil -- because
they do Evil! This hating helps one to struggle against them. It can also often help one to intuitively
grasp Evil. Such an approach means going beyond Roquentin's hating of the respectable citizens of
Gonzaga Debate Institute 63
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Bouville when he encounters their portraits in the museum. It means hating live persons who here and
now willingly do Evil; it means hating persons whom one encounters, who cross one's path, who
influence one's life, and whose way of life persistently threatens, destroys, and abuses the freedom of
others. Such hating may often lead to deeds, as when Orestes and Electra murder Aegistheus and
Clytemnestra or when Mathieu tries to kill as many Germans as possible before being hit by them. We
know that such hating is often difficult; it is not prudent. But, as the stories of Mathieu and of Orestes
reveal, hating Evil and acting on one's hatred is often the only way to live one's freedom and to preserve
one's integrity. Hence, there are two lessons to learn from Mathieu's moment of sudden enlightenment
in the belfry: First, since clever and evil bewitchers such as Daniel abound, and since the possibilities of
experiencing horror have diminished without the ability to hate the instigators and supporters of Evil,
we cannot significantly struggle against Evil. Furthermore, without hating Evil one will find it difficult to
intuitively apprehend it. Second, a person who dares not hate Evil and only wishes to understand the
evildoers is often sacrificing his or her freedom and integrity -- either on the altar of a cowardly
prudence, or so as to bask in the sentimentality and ignorance of the mob and the masses who support
the mob. The wish to understand an evildoer while refusing to see the horror of his or her deeds is much
too prevalent. Consider the years of Ronald Reagan's presidency in the United States. Suddenly men and
women, forcefully evicted from their homes, began to live in the streets of all major cities, from
Manhattan to Berkeley. This was an immediate outcome of the economic policy of the Reagan
administration, which decided to throw a party for the rich at the expense of the poor. A congressional
study reveals that from 1979 to 1987, after adjustment for inflation, the family income of the poorest
fifth of the population of the United States declined by over 6 percent, while family income rose by over
11 percent for the richest fifth of the population. Some of the results were immediate: infant mortality
in the slums of American cities now ranks above that of Cuba, Greece, Portugal, and all of Eastern
Europe. And, as mentioned, millions of homeless men and women live in the streets. 4 Yet the saddest
result is that the homeless seem to have become part of the accepted environment. Very few people
still respond with horror to the fact that these human beings have lost, probably forever, a place that
they can call home, where they can retain their privacy and intimate life. Indeed, as we learn from
Robert Frost, the homeless have sunk into the ultimate poverty, since they have no "place where, when
you have to go there, they have to take you in. . . . Something you somehow haven't to deserve." 5 And
their being evicted from such a basic human right does not arouse horror -- nor widespread sympathy,
nor hatred of the people who engineered this Evil. The contrary is true. Many American people were
enchanted (bewitched) by Ronald Reagan and his evil assistants, much as Marcelle was enchanted
(bewitched) by Daniel in Sartre's trilogy, much as the young Russian was enchanted (bewitched) by Kurtz
in Heart of Darkness. Even today, millions of Americans understand and sympathize with former
President Ronald Reagan and the decrees of his regime, while shifting their glance away from the
abominable degradation of human beings that it brought forth in the world's richest and greatest
democracy. In summing up the Reagan years, few articles in the mainstream press mentioned the horror
of the homeless as the president's legacy. And if it was mentioned, it was with sympathy and
understanding that such was the outcome of a perhaps minor policy mistake. If anything, the Reagan
and Bush years show that American society has become very well trained in fleeing from facing the
horror that is lying there, in the streets of their major cities. Furthermore, one can say quite clearly that
large segments of the people of the United States, including its intellectual elite, and especially its
right-wing intellectuals, create for themselves an imaginary reality that is a mirror image of Franz
Gerlach's perverted imaginary reality. In this perverted imaginary reality, the homeless are hardly
worthy of consideration. These segments of the American elite refuse to live with the horror that is the
outcome of the Evils of their regime. In their ongoing indifference to the Evil initiated and performed by
Ronald Reagan and continued by George Bush, these citizens of the United States resemble the cruel,
Gonzaga Debate Institute 64
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
avaricious "pilgrims" who accompany Marlow on his voyage to find Kurtz, who have eyes only for the
ivory that Kurtz has plundered.
Refuse the aff’s propaganda that bewitches you into ignoring Evil- absolute
confrontation and rejection of evil is the only option.
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, 35-36, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
In contrast, being bewitched to do Evil is an abandoning of lucidity and a choice to live in a magical
world created by one's emotions; these emotions have often been aroused by the appeal of the
bewitching Other. Consider Lady Anne's succumbing to Gloster's appeals to marry him in Shakespeare
The Life and Death of King Richard III or Macbeth's faithfully following the proclamations of the witches
whom he meets on the heath. These are clear examples of such an abandoning of lucidity and of being
bewitched. Yet this distinction is problematic. In convincing a person we are also often appealing to
that person's feelings, and almost every bewitcher, like Senator Clarke or his son Fred, knows how to
utilize facts and arguments with skill -- and at times with pseudorationality. One important point that
we have left out of the distinction is that while a person is being bewitched to do Evil, he or she knows,
vaguely or clearly, that the bewitcher is an evildoer. Here Shakespeare's dialogue between Gloster,
soon to become King Richard III, and Lady Anne is enlightening. (A similar bewitching dialogue between
King Richard III and Queen Elizabeth occurs later in the play.) While bewailing the tragedy and leading
her father-in-law's corpse to burial, Anne is accosted by Gloster; with vehement curses she hurls verbal
denunciations at him, reminding him that he killed her father-in-law and also her innocent husband.
Gloster ignores these curses and her anger; without scruples he flatters her and woos her until she
agrees to marry him. 3 Note that at the beginning of their encounter Anne despises Gloster; she knows
that he is an evildoer and tells him, "Villain, thou knowest no law of God or man." 4 In short, she knows
much about Gloster's evil deeds, and yet she soon succumbs to his entreaties. As Shakespeare clearly
shows, Anne's knowledge of Gloster's past evil deeds does not suffice for her to intuitively grasp his
current vile intentions and to reject them. She chooses to be bewitched by his flattery. Lizzie's situation
is more complex. At first she forcefully confronts John, James, and Fred, who want her to sign the
document that will acquit Thomas of murder and condemn the two Negroes as rapists. She intuitively
grasps that they want her to do something evil, and she vehemently refuses to sign. The men respond
with threats and violence. It is only after Senator Clarke enters and shrewdly dissolves this mood of
confrontation that Lizzie's intuitive grasping of Evil begins to fade. It seems that Sartre is here reiterating
a message already conveyed in Jesus' clear sharp rebuttals when Satan tempted him thrice. 5 When
tempted to do Evil, one remains lucid only by clearly confronting the bewitcher and his or her
temptations. When a person agrees to dissolve the confrontational encounter between oneself and
the bewitcher, that person is endangering his or her ability to intuitively grasp Evil and to reject its
temptations. But while Jesus was tempted by Satan, who was expelled from heaven, Lizzie is tempted
by the assumed upholder of legitimacy of seriousness and of respectability in southern society, by
Senator Clarke. In such a situation, not abandoning the confrontational encounter is indeed difficult.
Still, we can now formulate a major point that often appears in Sartre's fiction: intuitively grasping Evil
requires being willing to continually confront it. And the strength of the bewitcher quite often stems
from the reluctance of the person whom he or she wishes to tempt and bewitch to continually
confront Evil directly and to persistently reject it with vigor. How does Sartre suggest that one
withstand the bewitching appeals of the evildoer to join him or her in doing Evil? Once one has
intuitively grasped that one is facing an evildoer, one must not allow one's prereflective consciousness
Gonzaga Debate Institute 65
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
of Evil to be clouded by the evildoer's appeals to one's emotions, especially sentimental feelings and
pride. One must persist in confronting this bewitching evildoer lucidly here and now in a concrete
situation, knowing that only such a confrontation ensures the continuation of lucidity and personal
responsibility. And one must always keep in mind that by rejecting the emotional appeal of the
evildoer, a person thus rejects the magic world created by one's emotions in which the evildoer's evil
deeds suddenly seem permissible, legitimate, respectable, or good.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 66
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT Hypocrisy
Being hypocritical doesn’t make us wrong- we should reject Evil even while
recognizing the contradiction that we have benefited from it.
Gordon & Gordon, senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, and independent Scholar,
95
(Haim and Rivca, “Sartre and Evil: Guidelines for a Struggle,” 1995, 125, Questia, 7-2-13, JS)
And against mediocrity. Some years later, however, Sartre indicated that such struggles demand,
especially among intellectuals, the courage and the willingness to live a contradiction. 6 On the one
hand, the intellectual must embrace the rationalist approach that is at the core of Western science and
culture and its quest for truth, knowledge, and excellence. But on the other hand, the intellectual must
know that he or she is part of the bourgeois, which has established a totally irrational economic
system whose institutions forcefully perpetuate injustice, inequality, exploitation, oppression, and
mediocrity. Only by agreeing to live this contradiction authentically, with its everyday hardships, only
by personally reflecting this contradiction in one's actions and words while fighting Evil, can the
intellectual help to illuminate the struggle against Evil, including the fight against racism. By
demanding a courageous and authentic way of life from the intellectual, Sartre is pointing out that the
mere fact of utilizing one's intellectual talents does not suffice. To be an honest intellectual, the
contradiction that is at the basis of one's life must be evident. Thus, an honest intellectual will
straightforwardly attack racism, oppression, or exploitation because of its irrational basis, even while
agreeing that, unfortunately, one's own bourgeois life has probably benefited, albeit in a roundabout
manner, from this Evil. An honest intellectual will never refrain from pointing to and naming the evil
people who are directly responsible for the Evil that he or she is attacking. The honest intellectual will
not be afraid to point out, for instance, that President Carter, President Reagan, and the U.S. Senate
share the responsibility with the murderers in the death squads for the killings of innocent people
who struggled for human rights in El Salvador, among them Archbishop Romero. Or, as Sartre says
clearly, the honest intellectual will again and again struggle to define the principles of justice and
accuse those responsible for injustice in the bleak situation that confronts him or her. In a word,
genuine intellectuals will never evade relating honestly to the political situation in which they find
themselves.
Even if shunning is hypocritical, it should be done
Beversluis, Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University, 89
[Eric H., April, Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 15-25, “ON SHUNNING UNDESIRABLE REGIMES:
ETHICS AND ECONOMIC SANCTIONS”, accessed 7/3/13, VJ]
A third objection is that shunning is hypocritical. How, for example, can the United States in good
conscience shun South Africa, given (a) its own injustices at home and (b) its failure to apply the same
principles to the Soviet Union? (a) "Let him who is without guilt throw the first stone." This biblical
injunction will make anyone pause before judging publicly her neighbor's morality. Yet must we not do
this on occasion? Must we not, having admitted our own failings and shortcomings, having done our
best to put our own house in order, and having thereby affirmed our own commitment to the moral
order, on occasion publicly disassociate ourselves from those whose behavior indicates the refusal to
do just that? We may be wrong; others may see us as a hypocrites. But in the end we must follow our
consciences in this as in other matters. (b) The objection can also be that shunning must be hypocritical
because nations cannot consistently shun all human rights violators. Is there not hypocrisy in applying
Gonzaga Debate Institute 67
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
different standards to the Soviet Union, which is large and powerful, and to South Africa, which is
relatively small and weak? Certainly many conservatives are offended by an eagerness of liberals to
condemn South Africa which is not matched by an equal eagerness to condemn the Soviet Union although the Soviet Union seems equally guilty of willful, persistent and flagrant violations of the moral
order. There is no hypocrisy or inconsistency, however, if there are situations in which a prima facie duty
to shun is overridden by some other duty. It is possible, of course, to advocate shunning South Africa but
to deny even a prima facie duty to shun the Soviet Union. One could argue that the purported grounds
for shunning the Soviet Union (treatment of dissidents or the war in Afghanistan) do not consititute
flagrant, persistent, and willful violations of the moral order. This kind of disagreement about shunning
is unavoidable. For there will always be a strong element of judgment in decisions about shunning,
even among people who agree on their basic moral principles. The reason is that notions like "flagrancy"
inescapably involve judgments of degree and judgments of motives which do not admit of precise
measurement.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 68
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT Shunning doesn’t Change Behavior
Even if sanctions fail, we have an obligation to shun morally repugnant nations to
avoid complicity
Beversluis, Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University, 89
[Eric H., April, Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 15-25, “ON SHUNNING UNDESIRABLE REGIMES:
ETHICS AND ECONOMIC SANCTIONS”, accessed 7/3/13, VJ]
It is often clear that economic sanctions will not force the sanctioned nation to change its ways. There
is little likelihood, for example, that South Africa will give up apartheid, even in the face of fairly serious
world economic pressure. The economic literature on sanctions seems to support the general lack of
effectiveness of sanctions (Hufbauer and Schott, 1985). Yet in the face of this knowledge there
continue to be calls to impose such santions. The reasons given for sanctions under these
circumstances are (a) to make a witness against particularly immoral behavior and (b) to avoid
complicity in that behavior. John Galtung notes: When military action is impossible for one reason or
another, and when doing nothing is seen as tantamount to complicity, then something has to be done
to express morality, something that at least serves as a clear signal to everyone that what the
receiving nation has done is disapproved of. If the sanctions do not serve instrumental purposes they
can at least have expressive functions. Thus as a highly dramatic (and costly) way of reinforcing
international morality, economic sanctions may be useful ... (Galtung, 1983, pgs. 48-49.) And John
Tiemstra in his reflections on "Saving Nestle's Soul" writes: Scripture tells us that we should have
nothing to do with recalcitrant sinners. ...Perhaps, one might argue, this practice of avoiding individual
sinners also extends to corporations. Just as we would not want to associate with an unrepentant
individual, we might also want to avoid supporting by our purchases any corporation that is persistently
notorious for its lack of responsibility Shunning is for the benefit of the ones shunning, not the one being
shunned. It is a last resort, when every call to repentance has gone unanswered and there is no longer
any earthly hope that the person might be saved. We therefore must shun in order to avoid being
implicated in the sin being committed. I doubt that shunning is the major motivation behind the Nestle
boycott. (Tiemstra, 1979, p. 4.)
Shunning is key to reinforce the moral order—lack of action creates more rights
abuses
Beversluis, Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University, 89
[Eric H., April, Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 15-25, “ON SHUNNING UNDESIRABLE REGIMES:
ETHICS AND ECONOMIC SANCTIONS”, accessed 7/3/13, VJ]
But how can a case for shunning be made on this view of morality? Whose interests (rights) does
shunning protect? The shunner may well have to sacrifice his interest, e.g., by foregoing a beneficial
trade relationship, but whose rights are thereby protected? In shunning there seem to be no "rights"
that are protected. For shunning, as we have seen, does not assume that the resulting cost will change
the disapproved behavior. If economic sanctions against South Africa will not bring apartheid to an end,
and thus will not help the blacks get their rights, on what grounds might it be a duty to impose such
sanctions? We find the answer when we note that there is another "level" of moral duties. When
Galtung speaks of "reinforcing . . . morality," he has identified a duty that goes beyound specific acts of
respecting people's rights. The argument goes like this: There is more involved in respecting the rights
of others than not violating them by one's actions. For if there is such a thing as a moral order, which
Gonzaga Debate Institute 69
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
unites people in a moral community, then surely one has a duty (at least prima facie) not only to avoid
violating the rights of others with one's actions but also to support that moral order. Consider that the
moral order itself contributes significantly to people's rights being respected. It does so by
encouraging and reinforcing moral behavior and by discouraging and sanctioning immoral behavior. In
this moral community people mutually reinforce each other's moral behavior and thus raise the overall
level of morality. Were this moral order to disintegrate, were people to stop reinforcing each other's
moral behavior, there would be much more violation of people's rights. Thus to the extent that
behavior affects the moral order, it indirectly affects people's rights. And this is where shunning fits in.
Certain types of behavior constitute a direct attack on the moral order. When the violation of human
rights is flagrant, willful, and persistent, the offender is, as it were, thumbing her nose at the moral
order, publicly rejecting it as binding her behavior. Clearly such behavior, if tolerated by society, will
weaken and perhaps eventually undermine altogether the moral order. Let us look briefly at those
three conditions which turn immoral behavior into an attack on the moral order.
Shunning reinforces moral orders
Beversluis, Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University, 89
[Eric H., April, Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 15-25, “ON SHUNNING UNDESIRABLE REGIMES:
ETHICS AND ECONOMIC SANCTIONS”, accessed 7/3/13, VJ]
First, by refusing publicly to have to do with such a person one announces support for the moral order
and backs up the announcement with action. This action reinforces the commitment to the moral
order both of the shunner and of the other members of the community. (Secretary of State Shultz in
effect made this argument in his call for international sanctions on Libya in the early days of 1986.)
Further, shunning may have a moral effect on the shunned person, even if the direct impact is not
adequate to change the immoral behavior. If the shunned person thinks of herself as part of the moral
community, shunning may well make clear to her that she is, in fact, removing herself from that
community by the behavior in question. Thus shunning may achieve by moral suasion what cannot be
achieved by "force." Finally, shunning may be a form of punishment, of moral sanction, whose
appropriateness depends not on whether it will change the person's behavior, but on whether he
deserves the punishement for violating the moral order. Punishment than can be viewed as a way of
maintaining the moral order, of "purifying the community" after it has been made "unclean," as ancient
communities might have put it.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 70
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Engagement => HR
Empirics deny causal relationship – economic integration and human rights progress
not related
Forcese, Associate Professor at University of Ottowa and Research on international
law, human rights, and democratic accountability, 2001
[Craig, 6-10-01, “Globalizing Decency: Responsible Engagement in an Era of Economic Integration”, Yale
Human Rights & Development Law Journal, Volume: 5, p. 10, AJM]
The empirical record largely supports the policy view that simple maximization of economic
integration is insufficient to prompt human rights-sensitive development. A theory adopted by the
famous political sociologist Seymour Lipset and cited with approval by USA*Engage posits that if
developing nations were to become as rich as their developed counterparts, it is most probable that
they would become democracies.33 If true, this position suggests “transitions to democracy would be
more likely when authoritarian regimes reach higher levels of development.”34 However, as at least one
recent empirical study has concluded, “transitions are increasingly likely as per capita income of
dictatorships rises but only until it reaches a level of about $6,000. Above that, dictatorships become
more stable as countries become more affluent.”35 This study also found that “the causal power of
economic development in bringing dictatorships down appears paltry”36 and that “there are no
grounds to believe that economic development breeds democracies.”37 On the other hand, once
democracies are established, economic growth does seem to increase their prospects of surviving. In
summarizing its findings, the study concluded that [t]he emergence of democracy is not a by-product of
economic development. Democracy is or is not established by political actors pursuing their goals, and it
can be initiated at any level of development. Only once it is established do economic constraints play a
role: the chances for the survival of democracy are greater when the country is richer.38
Gonzaga Debate Institute 71
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Policymakers must be Utilitarian
Shunning can and should apply to institutions and states—not just individuals
Beversluis, Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University, 89
[Eric H., April, Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 15-25, “ON SHUNNING UNDESIRABLE REGIMES:
ETHICS AND ECONOMIC SANCTIONS”, accessed 7/3/13, VJ]
Many maintain that there are no moral rights or duties among nations. Others hold that nations have
a right to self-determination which obligates other nations not to interfere in their internal affairs. On
what grounds can we say that nations as well as individuals can be obligated to shun and be liable to
be shunned? As I see it, nations are agents in the sense that they do things that affect people's
interests - "do things" in the sense in which people do things and not in the sense in which the wind
does things - for they have both the power to affect people's interests and the ability to decide
whether or not to do so. But being an agent in this sense is a sufficient condition for having moral
responsibility. And the argument for the duty to shun is perfectly general, applying to all morally
responsible agents. Institutions such as the state can act in ways which directly attack and undermine
the moral order, and individuals and institutions can sanction such offenders as a witness to the moral
order. As moral agents states are also obligated to support the moral order and hence to shun when
the situation demands. (For more detailed analysis of the arguments that morality applies to nations
see Cohen (1985) and Beitz (1979).) But perhaps Thompson's pragmatic argument against interfering in
the affairs of other states rules out national shunning: Respect for domestic jurisdiction causes
diplomatists to question a crusading approach to human rights. Routine interference in the essential
conduct of the affairs of one government (that is, in its defintion of its rights and duties) by another is a
recipe for disaster in political relationships. Furthermore, history offers little support for the assumption
that moral intervention changes institutions and practices elsewhere; sometimes such intervention can
even make the situation worse. Given the realities of national sovereignity, methods such as quiet
diplomacy, the private offering of incentives and rewards, and sustained individual contacts are more
likely to yield results. Workability is a companion principle to respect for domestic jurisdiction. Together
they provide the diplomatists' main guidelines for action in human rights as in other spheres of foreign
policy. (Thompson, 1980, pp. 91-92) As a general caution against our desire to "do something" when
we do not like the policies of another country, Thompson's pragmatic approach is sound. But
shunning represents a special situation in which, persuasion and direct pressure having been tried and
having failed, the objective is not to change behavior but to witness against it. "Workability" has been
tried and has
failed; the flagrant, persistent, and willful violation of human rights continues and must be confronted
publicly. A frequent objection to "human rights" policies may also be raised to shunning: By what right
does one nation impose its values on another? The argument may proceed by noting that shunning
represents the reaction of a community to those who reject its standards in particularly serious way.
But, it will continue, surely there is no such moral community among nations, since there is no worldwide agreement on basic moral standards. José Zalaquett addresses these questions in his lecture on
"Human Rights and Moral Dimensions of International Conduct." His thesis is that there is a world-wide
consensus on basic human rights, as is evidenced by the fact that the world's nations have signed the
United Nations Charter (Zalaquett, 1983). Thus besides general arguments for moral obligations
among nations, the explicit recognition of certain duties by the nations of the world supports the
claim that there is a world moral order which ought to be protected. So, as moral agents, agents who
can be responsible for violating people's rights, nations as well as individuals (and presumably other
Gonzaga Debate Institute 72
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
institutions, such as corporations - although we have not examined these cases separtely) have a prima
facie duty to shun under certain circumstances and ought to be shunned under certain circumstances.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 73
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: One rejection doesn’t solve
Their argument necessitates never doing anything against evil
Filice – 1990
(Carlo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York, Geneseo, Human Rights
Quarterly, August, Vol. 12, No. 3. pp. 397-414, “On the Obligation to Keep Informed about Distant
Atrocities,” JStor)
Second, if likelihood of impact were an absolute moral prerequisite for action, then one could argue
that a person should also not invest any effort in speaking out on those matters on which many
others are already speaking out. Why? Because to add one more voice to a chorus of thousands
would make no noticeable difference. Hence, the principle here presumed-i.e., that one should
speak out only when one's voice is likely to have some nonnegligible effect-will justify a policy of
almost never speaking out on large-scale affairs. Surely this consequence is objectionable, since
such affairs are not what they could and should be. At the very least the magnitude of the
preventable evil is an additional factor one should consider in deciding what to do.
We are morally obligated to act and speak out against immoralities even if it is
unlikely to have an effect
Filice – 1990
(Carlo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York, Geneseo, Human Rights
Quarterly, August, Vol. 12, No. 3. pp. 397-414, “On the Obligation to Keep Informed about Distant
Atrocities,” JStor)
Objection 111: Help only those you can, i.e., your neighbors.
The average individual's attempt to influence matters like the Indonesian policy vis-a-vis East Timor,
runs this objection, is not likely to lead to the prevention of any harm. Perhaps if most individuals
acted collectively, the likelihood of harm-prevention would be quite significant. But the effort of a
lone individual is completely negligible, especially if one sets aside drastic options such as a public
hunger strike. Would one not be more effectively beneficent by helping instead local charities, an
alcoholic relative, or the neighborhood stray cats? And if so, why waste time and effort in trying to
become informed about distant atrocities?
Naturally, there is some validity to this line of thinking. One's replies might include the following
observations. First, one must concede that an individual alone will not generally accomplish visible
results when speaking out on distant occurrences about which officialdom-government, educational
institutions, the press-is silent. But surely there are exceptions to this. If nothing else, the average
individual may be heard by a few other individuals, each of whom, in turn, might reach a few
others, generating a significant ripple effect. Perhaps, someone will be reached who has
considerable power or access to the public ear.
Second, if likelihood of impact were an absolute moral prerequisite for action, then one could argue
that a person should also not invest any effort in speaking out on those matters on which many
others are already speaking out. Why? Because to add one more voice to a chorus of thousands
would make no noticeable difference. Hence, the principle here presumed-i.e., that one should
speak out only when one's voice is likely to have some nonnegligible effect-will justify a policy of
almost never speaking out on large-scale affairs. Surely this consequence is objectionable, since
Gonzaga Debate Institute 74
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
such affairs are not what they could and should be. At the very least the magnitude of the
preventable evil is an additional factor one should consider in deciding what to do.
Third, the ideal conditions for "local morality" cannot be obtained in the actual world. Perhaps in an
ideal world where power and resources are somewhat equitably distributed, if each tends only to
her own locality where a noticeable difference can be affected, the global result would probably be
morally acceptable (though protection of common resources, such as the ozone layer, would require
global and collective attention). But in a world like ours, where resources and power are
disproportionately distributed, often through past and present injustice, the policy of each tending
to her own property and community will not lead to morally acceptable global results. In this
askew world, pursuing one's personal interests and community interests may mean keeping those in
Timor or Brazil dispossessed; and one's power to do so is likely to more than offset another's power
to improve his or her position. Any view that justifies the pursuit of ends benefiting only oneself
and one's own, and that neglects to consider seriously the implications of such pursuits for
"others," does not deserve the appellation "moral." Impartiality must be one of the essential
features of the moral viewpoint. One aim of this viewpoint is the transcendence of the
"one's own/others" dichotomy, hard as this may be. Impartiality in an interconnected world implies
a cosmopolitan outlook.
Thus, the principle at issue-only speak out on those issues where one's voice is likely to have a
noticeable effect-must be rejected on moral grounds. It may be necessary, of course, to choose
those ways of speaking out that are most likely to be productive, since the goal is not to attain
some empty psychologicai and moral purity. Thus, one should, perhaps, write to those legislators,
newspapers, and organizations which are most likely to listen and which can help publicize one's
cause. There is no point in sending letters or articles to The National Review about East Timor or El
Salvador and then expressing outrage when this material is not printed. As I have argued, however,
the need for intelligence in one's efforts must not collapse into the need to limit one's focus to
parochial matters.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 75
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Case Outweighs
We must join in the struggle against evil regardless of how trivial it may seem
Gordon & Gordon, 95
(Haim & Rivca, Department of Education, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel, Sartre & Evil:
Guidelines for a Struggle, Questia)
We chose to close the book with this terrible incident because in it one can find much of what we
have gleaned from Sartre's writings about the prevalence and the reality of Evil and the need to fight
it. The bewitching reality, the flight from lucidity and from horror, the passivity, the lack of moral
indignation, the mediocrity, the pathos, the wounded pride, the distortion of truth and knowledge,
the respectability of evildoers, the rightthinking men in the Israeli armed forces, the strength of serial
institutionsal of these, and many other of the insights that Sartre provides, emerged in the course of
our simple struggle to have punishment meted to an Israeli soldier and his friends who sexually
abused a Palestinian woman.
The example is important, however, for additional reasons. It reveals that daily fighting the Evil that
exists around us requires much attention to what may seem to be minor details. Such fighting
requires much patience and perseverance. Yet it brings very little glory. Today, courageously fighting
the many manifestations of Evil that Sartre articulately described and explained in great and
enlightening detail is like sending the bread of one's life upon the waters; it very often resembles a
secret act of generosity -- the greatest charity, according to Maimonides.
There are results. At times, the evildoer is punished or someone is compensated for his or her
suffering. Much less often, one succeeds in somewhat changing the approach of persons in power or
in successfully attacking the evil principles that Sartre described as underlying contemporary society.
But one of the major results of such struggles, which we have repeatedly mentioned in passing in
the course of writing his book, emerges in the life of the authentic fighter against Evil. The
satisfaction in fighting Evil is in doing something that is worthy in itself, lucidly, authentically, and in
good faith. That is a possibility, Sartre's profound and engaging writings point out, that awaits every
human being.
We hope that many others will join in realizing such a wonderful possibility. We wrote this book to
suggest to such courageous people that Sartre's writings can guide them in their fight against Evil. His
insights will always be helpful in showing the difficulties and the likelihood of attempting to realize
the worthy possibility of struggling against Evil. Beyond these insights, however, one always finds
Sartre's basic message: we fight Evil because it is Evil!
Yes, we fight Evil because it deserves to be negated, annihilated, and abolished; we fight to
eradicate Evil from the face of the earth!
Gonzaga Debate Institute 76
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Sanctions Ethical
Gonzaga Debate Institute 77
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Sanctions Ethical and Cause Compliance
Sanctions work—ethical or practical failures are due to lack of quid pro quo
Lopez, PhD from Syracuse University, 99
[George A., March, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “More Ethical than Not: Sanctions
as Surgical Tools: Response to “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy””, page 145, Wiley Library, accessed
7/5/13, VJ]
Beyond this “sanctions theory,” the empirical record of sanctions’ success has more positive examples
than simply the South African case, which Gordon considers an anomaly. Certainly in the Rhodesian
case, sanctions combined with diplomatic incentives and initiatives to produce the settlement
resulting in majority rule. As I will amplify below, the Iraq case is characterized by a great deal more
compliance than is recognized regarding weapons of mass destruction. And there is no question that
economic sanctions was one of the factors that pressured the Belgrade government to participate in
the Dayton peace accords process. As we write, Libya has finally agreed to release for trial the two
suspects in the Lockerbie bombing. Gordon’s claims that sanctions are a patent failure, and that the
evidence (and the logic of sanctions) suggests that sanctions are far more likely to guarantee
noncompliance, are simply incorrect. If there is a practical or ethical dilemma with sanctions it is not
compliance failure, but compliance underachievement. From recent analyses of cases, however, we
know that this results because leaders who impose sanctions have neither fully used nor fully
understood the mechanism and how to properly assess its impact. In some cases the Security Council
has not set conditions for the immediate lifting of sanctions upon compliance; or, they have “moved
the goalposts” after sanctions have been imposed. Most problematic, sanctioners have failed to mix
sanctions with incentives in order to get meaningful compliance. There is little question that the UN
Sanctions Committee system has learned some unfortunate lessons through trial and error and that,
especially regarding the Iraq case, the Security Council was fairly unimaginative in executing an effective
sanctions policy. In particular, the council failed to see in the multiple requirements placed on Iraq
after the Gulf War an opportunity to mix pressure, pain, and promises in ways that might have
sparked more compliance and that would have rewarded the real progress made in Iraq’s compliance
with various provisions important to the council. Sanctions have gone awry because the council did
not mix carrots (such as the partial lifting of sanctions as rewards) with sticks (keeping sanctions on the
free flow of oil) in attempting to close down Iraq’s weapons development.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 78
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Ethically Justified- Self-Defense and Humanitarian Reasons
Sanctions are ethically justified—self-defense and humanitarian intervention
Winkler, PhD in political science, 99
[Adam, Human Rights Quarterly Volume 21 Issue 1, “Just Sanctions”, Page 141-142,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/human_rights_quarterly/v021/21.1winkler.html#authbio, accessed
7/9/13, VJ]
Under the laws of just war, just cause is necessary to legitimize any resort to force. What constitutes
just cause is a limited range of potential motivations behind the use of force, including self-defense 50
and humanitarian intervention. 51 [End Page 141] Under the principle of self-defense, states can resort
to doing harm when faced with an actual or imminent infringement of state sovereignty. Self-defense
against aggression has been codified as a legitimate reason to use force in Articles 2 and 51 of the UN
Charter, 52 but the principle can be traced to the beginnings of the just war tradition. 53 The scope of
self-defense is broad enough to encompass collective self-defense, enabling allied states to come to
the assistance of a nation under attack by an aggressor. 54 Self-defense can also justify the use of
harmful force enacted for the purposes of deterrence, a strategy designed to diminish potential future
infringements of sovereignty. But the principle of self-defense has its limits: one can fight back to repel
an attack, but one cannot harm the aggressor for purposes of revenge or domination. 55 In the context
of economic sanctions, self-defense means that states certainly can resort to harmful economic
measures when faced with infringements of territorial boundaries; where just war would declare the
use of armed force to be legitimate, economic sanctions of some sort are justifiable. Self-defense
would also allow the adoption of sanctions when an aggressor state imposes measures of economic
coercion against other states without appropriate reason. If, for example, one nation declared economic
war on a neighbor, the neighboring state and its allies would be justified in imposing economic sanctions
as a defensive response. An example of self-defense supplying just cause for the use of economic
sanctions is the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Although there had been longstanding disputes over
the borders of the two countries, the existing borders were internationally recognized. In addition, Iraq
was clearly the aggressor under international norms; the UN General Assembly's 1974 Declaration on
Aggression provides that the first resort to armed force in a dispute is prima facie evidence of
aggression, 56 and Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of aggressive force against the
territorial integrity of another nation. Therefore, when the Security Council imposed mandatory
sanctions against Iraq, just cause was present. 57 Beyond self-defense, the laws of just war consider
humanitarian [End Page 142] intervention to constitute just cause legitimizing the use of force. 58
Therefore, when a state engages in widespread violations of internationally recognized human rights,
other nations can properly resort to harmful force to end the violations. Although the exact marking
lines are unclear for when the treatment of people within a state reaches the level at which an
international response is justified, among the conditions allowing the use of force are enslavement,
genocide, and subjugation of peoples. 59 While the principle of self-determination generally allows the
state to deal with its citizens in the manner that they as a people wish to be treated, selfdetermination is a misnomer if the state severely oppresses part of its population. 60 And while some
have suggested that concern with humanitarian ideals represents a new focus for international
relations--an evolution from states to individuals as relevant actors 61 --the laws of just war dictate that
humanitarian intervention can amount to just cause, thereby providing at least one instance where
the pursuit of humanitarian ideals maintains a focus on the state. 62 Humanitarian reasons would
support the resort to economic sanctions, and, indeed, violations of international humanitarian norms
Gonzaga Debate Institute 79
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
have provided justification for the use of sanctions in recent years. For example, the UN Security
Council's sanctions against Serb-controlled areas of the former Yugoslavia 63 were prompted in part
by the Serbian war policy of "ethnic cleansing," a polite way of referring to genocide. During the late
1980s, the Iraqis also engaged in genocide. Targeting its Kurdish population, Iraq used chemical
weapons, destroyed Kurdish villages, and buried Kurdish casualties in mass unmarked graves. 64 Even
in the absence of territorial aggression, this would have supplied ample just cause for the imposition
of economic sanctions against Iraq. [End Page 143]
Gonzaga Debate Institute 80
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Moral Responsibility is with the Target
The responsibility for immoral sanction doesn’t rest with sanctioners—it lies with the
authoritarian leaders of the country
Lopez, PhD from Syracuse University, 99
[George A., March, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “More Ethical than Not: Sanctions
as Surgical Tools: Response to “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy”” page 145-146, Wiley Library,
accessed 7/5/13, VJ]
Gordon correctly notes that there has also been difficulty with implementing in full the humanitarian
exemptions and programs that are intended to operate during sanctions episodes. She, again rightly,
raises concerns about their adequacy to the needs of a beleaguered population. Whether it be in the
case of the Haiti or the Angola (UNITA) sanctions, we can now point to terrible ineptitude and lack of
political will in enforcing sanctions as keys to their ineffectiveness, and by extension to their harsh
impact on the innocent. We can also point to the slowness with which humanitarian exemptions have
been adjusted in response to the documented need of vulnerable populations. But these are
correctable problems, and they have been analyzed in some detail by both the Security Council and
humanitarian agencies. That past behavior does not inspire confidence that attention will be paid to
all the humanitarian needs of a sanctioned population may be clear, but being naive about issues of
moral agency in the impact of sanctions compounds the problem. Specifically, Gordon takes the facts
that harm comes to innocents and that sanctions are imposed by sanctioners and mistakenly makes
the pain of the former the direct and singular responsibility of the latter. She refuses to deal with the
intermediary and decision-making role that leadership in a target state plays in determining the
impact of sanctions. While she blames the imposers of sanctions for treating a general population
instrumentally, she appears not to acknowledge at all the moral responsibility of despicable leaders
who victimize their own people instrumentally through the manipulation of sanctions. While the
impact of sanctions maybe either immoral or moral, any judgment regarding their impact on innocent
people must be assessed by examining the responses of the sanctioned country’s leader and in light of
the international humanitarian relief effort mobilized on behalf of the innocent. Again here, the case
of Iraq focuses the discussion on the burden of responsibility borne by Iraqi leaders.
Sanctions are necessary— we can and should assume that we have the consent of the
people—they can’t express consent under authoritarian regimes
Lopez, PhD from Syracuse University, 99
[George A., March, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “More Ethical than Not: Sanctions
as Surgical Tools: Response to “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy””, page 146-147, Wiley Library,
accessed 7/5/13, VJ]
Two other disagreements with Gordon are noteworthy. The first concerns the problem of sanctions’
having increased moral power if they were imposed with the consent of those likely to bear their
brunt. Gordon, considering as the norm the South Africa case, wherein the African National Congress
and resident trade union and church groups endorsed sanctions outright, is unwilling to consider cases
of implied consent, which may come from exiles or the wider international community in the name of
a repressed people. I would claim that recent evidence, such as the crowds in the streets of Russia and
Eastern Europe toppling statues of past dictators and the throngs in the Congo rejoicing after the fall
of Mobuto, underscores a fundamental generalization: We can morally argue for sanctions on some
Gonzaga Debate Institute 81
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
countries because history supports the contention that repressed people will consent to such.
Considering the evidence of the past in repressive states, such as Haiti, Iraq, or Rwanda, we can
combine the criterion of “right intention” with “right reason” in a philosophical sense to maintain that
if these (Haitian, Iraqi, or Rwandan) citizens lived in an environment where they could speak freely,
they would argue for bystanders, or outsiders, to take all actions, such as sanctions, on their behalf to
bring down the regime, To suggest, as Gordon appears to do, that under repression citizens need to
express consent for external coercive sanctions in order for the latter to be moral is to condemn those
citizens to being the regime’s next targets.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 82
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Humanitarian Impact
There are checks on humanitarian impacts, and that impact is miniscule anyway
Lopez, PhD from Syracuse University, 12
[George A., Spring, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 26, Issue 1, “In Defense of Smart Sanctions: A
Response to Joy Gordon”, page PQ, Pro Quest, accessed 7/5/13, VJ]
Joy Gordon has been the foremost singular intellectual voice calling for close scrutiny of sanctions on
humanitarian grounds and for the application of ethical criteria to assess them. Thus, it is not surprising
that she has astutely pointed out the serious impact of aviation sanctions on health and other sectors,
and the potentially far-reaching legal and ethical dilemmas inherent in the sanctions listing process and
in financial sanctions. 11 No serious analyst of sanctions can claim that smart sanctions have no
unintended consequences, or that there are no inconsistencies in particular cases. The disagreements I
have with Gordon's assessment--in addition to the '90s hangover mentioned at the outset--are twofold.
First, the humanitarian impact of targeted sanctions is miniscule compared to that during the era of
trade sanctions, and Gordon does not place her current examples in that larger context. She does
acknowledge that the studies of sanctions in the mid to late 1990s and the practical changes they
underwent during this time went a long way toward ameliorating much of their worst humanitarian
effects. Her claim that not every set of targeted sanctions is subject to a pre-assessment of impact by
the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is correct. But that is not because
humanitarian concerns are slighted in sanctions design as the Security Council resolution is being
formulated. Rather, it is because the Council has had sufficient experience in crafting sanctions so as to
preempt many of the potential negative consequences. 12 And, I would assert, the truer test of
whether the sanctions process is committed to avoiding negative humanitarian effects lies in the
presence of effective sanctions-monitoring mechanisms, which can aid in correcting unintended
consequences. Monitoring mechanisms also allow policy-makers to continually improve the design
and implementation of sanctions to bring them more fully in line with the rule of humanitarian law.
UN missions, the special representatives of the secretary-general, and the panels of experts for each UN
sanctions case all focus on monitoring in ways that did not exist a decade ago. 13 My second major
disagreement with Gordon is again a matter of degree. Specifically, I am referring to her concerns about
due process rights and the listing controversy that has engulfed the UN's "1267 regime" for
counterterrorism. While I understand her critique, Gordon's judgment is more severe than my own, as I
believe she fails to acknowledge a few realities of the past five years. First, although she describes most
of the reforms undertaken over time by the Council regarding delisting and due process, Gordon does
not give sufficient weight to these. I would claim that in passing five new resolutions since 2006 the
Security Council has undergone a remarkable evolution to a more rights-sensitive system that is
consistent with the concerns and claims of the "like-minded states" that championed the due process
challenge, and at the same time holds firm to a fundamental distinction made by a number of Security
Council members that placing an entity or individual on the sanctions list is an act of preventive security,
not a judicial decision subject to judicial review. 14 Further, Gordon overestimates the significance of a
very small number of cases of due process in connection to asset freezes that are currently working their
way through the European court system and that comprise this controversy. Moreover, analysts and
lawyers of quite different persuasions disagree about the role and place of the European human rights
judicial system in evaluating Security Council resolutions in this issue area. In sum, Gordon's concern
with targeted sanctions writ large, when the listing due process problem has affected a very small
number of individuals, and only in the counterterrorism area, seems overstated.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 83
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Smart Sanctions Avoid Ethical Harms
“Smart sanctions” solve humanitarian concerns
Lopez, PhD from Syracuse University, 99
[George A., March, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “More Ethical than Not: Sanctions
as Surgical Tools: Response to “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy””, page 148, Wiley Library, accessed
7/5/13, VJ]
Gordon dismisses much too quickly the possibility of “smart sanctions” that can have minimal
humanitarian impact and target elites responsible for the policies that generated the sanctions.
Admittedly, the idea of “smart sanctions” may be more elegant in conceptualization than application at
the present time. But the momentum in the diplomatic and academic communities to make them a
reality is in full force. Various analyses and forums have now explored in detail the possibility of more
robust and refined sanctions mechanisms, such as asset freezes and other financial measures, which
can be more dynamically integrated with arms embargoes and bans on travel and international
meetings, and targeted specifically at elites. To be fully effective, these smarter measures will need
further strategic design and improved implementation through monitoring and via the enforcement
capabilities of the Security Council.5 But their advent—and their importance to the international
community-is clear. On balance, then, I cannot share Gordon’s condemnation of sanctions as
categorically unethical. There is no question that this decade has witnessed a set of costly and
sometimes inhumane sanctions cases, with Iraq being an extraordinary quagmire. But some other
sanctions episodes (Rhodesia, South Africa, and Libya) have appeared to be successful without terrible
humanitarian consequences, while other cases had limited negative humanitarian tragedy relative to
accomplishing compliance (the former Yugoslavia). As a result of these experiences and from critiques
like Gordon’s, sanctions that are more just, ethical, and effective now lie within our grasp. When they
are again called for in response to violations of international norms, we should move deliberatively to
assure that sanctions be imposed only under these heightened criteria.
Targeted sanctions are better than generic ones
Lopez, PhD from Syracuse University, 12
[George A., Spring, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 26, Issue 1, “In Defense of Smart Sanctions: A
Response to Joy Gordon”, page PQ, Pro Quest, accessed 7/5/13, VJ]
Gordon's first concern, that targeted sanctions are no more successful than general trade sanctions,
has varied dimensions.4 The first is Gordon's contention--echoing Daniel Drezner--that targeted
sanctions, which are applied by the UN Security Council, will always have limited success because UN
member states have varied goals in imposing them and quite diverse commitments to enforcing them
fully. 5 But this is true of every public policy that is legislated, whether at the domestic or international
level (for example, by a resolution of the Security Council). The measure of success of a policy lies not in
the intentions of its framers, nor very much in assessing the roadblocks or inconsistencies that such a
policy may manifest in its implementation. Rather, the measure of success lies in the empirical impact
of the policy--and, in the case of sanctions, on constraining its targets in the manner specified in the
Security Council resolution. Thus, a perfect policy outcome would be one in which the change in
behavior of the target perfectly conforms to the resolution imposing the sanctions. Moreover, because
economic sanctions of even the targeted variety are political in nature, they will always be affected by
the current tensions within the Security Council, with its various rivalries among regional and other
Gonzaga Debate Institute 84
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
powerful actors, and will invariably fall victim to problems of implementation, monitoring, and
compliance. In the worst instances, issues of implementation, monitoring, and compliance are a function
of the weak workings of the Security Council, in which major world powers will muster up the
organizational strength to legislate targeted sanctions, but will have neither the political will nor the
institutional strength to carry them out in full. A second, data-based point undercuts Gordon's claim
that targeted sanctions fare no better than trade sanctions. The global volume of trade for 2010 was
nearly $15 trillion, more than double the $6 trillion of 1995. Moreover, the trade-based component of
the gross domestic product of most countries has steadily increased as well. Both logically and
empirically, then, the application of traditional trade sanctions focused on entire nations in our
current era would have a much more substantial dislocation to both unintended secondary entities
and, most certainly, the general population than they did in the early 1990s. Trade-based sanctions in
2012 would more rapidly affect the quality of life of average people within a targeted country, and in a
more widespread manner. This is an outcome that Gordon clearly wants to avoid. Thus, it is difficult to
understand how Gordon could argue that targeted sanctions imposed on those persons and entities
most responsible for an objectionable policy, or placed on those who violate existing sanctions, fail to be
superior to such broadly affecting trade sanctions. A third approach to support my argument for the
utility of targeted sanctions emerges if we assess their success by examining more than just the
general strengths and weaknesses of the discrete types of targeted measures--for example, financial,
aviation, and so on--that are analyzed by Gordon. Especially in judging the adequacy of Security Council
sanctions, and as a recent book by Andrea Charron convincingly demonstrates, sanctions cases should
also be analyzed in terms of the very specific types of violations in international law they are meant to
correct and the UN Charter-based goals that the Security Council expressed in adopting them. 6 Utilizing
this lens of analysis points to four types of goals for which sanctions are imposed: to end serious
violent conflict; to prevent international terrorism; to control nuclear proliferation; and to protect
human rights and civilians during serious violent conflict. After a brief discussion of each of these
goals, I assess how well targeted, smart sanctions performed in achieving them.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 85
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Deontology Framework
Gonzaga Debate Institute 86
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Consequentialism Kills VTL
Consequential framework destroys intrinsic value to life- they reduce human life to a
calculable object.
Grisez, professor of Christian ethics @ Mount Saint Mary’s College and Shaw, Director
of public information at Knights of Columbus, 94
(Germain and Russell, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 25-26)
If there are no ethical absolutes, human persons, rather than being¶ the norm and source from which
other things receive their value,¶ become simply items or commodities with a relative value-inviolable¶ only up to the point at which it is expedient to violate them in order to¶ achieve an
objective. It would then make no sense at all to speak of¶ the immeasurable value of the human
person from being. Far from being immeasurable—that is, ¶ beyond calculation—the value of a person
would be quite specific and quantifiable, something to be weighed in the balance¶ against other
values.
Utilitarianism destroys human dignity - Treats people as means to an end
Grisez, professor of Christian ethics @ Mount Saint Mary’s College and Shaw, Director
of public information at Knights of Columbus, 94
(Germain Gabriel and Russell, Beyond the New Morality: The Responsibilities of Freedom p 28)
One arrives at a different judgment of how one ought to proceed in such circumstances if human life is
regarded, not as one of the things of relative value which a person has, but as an intrinsic component of
the person, and so as a value which shares in the dignity of the person. In denying that we can choose
to kill one person for the sake of two, we really are denying that two persons are "worth" twice as
much as some other real person. On this view it is simply not possible to make the sort of calculation
which weighs persons against each other (my life is more valuable than John's life, John's life is more
valuable than Mary's and Tom's combined, or vice versa) and thus to determine whose life shall be
respected and whose sacrificed. The value of each human person is incalculable, not in any merely
poetic sense, but simply because it is not susceptible to calculation, measurement, weighing, and
balancing. Traditionally this point has been expressed by the statement that the end does not justify
the means. This is a way of saying that the direct violation of any good intrinsic to the person cannot
be justified by the good result which such a violation may bring about. What is extrinsic to human
persons may be used for the good of persons, but what is intrinsic to persons has a kind of sacredness
and may not be violated.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 87
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Utilitarianism Justifies Atrocities
Deontology comes first, the means must justify themselves – utilitarianism justifies
any atrocity.
Anderson, National Director of Probe Ministries International 2004
(Kerby, “Utilitarianism: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number” http://www.probe.org/theologyand-philosophy/worldview--philosophy/utilitarianism-the-greatest-good-for-thegreatest-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 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.
Without absolute side constraints against violating human dignity, utilitarianism
becomes a justification for slavery, torture, and murder.
Clifford, Professor of Philosophy @ Mississippi State University, 11
[Michael, Spring, “MORAL LITERACY”, Volume 11, Issue 2,
https://webprod1.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Clifford_Moral_Literacy.pdf, Accessed 7-6-13, ABS]
Whether or not you believe in individual rights, whether or not you are convinced by arguments one
way or another about the metaphysical grounds of rights, we can all appreciate the idea that any
ethics should recognize the fundamental dignity of human beings. This is precisely what worries critics of
utilitarianism, that it may require us to violate that dignity, for some at least, if doing so will promote the greatest happiness. But to violate
human dignity is to ignore or to misunderstand the very point of ethics. For
the deontologist, such as Kant, we have a duty not
to violate human dignity, even if it causes us pain, even if the consequences fail to maximize the
overall happiness. The inviolate character of human dignity is expressed most practically by the idea
that we have certain basic rights (whatever the source of rights are, whether natural or by convention). John Locke defined rights
as “prima facie entitlements,” which means that anyone who would restrict my rights bears the burden of proving that there are good reasons
for doing so. For example, the right to private property is sometimes trumped by the principle of eminent domain, provided that I too stand to
gain by seizure of my land. My right to free speech is limited by the harm it might cause by, say, shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre. There
are times when we feel justified in limiting or abrogating certain positive rights for the common good,
but even here no social outcome justifies torture, slavery, murder, or any action which violates my
Gonzaga Debate Institute 88
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
fundamental human dignity. Deontological ethics assumes there to be a line that cannot be crossed,
regardless of the consequences.
Utilitarianism can be manipulated to justify any atrocity – their framework condones
mass slaughter.
Holt, commentator for the BBC, writes frequently about politics and philosophy 1995
(Jim, New York Times, “Morality, Reduced To Arithmetic,” August 5, p. Lexis)
Can the deliberate massacre of innocent people ever be condoned? The atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, resulted in the deaths of 120,000 to 250,000 Japanese by
incineration and radiation poisoning. Although a small fraction of the victims were soldiers, the great
majority were noncombatants -- women, children, the aged. Among the justifications that have been
put forward for President Harry Truman’s decision to use the bomb, only one is worth taking seriously - that it saved lives. The alternative, the reasoning goes, was to launch an invasion. Truman claimed in
his memoirs that this would have cost another half a million American lives. Winston Churchill put the
figure at a million. Revisionist historians have cast doubt on such numbers. Wartime documents suggest
that military planners expected around 50,000 American combat deaths in an invasion. Still, when
Japanese casualties, military and civilian, are taken into account, the overall invasion death toll on both
sides would surely have ended up surpassing that from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars will continue
to argue over whether there were other, less catastrophic ways to force Tokyo to surrender. But given
the fierce obstinacy of the Japanese militarists, Truman and his advisers had some grounds for believing
that nothing short of a full-scale invasion or the annihilation of a big city with an apocalyptic new
weapon would have succeeded. Suppose they were right. Would this prospect have justified the
intentional mass killing of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the debate over the question,
participants on both sides have been playing the numbers game. Estimate the hypothetical number of
lives saved by the bombings, then add up the actual lives lost. If the first number exceeds the second,
then Truman did the right thing; if the reverse, it was wrong to have dropped the bombs. That is one
approach to the matter -- the utilitarian approach. According to utilitarianism, a form of moral
reasoning that arose in the 19th century, the goodness or evil of an action is determined solely by its
consequences. If somehow you can save 10 lives by boiling a baby, go ahead and boil that baby. There
is, however, an older ethical tradition, one rooted in Judeo-Christian theology, that takes a quite
different view. The gist of it is expressed by St. Paul’s condemnation of those who say, “Let us do evil,
that good may come.” Some actions, this tradition holds, can never be justified by their consequences;
they are absolutely forbidden. It is always wrong to boil a baby even if lives are saved thereby.
Applying this absolutist morality to war can be tricky. When enemy soldiers are trying to enslave or kill
us, the principle of self-defense permits us to kill them (though not to slaughter them once they are
taken prisoner). But what of those who back them? During World War II, propagandists made much of
the “indivisibility” of modern warfare: the idea was that since the enemy nation’s entire economic and
social strength was deployed behind its military forces, the whole population was a legitimate target for
obliteration. “There are no civilians in Japan,” declared an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force
shortly before the Hiroshima bombing, a time when the Japanese were popularly depicted as vermin
worthy of extermination. The boundary between combatant and noncombatant can be fuzzy, but the
distinction is not meaningless, as the case of small children makes clear. Yet is wartime killing of those
who are not trying to harm us always tantamount to murder? When naval dockyards, munitions
factories and supply lines are bombed, civilian carnage is inevitable. The absolutist moral tradition
acknowledges this by a principle known as double effect: although it is always wrong to kill innocents
deliberately, it is sometimes permissible to attack a military target knowing some noncombatants will
die as a side effect. The doctrine of double effect might even justify bombing a hospital where Hitler is
Gonzaga Debate Institute 89
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
lying ill. It does not, however, apply to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Transformed into hostages by the
technology of aerial bombardment, the people of those cities were intentionally executed en masse to
send a message of terror to the rulers of Japan. The practice of ordering the massacre of civilians to
bring the enemy to heel scarcely began with Truman. Nor did the bomb result in casualties of a new
order of magnitude. The earlier bombing of Tokyo by incendiary weapons killed some 100,000 people.
What Hiroshima and Nagasaki did mark, by the unprecedented need for rationalization they
presented, was the triumph of utilitarian thinking in the conduct of war. The conventional code of
noncombatant immunity -- a product of several centuries of ethical progress among nations, which had
been formalized by an international commission in the 1920’s in the Hague -- was swept away. A simpler
axiom took its place: since war is hell, any means necessary may be used to end, in Churchill’s words,
“the vast indefinite butchery.” It is a moral calculus that, for all its logical consistency, offends our deepseated intuitions about the sanctity of life -- our conviction that a person is always to be treated as an
end, never as a means. Left up to the warmakers, moreover, utilitarian calculations are susceptible to
bad-faith reasoning: tinker with the numbers enough and virtually any atrocity can be excused in the
national interest. In January, the world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz, where mass slaughter was committed as an end in itself -- the ultimate evil. The moral nature
of Hiroshima is ambiguous by contrast. Yet in the postwar era, when governments do not hesitate to
treat the massacre of civilians as just another strategic option, the bomb’s sinister legacy is plain: it has
inured us to the idea of reducing innocents to instruments and morality to arithmetic.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 90
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Side Constraints
Even if we should evaluate consequences, there should be absolute side constraints
on deliberately harming innocent people.
Fried, Professor of law @ Harvard, 94
(Charles, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 74)
The opposing conception of right and wrong, the conception that there are some things we must not
do no matter what good we hope to accomplish, has always stood as a provocation and a scandal to
consequentialism. If a state of the world is the best possible state and we bring it about at the least
possible cost, what else can matter? Yet the opposing conception (the deontological) holds that how
one achieves one's goals has a moral significance which is not subsumed in¶ the importance and
magnitude of the goals. Whether we get to the¶ desired end state by deliberately hurting innocent
people, by violating their rights, by lies and violence, is intensely important. And yet the deontologist
does not deny that states of the world are sources of value and even agrees that the good inherent in
states of the world (including¶ our own states of mind) is the only good. If a happy state of the world
existed that had been brought about through wrong and violation of right, and if those wrongs could
no longer be righted, there is nothing that says that this happiness would not count as real happiness
and should not be enjoyed; still, if this happiness had been ours to choose only by wrongful means, we
would have had to wave it away. We would have to wave it away because right and wrong are the
foundations of our moral personality. We choose our goods, but if what we choose is to have value as
a good, then the entity doing the choosing must have value, and the process of choice must be such
that what¶ comes out of it has value. In the view I shall elaborate, right and wrong have an
independent and overriding status because they establish our basic position as freely choosing
entities. That is why nothing we choose can be more important than the ground'—right and wrong—
for our choosing. Right and wrong are the expressions of respect for persons—respect for others and
self-respect.
You should never commit a sure evil to avoid a possible one- consequentialist logic
can be manipulated, and other actions can be taken to mitigate or avoid their disads.
Gewirth, Professor of Philosophy @ The University of Chicago, 84
(Alan, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 138-139)
6. There is, however, another side to this story. What of the thousands of innocent persons in the
distant city whose lives are imperilled by the threatened nuclear explosion? Don't they too have rights
to life which, because of their numbers, are far superior to the mother's right? May they not contend
that while it is all very well for Abrams to preserve his moral purity by not killing his mother, he has no
right to purchase this at the expense of their lives, thereby treating them as mere means to his ends and
violating their own rights? Thus it may be argued that the morally correct description of the alternative
confront- ing Abrams is not simply that it is one of not violating or violating an innocent person's right to
life, but rather not violating one innocent person's right to life and thereby violating the right to life of
thousands of other innocent persons through being partly responsible for their deaths, or violating one
innocent person's right to life and thereby protecting or fulfilling the right to life of thousands of other
innocent persons. We have here a tragic conflict of rights and an illustration of the heavy price exacted
by moral absolutism. The aggregative conse- quentialist who holds that that action ought always to be
performed which maximizes utility or minimizes disutility would maintain that in such a situation the
lives of the thousands must be preferred.¶ An initial answer may be that terrorists who make such
Gonzaga Debate Institute 91
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
demands and issue such threats cannot be trusted to keep their word not to drop the bombs if the
mother is tortured to death; and even if they now do keep their word, acceding in this case would only
lead to further escalated demands and threats. It may also be argued that it is¶ irrational to perpetrate
a sure evil in order to forestall what is so far only a possible or threatened evil. Philippa Foot has sagely
commented on cases of this sort that if it is the son's duty to kill his mother in order to save the lives of
the many other innocent residents of the city, then "anyone who wants us to do something we think
wrong has only to threaten that otherwise he himself will do something we think worse".8 Much
depends, however, on the nature of the "wrong" and the "worse". If someone threatens to commit
suicide or to kill inno- cent hostages if we do not break our promise to do some relatively unimportant
action, breaking the promise would be the obviously right course, by the criterion of degrees of
necessity for action. The special difficulty of the present case stems from the fact that the conflicting
rights are of the same supreme degree of importance.¶ It may be contended, however, that this whole
answer, focusing on the probable outcome of obeying the terrorists' demands, is a conse- quentialist
argument and, as such, is not available to the absolutist who insists that Abrams must not torture his
mother to death whatever the consequences.9 This contention imputes to the absolutist a kind of
indifference or even callousness to the sufferings of others that is not warranted by a correct
understanding of his position. He can be concerned about consequences so long as he does not regard
them as possibly superseding or diminishing the right and duty he regards as absolute. It is a matter of
priorities. So long as the mother's right not to be tortured to death by her son is unqualifiedly
respected, the absolutist can seek ways to mitigate the threatened disastrous consequences and
possibly to avert them altogether. A parallel case is found in the theory of legal punishment: the
retributivist, while asserting that punishment must be meted out only to the persons who deserve it
because of the crimes they have committed, may also uphold punish- ment for its deterrent effect so
long as the latter, consequentialist consideration is subordinated to and limited by the conditions of the
former, antecedentalist consideration.' Thus the absolutist can accommodate at least part of the
consequentialist's substantive concerns within the limits of his own principle.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 92
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Intervening Action
The principle of intervening action means we aren’t morally culpable for the reaction
or backlash of other parties.
Alan Gewirth, Professor of Philosophy @ The University of Chicago, 1982
(“Human Rights: Essay on Justification and Application.” Pg. 230)
The required supplement is provided by the principle of intervening action. According to this principle,
when there is a casual connection between some person A’s performing some action (or inaction) X
and some other person C’s incurring a certain harm Z, A’s moral responsibility for Z is removed if,
between X and Z, there intervenes some other action Y of some person B who knows the relevant
circumstances of his action and who intends to produce Z or who produces Z through recklessness.
The reason for this removal is that B’s intervening action Y is more direct of proximate cause of Z and,
unlike A’s action (or inaction), Y is the sufficient condition of Z as it actually occurs. An example of this
principle may help to show its connection with the absolutist thesis. Martin Luther King Jr. was
repeatedly told that because he led demonstrations in support of civil rights, he was morally
responsible for the disorders, riots, and deaths that ensued and that were shaking the American
Republic to its foundations. By the principle of intervening action, however, it was King’s opponents
who were responsible because their intervention operated as the sufficient conditions of the riots and
injuries. King might also have replied that the Republic would not be worth saving if the price that had
to be paid was the violation of the civil rights of black Americans. As for the rights of the other
Americans to peace and order, the reply would be that these rights cannot justifiably be secured at
the price of the rights of blacks.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 93
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Critical Consequentialism
You should adopt critical consequentialism- examine every possible alternative before
taking unethical action. This is the only way to avoid atrocities.
Blum, Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard, 2008
[Gabriella, “The Laws of War and the ‘Lesser Evil,’” Harvard Law School Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper
24,http://lsr.nellco.org/harvard/faculty/papers/24, Accessed 7/11/13]
To be truly justified, a net utilitarian calculation is insufficient; the¶ actor, instead, must be able to
show that she had chosen the least possible¶ harmful mean that could avert the greater evil, without
jeopardizing the¶ success of the military mission. This further condition is intended to¶ supplement the
causal connection between the violation and the aversion of¶ harm and to ensure that the lesser evil
justification is not used to mask¶ unnecessary atrocities.¶ The domestic necessity defense does not
require this condition; instead,¶ it offers only a vague proportionality test. The joint necessity-duress
clause¶ in the ICC Rome Statute includes a similarly broader test, namely that “the¶ person acts
necessarily and reasonably to avoid this threat.” Both the¶ domestic necessity and the ICC necessity
operate only when the defendant¶ has acted against an imminent threat. But where a government
chooses in an¶ non-imminent, premeditated decision to break the law, it supposedly can¶ and should
assess the full ramifications of the violation, including by¶ considering less harmful means, whether legal
or illegal themselves.¶ In the Early Warning case, the High Court of Justice addressed the¶ possible use of
loudspeakers as an alternative to the reliance on civilians.¶ The IDF’s position, to recall, was that the use
of loudspeakers would call¶ attention to the forces operating, thereby increasing the risk of all-round¶
escalation. It is unclear to what extent this alternative affected the final¶ decision of the judges, and
whether the Court ultimately struck down the¶ procedure despite deferring to the IDF’s judgment on this
particular issue.¶ The use of torture, so it is commonly agreed by those who are willing to¶ accept it as
necessary under certain circumstances, must be restricted to¶ those cases where a similar outcome
could not be achieved by any other¶ means. Consequently, if any less harmful measure (for instance,
detention,¶ the taking of hostages, or even the threat of using torture) would have had a¶ similar
probability of success, torture would be unjustifiable.¶ This requirement would also exclude certain
atrocities from¶ consideration under the humanitarian necessity paradigm altogether.¶ Consider, for
instance, the crime of rape: It is impossible to imagine any¶ scenario in which the raping of an individual
would be the least harmful¶ way to achieve a certain goal. If anything less than killing is possible, there¶
must be a range of less harmful means to avert the harm the infliction of¶ which is allowed under the
law.¶ The less harmful means requirement casts the largest shadow over the¶ attacks on Hiroshima, and
particularly, Nagasaki. Was it indeed impossible¶ to avert Operation Downfall by using less disastrous
means? Or were some¶ scientists, who argued that inviting UN representatives for a live¶ demonstration
of the explosion in the desert, correct in arguing that this¶ option had to be tried out first, before
dropping the bomb on densely¶ populated cities? Does the insistence of the Emperor on conditional¶
surrender even after the widespread firebombing of Tokyo and the invasion¶ of Okinawa prove that
there were no other options? Did the conditions set¶ by the Emperor warrant the continuation of the
war? Could the use of¶ nuclear weapons ever be justified under the “least harmful requirement”¶
condition?
Gonzaga Debate Institute 94
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Extinction Outweighs
Gonzaga Debate Institute 95
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Extinction Images = Overestimate Risk
Their understanding of extinction scenarios is flawed. They are only evaluating the
images that extinction evokes, not the probability of its occurrence.
Yudkowsky ‘6 (Eliezer; Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence “Cognitive
biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks” Forthcoming in Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick
Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic 8/31/06)
In addition to standard biases, I have personally observed what look like harmful modes of thinking specific to existential risks. The
Spanish
flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people. 107 is the order of the largest
catastrophes in humanity's written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially
qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a
different mode of thinking - enter into a "separate magisterium". People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an
existential risk, and say, "Well, maybe the human species doesn't really deserve to survive."There is a saying in heuristics and biases that
people do not evaluate events, but descriptions of events - what is called non-extensional reasoning. The extension of
humanity's extinction includes the death of yourself, of your friends, of your family, of your loved ones, of your city, of your country, of your
political fellows. Yet people who would take great offense at a proposal to wipe the country of Britain from the map, to kill every member of
the Democratic Party in the U.S., to turn the city of Paris to glass - who would feel still greater horror on hearing the doctor say that their child
had cancer - these people will discuss the extinction of humanity with perfect calm. "Extinction
of humanity", as words on
paper, appears in fictional novels, or is discussed in philosophy books - it belongs to a different context than the Spanish
flu. We evaluate descriptions of events, not extensions of events. The cliché phrase end of the world
invokes the magisterium of myth and dream, of prophecy and apocalypse, of novels and movies. The
challenge of existential risks to rationality is that, the catastrophes being so huge, people snap into a
different mode of thinking. Human deaths are suddenly no longer bad, and detailed predictions
suddenly no longer require any expertise, and whether the story is told with a happy ending or a sad
ending is a matter of personal taste in stories.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 96
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Tyranny of Survival
Sole focus on survival destroys value to life and is always used to justify the worst
atrocities.
Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973 (Daniel, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 9193)
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, into detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme
Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in a general consensus that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly
unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was
one of the official legitimizations of Nazism. Under the banner
of survival, the government of South Africa imposed a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary
human rights. The Vietnamese war has been 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 evokes 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 Jaques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow
almost all known religious, ethical, and political system. In genetics, the
survival of the gene pool has been put forward as
grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and beating
children. Some have suggested we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means to find means by which
those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life and thus procreate 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 starving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies For all these reasons, it 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 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 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 make to ensure that
survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 97
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
****AFF****
Gonzaga Debate Institute 98
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
General
Gonzaga Debate Institute 99
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Shunning Bad- Hurts People/Strengthens Regime
Shunning puts an unequal burden on the people of a nation—it creates larger
injustices
Beversluis, Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University, 89
[Eric H., April, Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 15-25, “ON SHUNNING UNDESIRABLE REGIMES:
ETHICS AND ECONOMIC SANCTIONS”, accessed 7/3/13, VJ]
Finally, shunning can itself cause injustices. Should we shun a nation that violates the rights of some or
all of its citizens if the burden will fall primarily on those victims? For example, sanctions against South
Africa are often rejected on the grounds that they will hurt the South African blacks the most. Yet it is
not clear what weight this argument has. Certainly shunning will cause economic hardship for South
Africa, hardship which the oppressive regime may well transer to the black people. But the oppressed
people may welcome that additional burden, since it may, as it were, lighten their overall burden by
recognizing their plight and their worth (Wurde, dignity) as human beings. It may give them the moral
encouragement needed to carry on their struggle. Finally, the cries of the black people against
apartheid, along with their strikes and boycotts, seem to be evidence that they themselves are willing to
make the sacrifices to fight apartheid. In other cases, however, the burden of shunning may in no way
help the oppressed people. Then shunning itself would clearly be unjust and should not be done;
alternative sanctions must be devised which will affect the offending members of the society.
Problems of justice can also arise within the shunning nation, since shunning will almost certainly
impose unequal costs on its citizens. For example, sanctions will affect the employees and
stockholders of certain companies significantly while affecting the general public little. This problem of
uneven burden can arise with all forms of economic sanctions, not just with shunning, of course. Recall
the pain suffered by American farmers when President Carter stopped grain shipments to the Soviet
Union after the invasion of Afghanistan. It seems clearly unfair to expect only part of the nation to
bear the burden of the witness against immorality. To the extent that the domestic incidence of such
plicies can be identified, compensating policies should be divised, policies such as subsidies, opening
of other markets, government purchase, etc. which can be funded out of general revenues and
thereby spread the burden fairly over the whole nation.
Sanctions fail—only hurt the bottom classes of society, and often strengthen the
regimes rather than topple them
Addis, Professor at Tulane University Law School, 03
[Adeno, August, Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 25, Number 3, pp. 585-586, Economic Sanctions and
the Problem of Evil, Project Muse, accessed 7/2/13, VJ]
It is true that even such regimes do have the support of a section of the populace, however small that
may be. The Haitian military regime had, for example, the support of the small wealthy elite. The
Taliban had the support of religious militants and the Iraqi regime had the support of the military, at
least the Republican Guard. And the regimes must keep these constituents happy in order to stay in
power. But however harsh a sanction may be, the regimes will find ways to take care of their
supporters. It is the ordinary citizens that will shoulder the harsh effects of sanctions and, ironically,
that have the least chance to affect the policies and actions of those regimes. The irony becomes even
more pronounced when one realizes that sometimes those sanctions are imposed supposedly in
support of the human rights of citizens of the target states.33 We should not expect economic
Gonzaga Debate Institute 100
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
sanctions to bring about changes in the behavior or policy of regimes that are often targets of such
sanctions, for there are no economic or political costs to the leaders of those regimes. Not only is it the
case that ordinary citizens often have no influence over the regimes of target states, but at times the
severity of these sanctions do in fact force those citizens to rally behind regimes that they do not like.
This is so for two reasons. First, the regimes manage to convey to the populace that the sanctioners
care very little about their lives and are prepared to sacrifice them to achieve their foreign policy
objectives, one of which is replacing nationalist regimes with client regimes. The regime’s
vulnerability is deftly transformed into the vulnerability of the nation itself. Second, some regimes
also manage to define the sanction as one action in a long line of historical attempts of one civilization
demeaning and attacking another or one religious tradition demonizing another—the West
attempting to dominate the East, or Christianity engaged in its historical attempt to humiliate Islam. The
particular action gets defined in the context of historical struggles where the victim is not simply the
regime or even the particular state, but a grand tradition. This will be discussed in greater detail later in
the essay. But at the moment it is sufficient to note that sanctions may in fact build solidarity between
the population and the target regime.
US sanctions make human rights violations even worse
Hadar, 98 (Leon T. Hadar is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, Trade Policy Analysis No. 1 March
26, 1998, U.S. SANCTIONS AGAINST BURMA: A Failure on All Fronts,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/trade/tpa-001.html)
Present U.S. policy toward Burma is not going to bring meaningful change in the human rights
practices of the regime and will probably make the bad situation in Burma even worse. Sanctions
strengthen the hand of the ruling authorities by creating a scapegoat for their own internal policy
failures and narrowing the opportunity of private individuals in Burma to expand their economic,
social, and cultural contacts with the citizens of the West.
US sanctions undermine human rights efforts and deny people around the world
exposure to American values
Hadar, 98 (Leon T. Hadar is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, Trade Policy Analysis No. 1 March
26, 1998, U.S. SANCTIONS AGAINST BURMA: A Failure on All Fronts,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/trade/tpa-001.html)
Sanctions Fall Hardest on People of Burma
What really matters is that the Burma sanctions have not worked to achieve their political goals of
domestic change. The SLORC/SPCD junta remains in control and is not facing any serious challenge
to its power. As many of the businesses operating in Burma have pointed out, the sanctions' main
victims are the Burmese people themselves.
When it comes to advancing political and economic reforms, U.S. companies in Burma are part of the
solution, not the problem. "The presence of U.S. companies abroad helps to promote the values we
as a nation espouse, including human rights and fair labor standards," noted Ernest Bower,
president of the U.S.-ASEAN Council and one of the leading opponents of sanctions. U.S. companies
train workers and transfer technology more readily than do their Asian and European competitors.
They promote democratic values, set a positive example, and improve the general quality of life by
providing fair pay, safe working conditions, and health and education benefits. American foreign
investment in Burma "is an extremely effective means of advancing economic and social
Gonzaga Debate Institute 101
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
development, and should not be abandoned in favor of measures which have no chance of
success," argued Bower.(33)
Gonzaga Debate Institute 102
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Human Rights Pressure = Violence
Human rights are a ruse: they are deployed to do violence to other states and
individuals, not to protect people
Kennedy, 02 (David, Professor of Law at Harvard, Harvard Human Rights Journal, “The International
Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?” vol. 15, Spring 2002,
www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/iss15/kennedy.shtml)
G. The Legal Regime of “Human Rights,” Taken as a Whole, Does More To Produce and Excuse
Violations than To Prevent and Remedy Them
Treating symptoms. Human rights remedies, even when successful, treat the symptoms rather than
the illness, and this allows the illness not only to fester, but to seem like health itself. This is most
likely where signing up for a norm—against discrimination—comes to substitute for ending the
practice. But even where victims are recompensed or violations avoided, the distributions of power
and wealth that produced the violation may well come to seem more legitimate as they seek other
avenues of expression.
Humanitarian norms excuse too much. We are familiar with the idea that rules of warfare may do
more to legitimate violence than to restrain it—as a result of vague standards, broad justifications,
lax enforcement, or prohibitions that are clear but beside the point. The same can often be said
about human rights. The vague and conflicting norms, their uncertain status, the broad
justifications and excuses, the lack of enforcement, the attention to problems that are peripheral
to a broadly conceived program of social justice—all this may, in some contexts, place the human
rights movement in the uncomfortable position of legitimating more injustice than it eliminates.
This is particularly likely where human rights discourse has been absorbed into the foreign policy
processes of the great powers, indeed, of all powers.
Humanitarian norms justify too much. The human rights movement consistently underestimates the
usefulness of the human rights vocabulary and machinery for people whose hearts are hard and
whose political projects are repressive. The United States, The United Kingdom, Russia—but also
Serbia and the Kosovar Albanians—have taken military action, intervened politically, and justified
their governmental policies on the grounds of protecting human rights. Far from being a defense of
the individual against the state, human rights has become a standard part of the justification for
the external use of force by the state against other states and individuals. The porousness of the
human rights vocabulary means that the interventions and exercises of state authority it
legitimates are more likely to track political interests than its own emancipatory agenda.
Background norms do the real damage. At the same time, the human rights regime, like the law
concerning war, is composed of more than those legal rules and institutions that explicitly concern
human rights. The human rights movement acts as if the human rights legal regime were composed
only of rights catalogs and institutions for their implementation. In fact, the law concerning torture,
say, includes all the legal rules, principles, and institutions that bear on the incidence of torture. The
vast majority of these rules—rules of sovereignty, institutional competence, agency, property and
contract—facilitate or excuse the use of torture by police and governments.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 103
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Shunning Bad- No Change
Sanctions fail—don’t create change and undermine human rights
Addis, Professor at Tulane University Law School, 03
[Adeno, August, Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 25, Number 3, pp. 605-608, Economic Sanctions and
the Problem of Evil, Project Muse, accessed 7/2/13, VJ]
The notion of the outlaw state or the rogue state, therefore, seems to refer to the overall and consistent
actions of a state that are seen to be at odds with the two fundamental norms and commitments of the
international community. Following John Rawls90 and the UN Charter itself, it was argued earlier that
two important commitments—respect for human rights and inclination to disfavor the use of war as
an instrument of state policy— define the international community in the post World War II era.91
Therefore, a regime may be designated as an outlaw regime if it engages in massive violations of
internationally guaranteed rights of its citizens or when it considers it a sufficiently good reason to use
war as a means of advancing what it regards as its rational interest. Outlaw regimes aggressively
deprive their citizens’ human rights and they aggressively attempt to vanquish outsiders through the
use of war.92 Put simply, the outlaw regime is the negation of a fundamental aspect of the identity of
the international community, and economic sanctions could be utilized to mark the outlaw regime.
However, often, and perhaps even always, the use of economic sanctions as a mark of the outlaw state
has had rather undesirable and tragic consequences. The effect of sanctions that are meant to mark
the outlaw end up treating the people on whose behalf the measures are often adopted as outlaws
themselves. Conceptually, when terms like the “outlaw states,” “pariah states,” and “rogue states” are
used to refer to those states which are believed to be acting contrary to the norms of the international
community, what usually happens is that there is a collapse between the notions of states and regimes.
The regime of a state is viewed as being the state itself. But, of course, the state is more, much more,
than a regime. A state is the official center of self-conscious collective action, “the agency of selfconscious political action.”93 Conceptual confusions are never without practical consequences. If one
were to examine Security Council imposed mandatory sanctions, one would find that many treated
states and regimes as if they were the same. The sanctions on Iraq and, to some extent, the ones that
were imposed on Afghanistan prior to the armed intervention that toppled the Taliban are such
examples. In fact, as argued earlier, in a general sense, a major reason for the ineffectiveness of
economic sanctions is a result of this conceptual confusion. In relation to the behavior modification
objective, it was argued earlier that economic sanctions falsely assume that the people of the target
state could pressure the regime to alter the offending policies and behavior. Many studies indicate
that multilateral (or, for that matter, even unilateral) economic sanctions do not often force regimes to
alter their conduct or policy. To add another voice to that general conclusion, below are comments
from the Sub-Commission of the UN Commission on Human Rights: The “theory” behind economic
sanctions is that economic pressure on civilians will translate into pressure on the Government for
change. This “theory” is bankrupt both legally and practically, as more and more evidence testifies to
the inefficacy of comprehensive economic sanctions as a coercive tool. The traditional calculation of
balancing civilian suffering against the desired political effects is giving way to the realization that the
efficacy of a sanctions regime is in inverse proportion to its impact on civilians.94 This is not to say, of
course, that sanctions are not economically effective— they are. They have devastating impacts on the
target nation and its citizens, as the UN sanctions against Iraq and US trade embargoes against Cuba95
testify. The point here, rather, is that “the relation[ship] between economic effectiveness and political
effectiveness is not at all clear; indeed, it may be an inverse relation.”96 An unaccountable regime will
Gonzaga Debate Institute 104
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
always externalize the cost from itself and its supporters to the ordinary citizens. And the power of
the ordinary citizen to punish the regime for the consequences of the sanction is rather negligible, if
not non-existent. A newspaper report on the effects of the decade old UN imposed sanctions against
Iraq concluded that in Baghdad those sanctions have created two classes of people, a small group of
citizens who are “close to the ruling circles” and who are still doing very well, on the one hand, and on
the other hand, the overwhelming majority of Iraqi citizens “whose income has been so devalued that
few . . . can afford a helping of chicken at al-Sa’ah [the equivalent of Kentucky Fried Chicken].”97
Treating civilians in such circumstances effectively as “outlaws” is the cruelest form of indifference.
Economic effectiveness does not correlate with political effectiveness.98 Even in relation to the
identity-constituting objective, many of the sanction regimes seem to be spectacularly unsuccessful.
The image they project is not an international community that believes in the centrality of human
rights as its very identity, but the opposite. Once again, consider Iraq. When the lives of many
civilians, including many children, are put at risk or even lost as a result of sanctions, part of whose
purpose is said, at of the international community becomes one that is quite willing to sacrifice the
rights and lives of a considerable number of individuals from certain parts of the world to achieve
certain political goals. For many individuals from developing countries and from non-western traditions,
this suspicion gets strengthened when they hear statements such as the one from former US Secretary
of State and Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeline Albright. Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl of
“60 Minutes” whether the death of a half-million people—which reports had suggested might have
taken place—was an acceptable price for sanctions and Albrght responded: “we think the price is worth
it.”100 The image of the international community is, therefore, one that devalues not only non-western
traditions and horizons of significance,101 but the very lives of non-western peoples as well.102 A public
attempt to dissociate oneself from evil ends up creating an even greater evil.
Sanctions fail at both behavior change AND ethical positioning
Addis, Professor at Tulane University Law School, 03
[Adeno, August, Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 25, Number 3, pp. 610-611, Economic Sanctions and
the Problem of Evil, Project Muse, accessed 7/2/13, VJ]
Not only do economic sanctions as they are currently applied usually fail to persuade the outlaw
regimes to alter their behavior or policy, they also do not project an image of an international
community whose central identity is defined by respect for, and defense of, human rights. They may,
in fact, ultimately force citizens of those countries to rally behind those regimes that they generally
dislike. Citizens begin to view the sanctions in a historical continuum of the countries in the center
defining as a negation of the normal and moral order the traditions of those at the corner.106 When
President Clinton observed that the sanctions against Afghanistan were intended “to deepen the
international isolation of the Taliban,”107 whether he realized it or not he was isolating Afghanistan and
its people as well. A study “found that the sanctions [against Afghanistan had in fact] magnified feelings
of isolation and victimization among the population.”108 The isolation of Afghanistan was likely to
have been viewed by the citizens of that country as just another attempt by the West, the JudeoChristian tradition, to isolate Islam by defining it as the troublesome other. The same report cited
earlier revealed that there was absolutely no “support within Afghanistan for further economic
sanctions”109 and that there was strong and widespread perception that the Security Council had “set
out to harm rather than help Afghans.”110 To summarize, the irony of multilateral economic sanctions
such as those that were imposed against Iraq and Afghanistan is that they often end up gravely
harming the two causes for which they were adopted. The image of the international community that
is projected to those living in the target state and others in similar positions is at odds with the official
Gonzaga Debate Institute 105
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
and formal story. The chances of getting the target regime to alter its policy or behavior are markedly
reduced. This is so for three reasons. First, the regime is not accountable or responsive to citizens that
shoulder the harsh effect of sanctions and are meant to persuade the regime to alter its conduct so as
to avoid further damage. Second, the harsh sanctions often trigger a reflex among the people to
defend what they may come to believe to be their core identity that is under attack, the ethos of
“conspicuous sacrifice” as Johan Galtung calls it.111 Third, economic sanctions often seriously undercut
the position and development of internal challenges to the regime. Economic sanctions, in the way
that they are imposed and administered, postpone (and sometimes for very long, as the Cuban example
shows)112 meaningful and sustained internal challenges to repressive regimes by unwittingly providing
the condition in which internal challenges are discredited.
US sanctions fail at least 87% of the time and rarely achieve anything productive
Hadar, 98 (Leon T. Hadar is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, Trade Policy Analysis No. 1 March
26, 1998, U.S. SANCTIONS AGAINST BURMA: A Failure on All Fronts,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/trade/tpa-001.html)
A Record of Failure
Economic sanctions have failed dismally in the past. The record of U.S. foreign policy is chock full of
sanctions that did not bring about the intended change in the target country. Since 1970 unilateral
economic sanctions imposed by the United States have failed to work in 87 percent of the cases in
which they have been tried.(19) Among the more spectacular fiascoes were the grain embargo
against the Soviet Union in retaliation for its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and the 1982 sanctions
against companies that participated in building the Soviet natural gas pipeline to Western Europe. In
both cases U.S. exporters and investors lost business to foreign competitors while Soviet behavior
was unaffected. After 35 years the U.S. embargo against Cuba has failed to topple the Castro
regime. Its only real impact has been to push the long-suffering people of Cuba deeper into
poverty.
Advocates of sanctions have pointed to Haiti, Iraq, and South Africa as examples of success. But
the political change in Haiti came about only after the United States prepared to invade the island.
And the United Nations-imposed embargo on Iraq did not force Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait;
it was the U.S. military campaign against Baghdad that achieved that goal. In South Africa
sanctions accomplished nothing until the end of the Cold War changed the political dynamic in that
country. Furthermore, those sanctions were imposed by a broad coalition of its major trading
partners and were aimed at a government that was democratically responsive to a sizable (albeit
minority) segment of the population. Neither of those conditions applies to the vast majority of
sanctions imposed by the United States in recent years, including those against Burma.
Sanctions don’t improve human rights – China proves
Drury – Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at University of
Misourri, and Li – PhD candidate at USC School of International Relations, 2006
(A. Cooper Drury and Yitan Li, ISA Journal of Foreign Policy Analysis, “U.S. Economic Sanctions Against
China: Failing to Leverage Better Human Rights,” October, p. 307-324, Blackwell-Synergy.com)
Although this sanction threat argument is logical, testing it is problematic. Sanction threats are
essentially nonevents or nonsanctions. Even threats that are not private (and one should expect that
many are) do not incur any visible material costs to the target or sender. That is, there is no
disruption in trade or financial holdings. This characteristic makes assessing the efficacy of sanction
Gonzaga Debate Institute 106
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
threats rather difficult. That is, the intensity of the threatened costs, as well as the threat itself, are
difficult to measure. In this paper, we attempt to provide an analysis of economic sanction threats.
To accomplish this, we build on previous qualitative work (Li and Drury 2004) to evaluate
quantitatively the U.S. decision to renew most favored nation (MFN) status for the People's Republic
of China from 1989 to 1995. During this period, the U.S. contentiously debated to revoke, or renew
with serious conditions, China's trading status. This debate constituted a serious threat of
economic sanctions. At first blush, Beijing reacted to these threats by releasing several high-profile
dissidents over the 6-year period, suggesting that, perhaps, the threats were effective. We will
show, however, that these threats were not effective and in fact, were counter-productive to the
goal of securing better human rights in China.
Economic sanctions backfire – Burma proves
Hadar, 98 (Leon T. Hadar is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, Trade Policy Analysis No. 1 March
26, 1998, U.S. SANCTIONS AGAINST BURMA: A Failure on All Fronts,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/trade/tpa-001.html)
Conflict created by U.S. policy toward Burma will only raise the cost of promoting U.S. economic and
strategic interests in the region, at a time when the rise of China and changing U.S. military and
diplomatic relationships with Japan and South Korea are creating a sense of growing strategic
uncertainly in East Asia, and when the financial turmoil in Southeast Asia, South Korea, and Japan is
slowing economic growth in the Pacific Rim.
In the final analysis, U.S. policy toward Burma is an irresponsible moral posturing. Supporters of
sanctions want to feel good that they are doing something to improve political and economic
conditions in Burma by forcing someone else--American businesses, the ASEAN nations, and the
Burmese people--to bear the costs. The result will be reduced access of the Burmese people to
American products, people, and ideas; worsening economic conditions; and potential political and
regional instability. It is indeed ironic that some members of America's cosmopolitan knowledge
class, who are the main beneficiaries of the process of economic globalization, are supporting
policies that run contrary to free trade and open markets and deny the Burmese people the ability to
enjoy the fruits of the global economy.
Sanctions fail, hurt the general public, and strengthen repressive forces
Lopez, PhD from Syracuse University, 2K
[George A., November 25th, America Magazine, “Toward Ethical Economic Sanctions”,
http://americamagazine.org/issue/390/article/toward-ethical-economic-sanctions, accessed 7/5/13, VJ]
Despite their frequent use, however, the conventional belief still holds that sanctions are mostly
symbolic in nature and have little practical impact. One reporter described sanctions as an ineffective
bromide intended to placate public demands for action but incapable of achieving real results.
Whether in Cuba, where 40 years of U.S. embargo have not dislodged Castro, or in Iraq, where Saddam
Hussein remains firmly in power despite 10 years of U.N. sanctions, sanctions seem to have minimal
political consequences or none at all. Yet contrary to this critique, as the case of Iraq illustrates, their
economic bite can be sufficiently sharp that sanctions will have severe humanitarian and social
consequences. In Haiti the short-lived U.N. embargo of 1993-94 also had negative impacts on
children’s health. In Cuba and Nicaragua, unilateral U.S. sanctions undermined significant advances in
public health. Sanctions often cause social consequences that make the desired political changes
Gonzaga Debate Institute 107
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
within the target regime less likely. During the 1991-95 war in Yugoslavia, U.N. sanctions deprived
middle-class human rights groups of international contacts and support and reduced the availability of
newsprint and broadcasting equipment with which these groups sought to challenge the regime’s
warlike policies. Sanctions harmed the very constituencies within Serbia that were most supportive of
the human rights norms being advanced by the United Nations. Sanctions also have the bitterly ironic
result of fostering black market criminality, which in many cases is controlled by state forces or
paramilitary groups. This strengthens the repressive forces against which sanctions are supposedly
aimed.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 108
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Unilateral Sanctions Fail
Even if sanctions are good they have no effect if only carried out by the U.S.
Forcese, 02 (Craig, BA, McGill; MA, Carleton; LL.B., Ottawa; LL.M., Yale; Member of the Bars of New
York, Ontario and the District of Columbia. Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, “Globalizing
Decency: Responsible Engagement in an Era of Economic Integration,” 5 Yale H.R. & Dev. L.J. 1, LexisNexis Universe)
Unilateral sanctions have been singled out for particular criticism. For example, the Cato Institute
has urged there are "no examples of U.S. unilateral economic sanctions changing the basic
character or significant policies of a foreign nation." 83 The Center for Strategic and International
Studies is in substantial agreement, 84 though it notes some instances where narrowly targeted,
non-comprehensive unilateral sanctions "have been [*19] successful in meeting their goal." 85 For
his part, Haas, in a Brookings Institution paper, concluded "unilateral sanctions tend to impose
greater costs on American firms than on the target, which can usually find substitute sources of
supply and financing." 86
Gonzaga Debate Institute 109
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Must Use Consequences to Determine When to Shun
The empirical evidence necessitates economic engagement based on the situation, not
absolute principles
Forcese, 02 (Craig, BA, McGill; MA, Carleton; LL.B., Ottawa; LL.M., Yale; Member of the Bars of New
York, Ontario and the District of Columbia. Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, “Globalizing
Decency: Responsible Engagement in an Era of Economic Integration,” 5 Yale H.R. & Dev. L.J. 1, LexisNexis Universe)
Clearly, assessing the merits of these two contrasting visions - economic engagement as panacea
versus economic engagement as villain - is an empirical exercise. Yet, the empirical evidence, such
as it is, is neither entirely dismissive nor completely supportive of either position, at least when
examined with an eye to human rights. Instead, these data tend to support a nuanced approach to
constructive engagement, one that might be termed "responsible engagement." In particular,
engagement is appropriate so long as it does not induce the very human rights ills it is said to cure.
Where constructive engagement via economic integration augments the staying power of a human
rights-abusing regime, or prompts it to engage in additional human rights abuses, the net impact of
that integration may not be positive. In these circumstances, the appropriate policy response will be
economic disengagement. Accordingly, under a responsible engagement model, there remains an
important role for economic sanctions, both as a means of affecting the behavior of nation-states
and to stave off the possibility that citizens of one country are contributing to the persistence of a
repressive regime in another nation.
Human rights concerns should be weighed pragmatically
Kennedy, 2 (David, Professor of Law at Harvard, Harvard Human Rights Journal, “The International
Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?” vol. 15, Spring 2002,
www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/iss15/kennedy.shtml)
I. Thinking Pragmatically About Human Rights
My purpose in pulling these concerns together is to encourage other well-meaning legal professionals to
adopt a more pragmatic attitude toward human rights. My hope is that we will develop a stronger
practice of weighing the costs and benefits of their articulation, institutionalization and enforcement. Of
course, the best human rights practitioners are already intensely strategic and practical in thinking
about their work. But it is often tempting (for those within and without the movement) to set pragmatic
concerns aside, to treat human rights as an object of devotion rather than calculation. And even the
most intense practical evaluations of human rights initiatives too often stop short of considering the full
range of potential down sides or negative knock on consequences in their enthusiasm to move forward
with efforts whose up side potential seems so apparent.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 110
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Sanctions Unethical
Gonzaga Debate Institute 111
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Target Innocent Civilians/Use People as Means
Sanctions take civilian populations hostage—the sacrifice of whole people for strategic
interests is ethically indefensible
Kochler, Professor of Philosophy, 94
[Dr. Hans, International Press Organization, “Ethical Aspects of Sanctions in International Law The
Practice of the Sanctions Policy and Human Rights”, http://i-p-o.org/sanctp.htm#I, accessed 7/8/13, VJ
Paraphrased within brackets for ableist language]
Comprehensive economic sanctions, then – continuing with the comparison above – have the ethical
quality of terror bombings: the civilian population is explicitly taken hostage in the framework of a
security strategy of power politics. It is self-evident that this kind of political instrumentalization of the
human being – as the citizen of a community that is a subject in international law – is not compatible
with his status as an autonomous subject, i.e. with human dignity.23 People have a natural right not to
be sacrificed for a strategic purpose over whose formulation and realization they exercise no
influence. As Quinn says, "They have a right not to be pressed, in apparent violation of their prior
rights, into the service of other people's purposes."24 In the area of ethics, the so-called "Doctrine of
Double Effect" secures every person's right to veto "a certain kind of attempt to make the world a better
place at his expense."25 It attacks the purely utilitarian approach (the maximization of usefulness)
which, in the case of sanctions, could sacrifice the health and prosperity of a whole people for the
sake of the external political purposes of member states in the Security Council or of another state
coalition. (This could be clarified case by case in such measures as the sanctions placed against Iraq,
Former Yugoslavia, Haiti, etc.) The sacrifice of a whole people for the sake of the strategic interests of a
superpower or of a coalition of states (as may be formed within the Security Council) would appear to
be in no way ethically justifiable.26 Assertions to this effect have already been made in connection with
the sanctions against South Africa: if there are no general criteria for morally evaluating a particular
political strategy, then those who have to bear the primary costs of measures such as sanctions should
be able to decide whether they are to be imposed.27 The general ethical principle guiding the use of
sanctions should thus be that consideration be taken of the affected population in the formulation of
such measures. Precisely this principle, however, is excluded by the nature of the coercive measures in
accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter. As American authors have illustrated in an evaluation of
the sanctions policy in the wake of the Gulf War, economic sanctions cause the civilian population to be
held hostage in its own country.28 Measures such as those which explicitly intend to harm the
population are to be judged as amoral,29 for "one cannot intentionally [weaken] cripple an economy
without intentionally affecting the people whose working and consuming lives are partially
constitutive of that economy."30
Sanctions are unethical instruments of mass destruction
Rarick, Professor at Purdue, and Duchatelet, Dean at Purdue, 08
[Charles A, Martine, June 1st, Economic Affairs, Volume 28, Issue 2, “AN ETHICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE
USE OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS AS A TOOL OF FOREIGN POLICY”, page 50, EBSCO, accessed 7/9/13, VJ]
The main deontologist. eighteenth-century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant, discounted the consequences of behaviour in assessing ethics, and instead
focused on human reasoning and logic. Kant developed the categorical imperative as his framework for
ethical behaviour. The categorical imperative has two formulations; the first being universalism. In order
Gonzaga Debate Institute 112
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
to act in an ethical manner a person has to want the behaviour they are engaging in to be universally
applied. For example, if you want the act of murder to be ethical, you would have to accept that
everyone is entitled to murder others. The second formulation of the categorical imperative - 'So act
that you use humanity, whether in your person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as
an ends, never as a means' (Kant. can be used to argue against the use of sanctions. Sanctions are a
means to an end. The theory operating behind sanctions is to cause as much pain as possible to the
people of the receiving country in order for pressure to be brought on the government. The citizens of
the sanctioned country are used as a means to achieve the foreign policy objectives of the sanctioning
country. Using people as a means represents an inhumane form of public policy. Dennis Halliday.
former co-ordinator of United Nations Resolution 986 (Food-for-Oil in Iraq), describes economic
sanctions as a 'totally bankrupt concept'. Sanctions in Iraq caused the price of basic food products to
greatly increase, resulted in inadequate nutrition, caused a decline of healthcare, and led to the
collapse of the national currency (BBC, 1998). According to UN1CEF, economic sanctions against Iraq
resulted in a doubling of the death rate for children less than five years of age. The organisation
reports that the sanctions made it wry difficult for parents to provide needed medicine, food and safe
drinking water for their children, and estimates that they resulted in the deaths of 500,000 children
under the age of five between 1991 and 199s (Pigler, 2004)- Economic sanctions themselves can be
called instruments of mass destruction (Mueller and Mueller, 1999) when one considers the human
toll inflicted on the innocent people of sanctioned countries.
Sanctions fail and disproportionally and intentionally target the most vulnerable and
least politically powerful
Gordon, professor at Fairfield University, 99
[Joy, Fall, Cross Currents, Volume 49, Issue 3, “ECONOMIC SANCTIONS, JUST WAR DOCTRINE, AND THE
"FEARFUL SPECTACLE OF THE CIVILIAN DEAD"”, http://www.crosscurrents.org/gordon.htm, accessed
7/9/13, VJ]
To some extent, their reasons reiterate the same arguments made by others -- that sanctions are less
harsh than warfare; that the population consented to, or for other reasons can properly be held
responsible for, the acts of the leadership; that structuring in humanitarian exceptions will prevent
sanctions from causing death or great suffering. I have addressed these issues elsewhere.(24) Here I
want to look at Christiansen and Powers to draw a distinction between sanctions-as-war and sanctionswithout-war. The distinction does not resolve the underlying question: Are sanctions a device that
keeps the peace and enforces international law, or are they intrinsically a form of violence, which in
fact violates the laws of warfare? Woodrow Wilson, in urging the adoption of sanctions as a method by
which the League of Nations would keep the world free of war, described them as a "peaceful, silent,
deadly remedy." And indeed, before the Iraq situation showed us how extensive and extreme the
human damage from sanctions can be, economic sanctions were most commonly portrayed in the
U.S. as a kind of stern but peaceful act -- a punishment which inconveniences or embarrasses, but does
no damage of the sort that raises moral issues. In fact, it was the peace activists who, in 1990, were in
the forefront arguing that sanctions be used in the case of Iraq rather than military undertakings. Like
many other commentators, Christiansen and Powers are partly basing their claim on two sets of
empirical assumptions regarding the speed and degree of damage done by sanctions: "Whereas war's
impact is speedy and frequently lethal, the impact of sanctions grows over time and allows more easily
for mitigation of these harmful effects and for a negotiated solution than acts of war."(25) Christiansen
and Powers suggest that the way to conceptualize sanctions is that warfare is akin to the death penalty,
whereas sanctions are more like attaching someone's assets in a civil proceeding.(26) In this analogy, the
Gonzaga Debate Institute 113
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
economic domain is seen as fully separate, and of a different nature altogether, than the domain of
power and of violence. But economic harm, while it is not directly physical, can also be a form of
violence. The sanctions-as-mere-seizure-of-assets theory, whether on the level of the individual or an
entire economy, implicitly assumes a starting point of relative abundance. Whether the seizure of
someone's assets is inconvenient or devastating depends entirely on what their assets are, and how
much is left after the seizure. For an upper-middle-class person with, say, $50,000 in stocks and an
annual income of $80,000, seizing $1000 from a checking account would at most cause inconvenience,
annoyance, perhaps some slight reduction in luxuries or indulgences. For someone living at poverty
level, seizing $1000 may mean that a family has lost irreplaceably the ability to pay for fuel oil for a
winter's heating season, or lost their car in a rural area with no other transportation, or lost the
security deposit and first month's rent on an apartment that would have given them a way out of a
homeless shelter. Living in a home with a temperature of 40 degrees in the winter does not kill
quickly, in the way that a bullet does, and may not kill at all. It may only make someone sick, or over
some time, worsen an illness until death occurs. Living in a shelter or on the street for a night or for a
week or for a month doesn't kill in the way that a bullet does, but it exposes someone to a risk of
considerable random violence, including killings. To conceptualize economic deprivation in terms of
mild punishment whose effects are reversible with no permanent damage -- inconvenience,
embarrassment, living on a budget -- is to misunderstand the nature of the economic. "Economic
deprivation" is not a uniform phenomenon; the loss of conveniences constitutes a different experience
than the loss of the means to meet basic needs. There is a reason that infant mortality rates and life
expectancy rates are used as measures of economic development: poverty manifests itself in
malnutrition, sickness, exposure to the elements, exhaustion, dirty drinking water, the lack of means to
leave a violent country or neighborhood -- the shortening of one's life. It is for this reason that liberation
theologians and others have argued that poverty is indeed a form of violence, although it doesn't kill in
the way that a bullet does. Christiansen and Powers argue that sanctions differ from siege partly on the
grounds that the intent of sanctions is to prevent violence rather than exacerbate it. Under the doctrine
of double effect, however, this does not seem to hold. The doctrine of double effect provides that the
foreseen evil effect of a man's action is not morally imputable to him, provided that (1) the action in
itself is directed immediately to some other result, (2) the evil effect is not willed either in itself or as a
means to the other result, (3) the permitting of the evil effect is justified by reasons of proportionate
weight.(27) Although the doctrine of double effect would seem to justify "collateral damage," it does
not offer a justification of sanctions. "Collateral damage" entails the unintended secondary harm to
civilians. If a bombing raid is conducted against a military base, the collateral damage would be that
the schoolhouse half a mile away was destroyed by a bomb that missed its intended target, which was
the military base. In that case, the bombing raid would be equally successful if the base were hit, and
the schoolhouse were undamaged. But the damage done by indirect sanctions is not in fact "collateral,"
in that the damage to the civilian population is necessary and instrumental. The direct damage to the
economy is intended to indirectly influence the leadership, by triggering political pressure or uprisings
of the civilians, or by generating moral guilt from the "fearful spectacle of the civilian dead." Sanctions
directed against an economy would in fact be considered unsuccessful if no disruption of the economy
took place. We often hear commentators objecting that "sanctions didn't work" in one situation or
another because they weren't "tight" enough -- they did not succeed in disrupting the economy. Thus,
sanctions are not defensible under the doctrine of double effect. Although the end may indeed be
legitimate, the intended intermediate means consists of the generalized damage to the economy, which
violates both the first and second requirements of the doctrine. But there is a second reason why good
intent can not available as a justification for sanctions: the intent cannot in good faith be reconciled with
the history and the logic of sanctions, and with the likely outcome. We know from the history of siege
Gonzaga Debate Institute 114
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
warfare that, legitimately or not, in the face of economic strangulation, the military and political
leadership will insulate themselves from its consequences, and place a disproportionate burden on
the civilian population. We also know from history that economic strangulation will consolidate the
state's power rather than undermine it; we know that sanctions are, for the most part, unlikely to
prevent military aggression, or stop human rights violations, or achieve compliance with any political
or military demand, even when sanctions drag on for decades. It is hard to reconcile the claimed "good
intent" of sanctions with a history that makes it easy to foresee that those intentions are not likely to be
realized. Thus, I would suggest that while sanctions may have very different goals than siege warfare -including goals such as international governance -- they are nevertheless subject to many of the same
moral objections: that they intentionally, or at least predictably, harm the most vulnerable and the
least political; and that this is something which the party imposing sanctions either knows, or should
know. To the extent that economic sanctions seek to undermine the economy of a society, and thereby
prevent the production or importation of necessities, they are functioning as the modern equivalent of
siege. To the extent that sanctions deprive the most vulnerable and least political sectors of society of
the food, potable water, medical care, and fuel necessary for survival and basic human needs,
sanctions should be subject to the same moral objections as siege warfare.
Sanctions are modern siege warfare—they systematically deprive the innocents of
basic life
Gordon, professor at Fairfield University, 99
[Joy, March, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The
Ethics of Economic Sanctions”, page 126-127 ,Wiley Library, accessed 7/7/13, VJ]
Thus, the argument can be made that siege is a form of warfare that itself constitutes a war crime. In
just war doctrine we could demand a justification for a military strategy in terms of the obligation to
minimize harm to civilians: the ammunition factory was a legitimate target, and there was no way to
bomb it without collateral damage to nearby residential areas. But siege is peculiar in that it resists such
an analysis: the immediate goal is precisely to cause suffering to civilians. In the case of the
ammunitions factory, we can answer the question, how is this act consistent with the moral
requirement to discriminate? In the case of siege, we cannot. Sanctions are subject to many of the
same moral objections as siege. They intentionally, or at least predictably, harm the most vulnerable
and the least political, and this is something the party imposing sanctions either knows or should know.
To the extent that economic sanctions seek to undermine the economy of a society and thereby
prevent the production or importation of necessities, they are functioning as the modern equivalent
of siege. To the extent that sanctions deprive the most vulnerable and least political sectors of society
of the food, potable water, medical care, and fuel necessary for survival and basic human needs,
sanctions should be subject to the same moral objections as siege warfare. Drew Christiansen and
Gerard Powers argue that the just war doctrine does not apply to peacetime sanctions in the same way
that this doctrine applies to sieges and blockades imposed as part of a war effort. The fundamental
difference, they hold, is that the use of economic sanctions is rooted in the intention to avoid the use of
armed force, as opposed to the intent to multiply the effects of wars The distinction between sanctionsas-war and sanctions-as-nonviolent-alternative-to war goes back to the fundamental question, what
kind of “things” are economic sanctions? Are sanctions “a stern but peaceful act”-a punishment that
inconveniences or embarrasses, but does no damage of the sort that raises moral issues? Or are they a
form of slow-acting but lethal warfare, which targets the innocent and helpless in a way that would
constitute a war crime in a military context? The implications of this ontological issue are enormous: in
Gonzaga Debate Institute 115
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
one view, economic sanctions are attractive and can be ethically justified easily and often; in the other
view, sanctions do gratuitous, direct human damage that is ethically indefensible. Christiansen and
Powers suggest that warfare is akin to the death penalty, whereas sanctions are more like attaching
someone’s assets in a civil proceeding. In this analogy, the economic domain is seen as fully separate,
and of a different nature altogether, from the domain of power and violence. But economic harm, while
it is not directly physical, can also be a form of violence. The sanctions-asmere- seizure-of-assets
theory, whether on the level of the individual or an entire economy, implicitly assumes a starting point
of relative abundance. Whether the seizure of someone’s assets is inconvenient or devastating depends
entirely on what those assets are and how much is left after the seizure. “Economic deprivation” is not
a uniform phenomenon; the loss of conveniences constitutes a different experience from the loss of
the means to meet basic needs. I do not deny that the contexts in which sanctions and sieges occur
maybe different. The intent of each may differ the nature of the demands maybe different, and the
options of the besieged or sanctioned states may be different. But the moral objection to sanctions does
not rest on the analogy; sanctions do not have to be identical to siege warfare in order to be subject to
condemnation under just war principles. Indeed, if the intent of sanctions is peaceful rather than
belligerent, then the usual justifications in warfare are unavailable. I am morally permitted to kill
where my survival is at stake, and in war, I am morally permitted to kill even innocents, in some
circumstances. But if one’s goal is to see that international law is enforced or that human rights are
respected, then the stakes and the justificatory context are quite different. Lori Fisler Damrosch has
argued that sanctions warrant a particularly high degree of tolerance because of the importance of the
international norms they are intended to protect: Especially in the case of norms such as the
prohibitions against aggression and genocide, which are themselves devoted to the preservation of
human life, it may be necessary to tolerate a high level of civilian hardship in order to prevent or at least
discourage future violations.7 Yet it is hard to make sense of the claim that “collateral damage” can be
justified in the name of protecting human rights; or that international law might be enforced by
means that stand in violation of international laws, including the just war principle of discrimination.
Thus, if sanctions are analogous to siege warfare, then they are problematic for the same reasons—both
effectively violate the principle of discrimination. But if sanctions are not analogous to siege, then they
are even more difficult to justify. If the goals of sanctions are the enforcement of humanitarian
standards or compliance with legal and ethical norms, then extensive and predictable harm to
civilians cannot be justified even by reference to survival or military advantage. Insofar as this is the
case, sanctions are simply a
device of cruelty garbed in self-righteousness.
Sanctions are ethically unacceptable- treat people as a means
Gordon, professor at Fairfield University, 99
[Joy, March, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The
Ethics of Economic Sanctions”, page 128-129 ,Wiley Library, accessed 7/7/13, VJ]
In addition to viewing sanctions within the ethical framework offered by the just war doctrine, we
should also examine them from a deontological perspective. I refer here to Kant’s ethical theory, which
holds that all rational beings are characterized by “dignity,” the inherent worth of a person that makes
him or her irreplaceable and that stands in contrast to those material things with a price, which can be
exchanged for other things of equal or greater price without loss. This is the basis for Kant’s claim that
all rational beings have autonomy, the right and the capacity to rule themselves. In Grounding for the
Gonzaga Debate Institute 116
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says that it is a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral mandate
binding on all rational beings, to “act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own
person or in the person of another, always as an end and never simply as a means.”8 This ethical
framework would arguably have had little to offer in the debate over sanctions at the time that Article
16 of the Covenant of the League of Nations was being set forth as a mechanism of enforcement. The
articulated purpose of sanctions was quite narrow: it was to stop military aggression. In that context,
there were two innocent populations involved—the nonpolitical/nonmilitary population of the
aggressor nation and the entire population of the nation under attack. Because deontological ethics
enjoins us to treat all human beings as ends in themselves and not solely as means, it would not offer
much guidance in the situation where some innocent population (or at least a sector of the population)
will be harmed, and where the issue is whether the innocents who are harmed will be the civilian
population of the aggressor nation upon whom sanctions are imposed, or the civilian population of the
attacked nations who are the objects of military aggression. In this case, either one population is the
means to the military victory of the aggressor, or the other population is the means to interdict the
aggressor. But deontological arguments do offer guidance in situations where military aggression is
not at issue, and where the choice therefore is not which innocent population suffers harm, but
whether an innocent population may be harmed in the service of the political interests of a foreign
state, or for the interest of the international community in enforcing norms. Where sanctions impose
suffering on innocent sectors of the target country population for an objective other than preventing
the deaths of other innocent persons, this is clearly incompatible with deontological ethics, since in
these situations, to use Kantian language, human beings are reduced to nothing more than a means to
an end, where that end is something less than the lives of other human beings.
Sanctions are economic bullying—only the superpowers have the ability to hurt
growing nations to maintain their lead
Gordon, professor at Fairfield University, 99
[Joy, March, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The
Ethics of Economic Sanctions”, page 136-137 ,Wiley Library, accessed 7/7/13, VJ]
Large and diversified economies are virtually immune to sanctions, since they have the economic
flexibility to pay higher costs in the short run, and to make structural changes in the long run.sq
Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott note that nations with weak or unstable economies therefore make the
best targets for economic sanctions. In a section entitled “The Weakest Go to the Wall,” they argue that
“there seems to be a direct correlation between the political and economic health of the target
country and its susceptibility to economic pressure,” and suggest that their data “demonstrate that
countries in distress or experiencing significant problems are far more likely to succumb to coercion by
the sender country. “3s They conclude with a list of “dos and don’ts” for those imposing sanctions,
including “Do pick on the weak and helpless. “3s Their analysis of the cases indicates that sanctions are
most effective when the target is much smaller than the country imposing sanctions, and
economically weak and politically unstable. In successful cases, the average sender’s economy was
187 times larger than that of the average target.37 Thus, sanctions offer themselves solely as
mechanisms that strong nations with large economies, or international alliances including strong nations
with large economies, can effectively use against countries with weak or import-dependent economies,
or countries with unstable governments. The reverse is not true— sanctions are not a device
realistically available to small or poor nations that can be used with any significant impact against
large or economically dominant nations, even if the latter were to, say, engage in aggression or
Gonzaga Debate Institute 117
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
human rights violations, or otherwise offend the international community. This has been obvious since
the reformulation of sanctions as a tool of international law.38 Therefore, there is a danger that
sanctions will be used “opportunistically” by powerful nations39 —for example, as a response by a
superpower to its declining economic hegemony. Here we can understand the particular enthusiasm
the United States holds for sanctions; the sheer size of the U.S. economy means that sanctions can be
imposed at little cost to itself, and with no likelihood that any other nation could retaliate in kind. It
would seem that we have lost altogether the rationale for sanctions that was articulated in the
formation of the League of Nations, It may be that sanctions, and the attendant harm to innocents, can
be justified as an alternative to actual warfare; but in order to justify this choice on utilitarian
grounds, we would have to have reason to believe that sanctions in fact obtain compliance by the
target state. If not, then they simply constitute the gratuitous imposition of suffering on a helpless
population, for no ethically defensible reason.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 118
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Sanctions = Genocide
Sanctions are genocidal
Anderson, senior editor, 10
[David E., September 13, Religion & Ethics Weekly, “The Ethics of Sanctions”,
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/09/13/the-ethics-of-sanctions/7016/, accessed
7/6/13, VJ]
Sanctions are attractive to policy makers—and the public—for a number of reasons. They seem more
substantial than diplomatic finger-wagging, less costly to impose than military action, and morally
preferable to war. “They are often discussed as though they were a mild sort of punishment, not an
act of aggression of the kind that has actual human costs,’’ Gordon wrote in a 1999 issue of
CrossCurrents, the journal of Association for Religion and Intellectual Life. Over the years, as the
humanitarian consequences and punitive social impact of comprehensive economic sanctions
imposed on Iraq and other countries such as Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Yugoslavia became apparent,
ethicists began debating more urgently how this tool should be understood. Albert C. Pierce, professor
of ethics and national security at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, writing in a 1996
issue of Ethics & International Affairs, the journal of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International
Affairs, argued that economic sanctions “are intended to inflict great human suffering, pain, harm, and
even death and thus should be subject to the same kind of careful moral and ethical scrutiny given to
the use of military force before it is chosen as a means to achieve national political objectives.’’
According to Gordon, “because sanctions are themselves a form of violence, they cannot legitimately
be seen merely as a peacekeeping device, or as a tool for enforcing international law.…They require
the same level of justification as other acts of warfare.’’ Pierce, Gordon, and others say sanctions
should be evaluated in much the same way and with similar principles as force is evaluated, that is,
with the just war doctrine. Gordon, for example, argues the sanctions imposed on Iraq violated both
the criteria that must be met before going to war, such as just cause and the probability of success, and
the criteria for how the war is conducted, employing such norms as proportionality and discrimination,’
which bars directly intended attacks on noncombatants and noncombatant targets. Comprehensive
economic sanctions as employed against nations such as Iraq in 1990, Haiti in 1991, and Cuba since the
1960s, have failed to achieve their goals while at the same imposing devastating hardships on the
civilian population. Gordon cites studies that found the economic sanctions leveled against Iraq were
responsible for the death of some 237,000 Iraqi children under age five. At best, sanctions have been
successful in just a third of the cases where they have been employed. US sanctions in Iraq
“systemically overrode many of the basic principles of international humanitarian law,” she writes,
adding that “many have maintained that the magnitude of the suffering was such that the sanctions
regime could properly be termed genocidal.”
Gonzaga Debate Institute 119
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Sanctions Only Ethical if they Cause Change
Sanctions fail and are only ethical if they result in change
Rarick, Professor at Purdue, and Duchatelet, Dean at Purdue, 08
[Charles A, Martine, June 1st, Economic Affairs, Volume 28, Issue 2, “AN ETHICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE
USE OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS AS A TOOL OF FOREIGN POLICY”, page 49, EBSCO, accessed 7/9/13, VJ]
When we look at the consequences of sanctions, in most cases the outcome has been to lower the
economic, educational and healthcare systems of the sanctioned countries. While one could argue
that higher pleasures such as virtue and moral principle could override the negative consequences of
sanctions, it is questionable that most people in sanctioned countries would agree with that
argument. In some cases the citizens of sanctioned countries may. through state propaganda, take a
different view. However, factual data concerning quality-of-life issues is a better indicator of negative
consequences. The longest-running case of economic sanctions, the embargo against Cuba, has
harmed the healthcare industry of that country. A study by the American Association for World Health
concluded that economic sanctions haw had a devastating impact on the quality of healthcare in
Cuba. The trade embargo is responsible, at least in part, for increases in certain diseases such as
waterbome illness, the lack of surgical supplies and equipment, and the unavailability of medicine
(Williams, 191")- While the socialist policies of Fidel Castro have made medical services available to all
citizens of Cuba, the lack of medicine, medical supplies and equipment have decreased the effectiveness
of healthcare providers. The dire economic conditions in Cuba, of course, cannot entirely be blamed on
US economic sanctions. Castro has been a less than effective economic planner. He has, however, been
able to blame his failed policies on US-imposed sanctions (Katz, 2005) and has gained some sympathy
with other political leaders in the region. There are both short- and long-term consequences of US
sanctions against Cuba, and the results of this policy may be felt for some time past the eventual lifting
of the sanctions. If sanctions were effective most of the time, it could be argued that the positive
results gained by the people of the sanctioned country justify* the necessary pain they experience in
the application of the sanctions. This is not, however, the case because economic sanctions seldom
achieve their desired aims. In most cases, they therefore result in a net loss in happiness for
sanctioned-country citizens, both in terms of lower and higher forms of pleasure.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 120
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Travel Sanctions Unethical
Travel sanctions have a negative humanitarian impact
Gordon, professor at Fairfield University, 11
[Joy, Fall, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 25, Issue 3, “Smart Sanctions Revisited” page PQ,
ProQuest, accessed 7/6/13, VJ]
There are two common types of travel sanctions: those limiting travel by individuals, such as visa bans,
and those involving broader restrictions, such as flight bans or restrictions on an entire airline. Visa bans
seem to be an ideal targeted measure in that they can designate individual political leaders or
wrongdoers by name, and the restrictions would affect them alone. But there are problems with
implementation, and doubts whether those targeted are seriously affected. Often there are no clear
procedures providing guidance for states that encounter banned individuals in their territory or
attempting to enter it. It is not difficult for individuals to hold passports in multiple nationalities or to
use fraudulent passports. But even when the travel of individuals can effectively be restricted, there is
little evidence that it is so costly to a political or military leader as to cause him to reconsider a policy
or state practice, or that restricting travel affects such individuals in any way that goes beyond
inconvenience.48 Aviation bans target an airline or a nation's airline industry. In some cases, such as the
sanctions imposed on Libya in response to the Lockerbie bombing, the aviation ban was widely viewed
as contributing to a successful outcome. However, there continue to be difficulties with implementation
and enforcement of aviation bans; and, as with any measure that compromises something as
fundamental as transportation, there are significant consequences for the civilian population, for
neighboring countries, and for others who are not the intended subject of the sanction. Even when
there are extensive efforts to strengthen them, there are many ways that flight bans can be
circumvented. Planes can be registered under different names, and the pilots can file false flight plans.
Restrictions on passenger flights are implemented relatively well, since commercial passenger airlines
are generally well regulated; however, the air cargo industry is not, and thus aviation bans on cargo
flights are quite porous.49 These illegal flights, in turn, often contribute to the black market in the
sanctioned country. The flight ban imposed on the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola
(UNITA) was violated continuously, with tons of goods being flown in daily on illegal but highly profitable
flights, benefiting those who could afford to buy black market goods.50 There are also humanitarian
impacts that are not widely acknowledged. The lack of regular commercial flights can significantly
affect the population as a whole. The flight ban imposed on commercial flights to and from Haiti in
1994 was seen as a way of denying the wealthy the opportunity to shop for luxuries abroad, but another
consequence was that hundreds of Haitians hoping to receive asylum in the United States or
elsewhere had no way to leave the country.51 In the case of the Security Council sanctions on Libya in
response to Lockerbie, the aviation ban meant that travel presented a much greater hardship for the
population as a whole; for example, a flight from Tripoli to Alexandria, Egypt, is only ninety minutes,
whereas driving takes fifteen hours.52 Restrictions on aviation do more than block flights carrying elites
on shopping trips or cargo flights bringing in luxuries. Aviation is critical to other sectors, such as
agriculture and health care. UN agencies reported that the aviation ban in Libya compromised the
import of agricultural inputs and veterinary supplies, and also undermined crop dusting, which in turn
reduced the availability of food from both animal sources and agriculture.53 When the Security
Council assessed the expected humanitarian impact of sanctions on Sudan, UN agencies anticipated that
an aviation ban would affect medical evacuations and the import of vaccines that require refrigeration,
as well as food availability, since aviation bans were likely to undermine the import of perishable
Gonzaga Debate Institute 121
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
goods.54 In addition to prohibiting flights, aviation bans often also prohibit the sale of parts or services
related to aircraft maintenance. Consequently, even where there are exemptions - for local travel, crop
dusting, or medical evacuations - the secondary prohibitions can undercut those exemptions. In Libya,
domestic air travel was compromised by safety issues, since the air travel ban prohibited the sale of
parts for repair and maintenance, and prohibited services, such as engineering or the certification of
airworthiness.55 In Afghanistan, the Security Council sanctions froze the assets of the state-owned
airline, depriving it of the funds to purchase spare parts for repair and maintenance.56 This measure
ignored the fact that air travel is critical in Afghanistan, since fighting and the consequent damage to
roads and bridges makes overland travel dangerous.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 122
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Sanctions = Ethnocentric
Sanctions are a form of ethnocentrism- prioritizes democratic governance over
economic development and only increase suffering.
Rarick, Professor at Purdue, and Duchatelet, Dean at Purdue, 08
[Charles A, Martine, June 1st, Economic Affairs, Volume 28, Issue 2, “AN ETHICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE
USE OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS AS A TOOL OF FOREIGN POLICY”, page 49, EBSCO, accessed 7/9/13, VJ]
A number of economic sanctions have been imposed based upon a lack of democracy in a country.
While democracy is generally viewed as the preferred form of government, even democracies can be
ineffective in advancing the interests of all citizens, and democracy will not solve every country's
problems. Reich (2007) has argued that even in democratic countries such as the USA. citizen interest
has been overtaken by special-interest groups lobbying law-makers for policies favourable to their
interests. Brittan (2007) warns against viewing democracy as everything that is politically desirable.
While this paper does not argue against the desirability of a democratic form of government, it does
propose that economic sanctions cannot be relied upon to produce democratic forms of government,
or to ease the suffering of people under totalitarian regimes. It is an ethnocentric viewpoint to
assume that people strongly desire democracy over economic freedom and development. Economic
sanctions aimed at producing political change can have the opposite effect and harden dictatorial
rule, increasing the suffering of people in the sanctioned countries. In the case of Myanma r. recent
civil unrest over the military regime's policies and worsening economic situation has produced an even
harsher response from the government (Kazmin, 2007) including a crackdown even on the monastic
community of the country. Government leaders have a fiduciary duty to represent all people, not just
those with special interests. Young (2007) has proposed that leaders should use this fiduciary duty,
which has evolved from the Judaeo-Chrtstian tradition and Roman law, to represent all stakeholders.
Often sanctions are imposed because of pressure brought by special-interest groups, such as Burmese
or Cuban refugees living in the USA. who are successful in getting sanctions imposed in order to
advance their own agendas. Economic sanctions imposed for a special interest, even with good
intentions, can be questioned on the basis of their ethical legitimacy. Using the three major
frameworks of ethics the morality of economic sanctions can be explored, and conclusions drawn
concerning the ethical nature of this type of public policy.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 123
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Outweighs War
Violent sanctions outweigh war
Dalecki, writer, 12
[Maggie, October 1st, The Ethics Blog, “Are Economic Sanctions Ethical?”,
http://ethicsblog.ca/archives/44, accessed 7/6/13, VJ]
Economic sanctions are often seen as a way to change the way a government behaves that is easier
and more humane than war. However, Professor Emily Muller (University of Manitoba) argues that our
faith in them is based on a misperception. When we look more closely at their effects on civilian
populations, and at their effectiveness in actually bringing change, we can see that they are often a
bad idea. Those in favour of sanctions argue that because they avoid military action, they are an
important tool to promote change internationally without bringing on the horrors of war. But
economic sanctions can be brutal. They often create levels of civilian suffering and hardship as great
as or even greater than those resulting from war. If their imposition is to be ethically defensible, the
harm done to civilians should be offset or outweighed by a reasonable chance of securing victory.
Another problem with economic sanctions, however, is that they are imprecise and their effects are
unpredictable. Generally it is extremely difficult to know whom they will hurt most, or whether they
will affect those in power at all. Further, if sanctions are to work, there must be a reliable connection
between subjecting civilian populations to economic hardship and those populations pressuring their
governments to change. And if the people do bring such pressure, it must be effective. Professor Muller
thinks that in many cases, the sanctions will either rally support for the enemy regime, or rob the
population of its ability to bring about change. There is a strong connection between a thriving middle
class and accountable governments, says Professor Muller. She argues that when societies are placed
under economic sanctions, it often disempowers the middle class by reducing them to poverty. This in
turn robs them of their capacity to deal with political oppression. It is also important to consider, when
contemplating sanctions, who takes responsibility. Because sanctions seem like an easy and bloodless
alternative to war, and because the harms are indirect and hard to calculate, governments are often
quick to impose them, without thinking seriously about the true costs or about the prospects for
success. And the governments responsible for sanctions often fail to accept any blame for the
suffering they cause. Whoever imposes economic sanctions must take their decision seriously, and
must be prepared to bear responsibility for the effects – especially harmful ones – of this decision.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 124
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Utilitarianism
Sanctions unethical and utilitarianism can’t be applied
Kochler, Professor of Philosophy, 94
[Dr. Hans, International Press Organization, “Ethical Aspects of Sanctions in International Law The
Practice of the Sanctions Policy and Human Rights”, http://i-p-o.org/sanctp.htm#I, accessed 7/8/13, VJ]
Comprehensive economic sanctions which heavily impact the life and health of the civilian population
need to be analyzed from an ethical standpoint before a normative evaluation of the current practice in
international law can be undertaken. Indeed, comprehensive economic sanctions seem to be the
"classical" instruments for inducing submission in the power politics of the so-called "New World
Order"14 – and instruments whose permissibility must be critically examined from the standpoint of
ethics as well as of international law. It does not of necessity follow that a measure praised as the
panacea of power politics fulfills the requirements placed on a legitimate international order. In the
first place, coercive measures like economic sanctions represent a form of collective punishment15
and thus do not comply with the ethical principle of individual responsibility, i. e. with the ability to
attribute behaviour to an individual. The punishment of people not responsible for political decisions is
most akin to a terrorist measure; the aim of such a measure is to influence the government's course of
action by deliberately assaulting the civilian population.16 Purposefully injuring the innocent is,
however, an immoral act per se, one which cannot be justified by any construction of utilitarian ethics.
In accordance with the conception of Thomas Aquinas, inquiring into the intention behind a particular
decision is of decisive value for an ethical evaluation.17 In the present context, several conditions
govern the moral permissibility of acts in which a morally questionable bad upshot is foreseen: (a) the
intended final end must be good, (b) the intended means to it must be morally acceptable; (c) the
foreseen bad upshot must not itself be willed (that is, must not be, in some sense, intended); and (d) the
good end must be proportionate to the bad upshot18, (that is, must be important enough to justify the
bad upshot).19 The problematic nature of this utilitarian context of evaluation is plain to view. Are
those who suffer under a certain measure to be viewed sympathetically as the victims of the pursuit
of a good intention, or is their suffering to be regarded as the deliberate component of a strategy?
This debate seems merely to invite hypocritical casuistry. The outcome for the affected population is
one and the same. A "superficial" difference may only be discerned by an ethics of attitude from the
viewpoint of the perpetrator. The latter appeases his conscience with reference to the unintentional
but "inevitable" side effects. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the so-called "Doctrine of Double Effect"
was developed, following a distinction made by Thomas Aquinas.20 It was designed to help clarify
ethical questions that arise when a morally good end can only be reached through inflicting harm
upon other people.21 In the concrete instance of comprehensive economic sanctions in accordance
with Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the moral good that is aspired is the maintenance or restoration of
international peace; the wrong that is thereby effected is the suffering of the civilian population
(including sickness and death as results of the mass suffering that accompanies the breakdown in the
distribution of essential commodities). According to Quinn's ethical analysis, it is necessary to take into
account the relation which the aspired goal has to the foreseen wrong that results from it.22 In this
context, Quinn refers to the difference between "terror bombing" and "strategic" bombing in war: in
the first instance, the suffering of the civilian population is deliberately intended; in the second, the
possibility that the population will suffer is merely tolerated. In the first instance, harm is directly
inflicted, in the second case indirectly. (In accordance with the currently valid rules of international
humanitarian law, which we will later examine more closely, terror bombings are strictly prohibited, for
Gonzaga Debate Institute 125
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
the civilian population is never allowed to be the direct target in a military conflict.) Economic sanctions,
however, are in line with the first case mentioned above: harm is directly and deliberately inflicted so
as to force the government to alter its course of action.
Sanctions fail and it’s impossible to apply util to sanctions
McGee, president of the Dumont Institute for Public Policy Research, 03
[Robert W., December 1, Economic Affairs, pg 42, “THE ETHICS OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS”, EBSCO,
accessed 7/6/13, VJ]
If the sanctions are successful, the nations imposing the sanctions gain psychic income, since their
efforts have paid off and have resulted in the target country buckling under pressure to change
behaviour. If the sanctions were imposed because the target country engages in human rights abuses,
the people who are being abused benefit when the abuses cease. If the abusive country has been
abusing the rights of 10 million of its own people, there are 10 million beneficiaries. But that is only
one side of the coin. Who are the losers? If the oil embargo is effective, the price of oil must
necessarily go up, since the supply is effectively reduced. That being the case, the 6 billion people on
the planet who use oil, either directly or indirectly, are losers because they must pay more for oil and
oil products. The obvious retort to this line of reasoning is that the 10 million people who cease to have
their human rights abused more than offsets the few extra pennies that 6 billion losers must pay for
their oil. That may or may not be the case. One of the major problems with utilitarian ethics is that
there is no precise way to measure gains and losses. Is it worth it to pressure some country to ease up
on their human rights abuses if doing so causes the price of oil to increase just a little bit? Such a
decision involves value judgements and estimates as to gains and losses. Another major problem with
this line of reasoning is that the assumption is that the sanctions are effective. Studies have almost
uniformly shown that sanctions are more likely to fail than succeed. That being the case, it appears
even less likely that a sanction intended to prevent or reduce human rights abuses will result in a
positive-sum game. What is a more likely scenario is that the 10 million people in the target country
will not experience a lessening in the extent of the human rights abuses perpetrated against them,
while the 6 billion other people in the world will have to pay higher prices for oil and oil products.
Thus, everyone is a loser. Indeed, the sanctions may result in additional suffering on the part of the
very people the sanctions are intended to help. That is definitely the case with the sanctions against
Iraq, as we shall discuss below.
Utilitarianism a bad way to weigh unethical sanctions
McGee, president of the Dumont Institute for Public Policy Research, 03
[Robert W., December 1, Economic Affairs, pg 43, “THE ETHICS OF ECONOMIC SANCTIONS”, EBSCO,
accessed 7/6/13, VJ]
Sanctions generally cannot be justified on utilitarian grounds because the losers exceed the winners.
However, utilitarian ethics is not a precise tool because it is not possible to precisely measure gains
and losses, especially when some of the gains and losses cannot be reduced to monetary units. Psychic
gains are only one example. Many other gains and losses are of a non-monetary nature. If sanctions
kill, which they sometimes do, how can total gains and losses be measured and compared? Another
major problem with applying utilitarian ethics is that utilitarians ignore rights violations. All that
matters to a utilitarian is whether the gains exceed the losses. The ends justify the means. For a
utilitarian, killing a few (or a few million) innocent people might be justified as long as the result is a
good one. That is one of the major problems with utilitarian ethics and it is one of the major strengths
Gonzaga Debate Institute 126
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
of rights-based ethics. A rights-based ethic takes the position that an action is bad if someone’s rights
are violated, regardless of whether the good outweighs the bad. What is wrong prima facie does not
become right just because some majority ultimately benefits. A major advantage of a rights-based ethic
is that there is no need to calculate total gains and compare them with total losses. It is impossible to
precisely measure gains and losses anyway. A rights-based ethic removes this problem. The only thing
that needs to be determined is whether someone’s rights would be violated. The matter is further
complicated, however, because there are two different kinds of rights, negative rights and positive
rights. Negative rights include the right not to have your property taken from you without your
consent and the right not to be killed. One attribute of negative rights is that they do not conflict. My
right to property does not conflict with your right to property. My right to life does not conflict with your
right to life. Positive rights have different attributes from negative rights. Examples of positive rights
include the right to free or low-cost medical care and the right to subsidised housing. One attribute of
positive rights is that they always involve the violation of someone’s negative rights. My right to free or
low-cost medical care comes at the expense of the taxpayers who must pay something to make up the
difference between the market price of the service and the price I have to pay. My right to lowcost
housing comes at the expense of the landlord, who is prohibited from charging the market rate for the
rental of his property. In a sense, positive rights are not rights at all. They are a licence to expropriate
the property of others with legal sanction. The kind of rights we need to look at when we are trying to
determine whether a particular sanction is justified is negative rights. We must ask ourselves the
question: ‘Are anyone’s negative rights to life, property, contract, etc. violated by this sanction?’ If the
answer is ‘yes,’ then the sanction cannot be justified. That being the case, one can easily conclude that
the vast majority of sanctions cannot be justified on ethical grounds because someone’s rights are
almost certainly violated. If even one willing buyer is prevented from buying what he wants from
whomever he wants, rights are violated. But what is more likely is that the rights of thousands, or
even millions, are violated by economic sanctions. The two case studies examined in this article are the
sanctions that have been imposed against Iraq and Cuba. Although they are both good examples,
because they illustrate the point, they are by no means the only examples that could be given. They
have been chosen because they are cases the average reader is most likely to be familiar with because
they have been reported frequently in the popular press.
Even utilitarian calculus rejects Cuban sanctions
Gordon, professor at Fairfield University, 99
[Joy, March, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The
Ethics of Economic Sanctions”, page 133-135 ,Wiley Library, accessed 7/7/13, VJ]
Since the formation of the League of Nations, those defending sanctions have justified
them in part on the basis of utilitarian reasons: the argument is that the economic hardship of the
civilian population of the target country entails less human harm overall, and less harm to the
sanctioned population, than the military aggression or human rights violations the sanctions seek to
prevent. Yet if this is so, then—as an ethical matter—we must look at the effectiveness of sanctions. If
they do not in fact stop military aggression or human rights violations, then a procedure that harms
innocent sectors of the population loses its utilitarian justification. We might begin by distinguishing
between economic effectiveness and political effectiveness. A common view is that the “generally
accepted goal” of sanctions is “to influence the conduct of political actors in another country who refuse
to conform to the accepted norms of international conduct. “2° Economic effectiveness concerns “the
volume of pecuniary damage or disruption inflicted, while political effectiveness refers to the degree
that desired changes, if any, are undertaken by the target state. “21 Johan Galtung points out that the
Gonzaga Debate Institute 127
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
economic damage done by sanctions in fact tends to have little likelihood of actually achieving the
stated goal of forcing the target nation to change its conduct or policies. Instead, he argues, what
emerges is an ethos of “conspicuous sacrifice. “22 Far from undermining the political legitimacy of the
target state, sanctions often trigger the opposite response: Galtung used the term “rally-around-theflag effect” to argue that leaders in target nations could use the economic pain caused by foreign
nations to rally their populations around their cause. Rather than creating disintegration in the target
state, sanctions would invoke nationalism and political integration.2j The relation between economic
effectiveness and political effectiveness is not at all clear; indeed, it may be an inverse relation. Many
economists and historians hold that, generally, sanctions are politically ineffectual. In the twentieth
century, this assessment dates back at least to the first time the League of Nations sought to impose
sanctions on a major military power—Italy under Mussolini— and failed quite spectacularly.24 Rather
than impeding Mussolini, the sanctions were reported to increase patriotic fervor and support for his
military project. Sanctions were denounced as ineffectual in stopping aggression,zd and the League of
Nations did not survive. Losman’s study of long-term boycotts against Israel, Cuba, and Rhodesia notes
that even where there was considerable economic damage, the only apparent political effect was
increased political integration.27 The common (though not universal) result is that “the morale-killing
effects of economic sanctions often operate in the opposite fashion, stimulating xenophobia and
strengthening the determination of the target country to maintain its stance. “28 The scholarship on
sanctions has to a large extent documented this phenomenon, though it has also described exceptions.
In the first large empirical study of the success of sanctions in the twentieth century, published in 1985,
Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott held that sanctions had in fact been effective in about one-third of the
situations in which they were imposed.29 Theirs is one of the most optimistic estimates. Others
question whether sanctions have been effective even one-third of the time.JO It is not surprising to see
historians, political scientists, and economists echoing the observation that target nations cannot
generally be expected to change their acts or policies in response to sanctions. Thus, when we work out
the utilitarian calculus of sanctions, we see on one side that there is not a high likelihood that
sanctions will succeed in stopping military aggression or human rights violations. On the other side of
the calculus, we see the high probability, if not inevitability, that sanctions will harm the most
vulnerable population.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 128
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Symbolic Value
Sanctions fail as symbolic messages—overly penal and there are better alternatives
Winkler, PhD in political science, 99
[Adam, Human Rights Quarterly Volume 21 Issue 1, “Just Sanctions”, Page 144,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/human_rights_quarterly/v021/21.1winkler.html#authbio, accessed
7/9/13, VJ]
A second dilemma for right intention is that posed by the pursuit of symbolic goals. David Baldwin
argues that sanctions should be understood to have both primary economic objectives, such as
impacting a foreign economy and achieving a change in a target nation's policies, and symbolic
objectives, such as demonstrating resolve to allies or domestic constituents. 72 According to Baldwin,
even when sanctions have little economic impact, they may still be considered successful if symbolic
messages are relayed. 73 As sanctions are more often successful in relaying messages than in achieving
policy objectives, Baldwin recommends that states use them for their communicative potential. 74 The
principle of right intention, however, renders the pursuit of symbolic goals objectionable. Because of
the harm caused by economic sanctions, they are far too penal to be used as signaling devices
intended for domestic constituents or foreign allies. Symbolic messages can be sent in numerous
other ways without harming anyone, including public statements, resolutions of international
organizations, and diplomatic maneuvers, like recalling ambassadors or negotiators. Symbolic
sanctions are neither the last resort short of war nor do they aim at objectives that absolutely mandate
inflicting harm on others. Finally, symbolic goals are often unarticulated and thus risk the same
dangers of vague sanctioning goals described above.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 129
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Smart Sanctions
Smart sanctions fail—don’t force change and continue humanitarian violations
Gordon, professor at Fairfield University, 11
[Joy, Fall, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 25, Issue 3, “Smart Sanctions Revisited” page PQ,
ProQuest, accessed 7/6/13, VJ]
Several types of targeted sanctions, such as arms embargoes, have structural problems with
implementation that appear to be irresolvable after almost two decades of efforts by practitioners,
NGOs, and academics. Most types of smart sanctions have not brought about an increase in
effectiveness that is dramatically better than that of "traditional" broad trade sanctions. Some have
argued that effectiveness has to be understood more broadly than just target compliance. As noted
earlier, Baldwin maintains that sanctions should be seen as effective if they increase the costs to the
targeted actor or otherwise affect the calculus of decision-making. Adopting a different approach,
Brzoska suggested that, in the case of arms embargoes, while target compliance was very low, arms
embargoes could be considered much more successful if we look instead at situations where the sender
is satisfied with the outcome, regardless of actual compliance. There may be merit to Baldwin's and
Brzoska's strategies for evaluating the impact of sanctions. However, they do not support the view that,
because they aim at specific individuals or goods, targeted sanctions are significantly more effective
than traditional trade sanctions. These proposals only suggest that if we use different criteria, we will
view sanctions as more successful than they seem by the measurement of target compliance. But that
is equally true of traditional sanctions. And, as Drezner notes, however "smart" the sanctions are,
their effectiveness is compromised when the senders have different goals. One sender can be looking
for containment, another for regime change; or one sender's goals can change as its strategic interests
in the region change, without any goal being accomplished.75 To the extent that targeted sanctions are
imposed to achieve conflicting or ambiguous goals, they will be no more effective than traditional
sanctions. More disappointingly, targeted sanctions did not bring an end to the humanitarian damage
or the ethical conundrums presented by traditional trade sanctions - at least not in the manner
expected. Arms embargoes that are imposed against all parties- both aggressors and victims- can
cripple the self-defense efforts of those under attack. Aviation bans can undermine a major
component of a nation's transportation sector, adversely affecting the civilian population generally.
Financial sanctions targeting the personal assets of individuals - the form of targeted sanctions that is
often seen as the most promising in every regard - has raised issues of due process that have brought
into question the fundamental nature of the Council's authority to impose Chapter VII measures. It may
even be that the rhetoric of targeted sanctions has caused, so to speak, a certain collateral damage: it
seems that the trend toward designing- or at least labeling - economic measures as "targeted" has
done much to silence the discussion of the humanitarian impact. Where the 1990s witnessed growing
demands that humanitarian monitoring be incorporated within the sanctions regime, and for prior
assessment of the humanitarian impact, this has largely ceased. It seems that the common view is that
since sanctions are now "smart," we no longer have to worry about harming the innocent. But that is
clearly not the case. Sanctions targeting a nation's financial system, or critical industries or exports,
disrupt the economy as a whole, much like traditional trade sanctions.
Smart sanctions only mask civilian suffering—sanctions are inherently unethical
Gordon, professor at Fairfield University, 99
Gonzaga Debate Institute 130
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
[Joy, March, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The
Ethics of Economic Sanctions”, page 141-142, Wiley Library, accessed 7/7/13, VJ]
Many of those who defend sanctions do not argue that damage to innocents is morally acceptable,
but rather that this damage is not inherent in sanctions and could in principle be mitigated or avoided
altogether. Where measures are taken to minimize civilian harm, the argument goes, sanctions are
ethically defensible. But this optimism is inconsistent with the nature of economic sanctions, as well
as with the history of sanctions and the logic of the vested interests created by sanctions. If economic
sanctions are motivated by an intent to do economic damage, then partial sanctions and humanitarian
exemptions will allow the target nation to adjust its economy to minimize the overall damage,
undermining the intentions of the political actors imposing the sanctions. The more complete the
sanctions, the more effective they will be, in terms of economic damage; but that in turn means that
the economy as a whole will be undermined. The greater the degree to which the economy is
generally undermined, the greater the damage to the civilian population, outside the military and
political leadership. The greater the damage to the civilian population, the more serious the harm will
be to the most vulnerable sectors—infants, the elderly, the sick, the handicapped, pregnant women,
widows with children. Sanctions that are economically effective necessarily entail the greatest harm to
those who are the most vulnerable and the most disenfranchised from power. The ethical dilemma is
not resolved by placing blame on the target state for its initial wrongdoing or for its response to
economic crisis. We know from the history of sanctions, and of sieges and blockades in wartime, that
the state will generally increase the proportion of the economy that goes to the support of the
political leadership and to the military, for any of a number of reasons: because national security is
legitimately seen as the highest priority, or because the nature of the “siege mentality” is that the
leadership will first protect itself, or because desperate need for basic goods creates opportunities for
black marketeering. This may shift part of the moral responsibility to the target state, but it does not
vitiate the moral agency that resides in the state that initiated the crisis by imposing sanctions in the
first place, particularly in light of the predictability of the outcome. The use of sanctions is even more
troubling if we acknowledge that the odds are not good that any political ends will be achieved by
sanctions. Even if the end is one that could justify the human cost of sanctions—such as stopping
military aggression— the one thing we know about sanctions is that they are generally unlikely to
achieve their goal. Alternatively, we could frame the “goals” of sanctions not in terms of political ends,
but in terms of punishment or symbolic expression. However, these cannot claim the ethical
justification that was invoked when sanctions were seen as the means of stopping war—that harm to
innocents may be justified when it is for the purpose of preventing a far greater harm. Establishing
criteria for the ethical use of sanctions does not resolve these contradictions, but instead masks them.
To say that sanctions are ethical as long as we make sure to minimize civilian harm is to mask the fact
that sanctions by their nature cause harm to civilians directly and primarily. It is like using a pickaxe for
brain surgery the nature of the instrument suggests that targeting certain areas with precision and
effectiveness, without killing the patient in the process, is not going to happen. It is disingenuous to be
surprised or apologetic when sanctions turn out to do no harm to a ruling elite, to achieve none of the
ostensible goals of the sanctions regarding “unacceptable behavior” or “punishment of international
outlaws, ” and to be generally ineffectual for much of anything besides rhetorical posturing and the
psychological gratification of having done something.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 131
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Cuba Aff
Gonzaga Debate Institute 132
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
No Link – Human Rights Improving
Cuba is working to stop human rights violations
Amnesty International, 2013 [Amnesty International, May 2013, “CUBA- Freedom of assembly and
expression limited by government policies- Amnesty International Submission to the UN Universal
Periodic Review” http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR25/027/2012/es/c232142f-3dba-41afb196-02718ffa5a43/amr250272012en.pdf, Accessed 7/7/13- JM]
At the time of its first Universal Periodic Review in February 2009, Cuba accepted 60 recommendations
of the 89 commendations made to it by other States.1 Most of the recommendations accepted by Cuba
concerned economic and social rights policies that had already been implemented.2 However, Cuba also
accepted several recommendations on issues that Amnesty International believes are key to improving
the human rights situation in the country, including as regards the promotion and protection of
human rights and freedoms,3 the death penalty,4 cooperation with UN human rights mechanisms,5
and the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.6
Cuba cooperates with the United Nations human right procedures and mechanisms
and has never failed to cooperate on improving human rights
Human Rights Council, 2013 [Human Rights Council, May 2013, “National report submitted in
accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 16/21, annex, paragraph 5* Cuba*” United Nations,
http://www.upr-info.org/IMG/pdf/a_hrc_wg.6_16_cub_1_cuba_e.pdf, Accessed 7/7/13- JM]
Cuba maintains a high level of cooperation and interaction with the United Nations human rights
procedures and mechanisms, as human rights are enjoyed by all, without discrimination.146 Cuba has
provided comprehensive information on various human rights issues to the United Nations system.
The Government has always demonstrated its genuine commitment to dialogue with all States on any
issue, based on mutual respect, sovereign equality, selfdetermination and recognition of the right of all
peoples to choose their own political, economic and social system.147 Cuba has never failed to
cooperate with the human rights mechanisms, even in the past when the United States resorted to a
spurious anti-Cuban ploy within the defunct and discredited Commission on Human Rights. 48 Cuba has
established a positive dialogue with the international human rights treaty bodies. Between the
submission of its first report to the universal periodic review in 2009 and late 2012, Cuba has focused its
full efforts on honouring its considerable commitments to prepare and submit reports to these
bodies.113 During that period, five national reports were prepared. Cuba fulfilled these obligations
despite the enormous effort needed to comply with these requirements.150 Three reports were
submitted to human rights treaty bodies114 and the other two were sent for consideration to the
appropriate bodies.115 Cuba’s initial report under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights
of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, and its initial report under
the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities are currently being reviewed prior to
submission. 151 The Cuban Government has systematically provided information requested by the special
procedures of the Human Rights Council. Cuba has sent information regularly and has completed most
of the questionnaires sent by the special mandate holders during the period under review, within the
time allowed. 152 Cuba has expressed its concern about the biased content and political prejudice of
some communications from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
(OHCHR), based on false allegations made by individuals and illegal groups lacking credibility or
authority. 153 Cuba has continued to ratify human rights treaties and to fulfil its international
Gonzaga Debate Institute 133
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
commitments and obligations under those treaties. It is party to 42 human rights instruments116 and
complies with their provisions.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 134
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Human Trafficking
Allegations made about human trafficking in Cuba is slanderous and just a means to
justify the US trade embargo- there is a profound effort to protect people in Cuba
Arizona Daily News, 2010 [Arizona Daily News, June 16, 2010, “US list on human trafficking
'shameful slander,' Cuba says”, http://azstarnet.com/news/world/us-list-on-human-traffickingshameful-slander-cuba-says/article_7b12a900-1434-5542-97ed-1232ace346ad.html, Accessed 7/7/13JM]
HAVANA - Cuba reacted angrily Tuesday to its inclusion on a U.S. list of countries that could be
sanctioned for failing to fight human and child trafficking, calling it a "shameful slander" and part of
Washington's efforts to justify its trade embargo. Cuba is one of 13 countries put on notice Monday
that they are not complying with the minimum international standards to eliminate the trade in human
beings and sexual slavery and could face U.S. penalties. The list, compiled by President Obama's
administration, also includes Iran, North Korea and Myanmar. An additional 58 countries were placed on
a "watch list" that could lead to sanctions unless their records improve. Cuba was singled out for
allegedly not doing enough to prevent the trafficking of children who work as prostitutes on the island,
mostly serving foreign tourists. "Cuba categorically rejects these allegations as false and disrespectful,"
Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, director of the Cuban Foreign Ministry's North American affairs office, said in a
statement sent to the foreign news media Tuesday. She said the allegations are all the more offensive
because the Communist government has concentrated its limited resources on protecting women and
the young, providing far more for the most vulnerable members of society than most nations in the
region. While Cubans receive low wages, the island offers free education through college, free health
care and heavily subsidized housing and transportation. Crime rates and drug use are extremely low in
a country where the state maintains near total control. "These shameful slanders profoundly hurt the
Cuban people. In Cuba, there is no sexual abuse against minors, but rather an exemplary effort to
protect children, young people and women," Vidal Ferreiro said. She said Cuban laws "put us among
the countries in the region with the most advanced norms and mechanisms for the prevention of
abuse."
Gonzaga Debate Institute 135
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
US Hypocrisy
America is the biggest human rights violator in Cuba
Press, Chicago Tribune writer, 13
[Bill, 5/2/13, Chicago Tribune Opinion, “The worst human rights violator in Cuba”,
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-02/opinion/sns-201305021630--tms--bpresstt--ma20130502-20130502_1_eighty-six-prisoners-political-prisoners-guantanamo, Accessed 7/2/13 I.K]
For decades, American politicians have denounced human rights violations in Cuba. With good cause,
they've accused the Castro brothers of rounding up political prisoners, torturing them, and detaining
them for years with no charges filed and no access to a criminal trial. But, as true as they may be,
American politicians can no longer make those charges. Because the worst human rights violator in
Cuba today is not the Castro regime, it's us. It's the U.S. government at our prison at the United States
Naval Station Guantanamo Bay; first, under George W. Bush, and now, under Barack Obama. There is
simply no way to defend what we as a nation are doing at Guantanamo on what is, under
international law, American soil. Consider: Eighty-six prisoners, more than half the 166 inmates still at
Gitmo, were found to have no connection to terrorist activity and have been cleared to leave, but are
still being held indefinitely. The remaining 80 prisoners have been held in prison for up to 12 years, with
no charges filed against them and no opportunity to defend themselves.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 136
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Prisoners – US Hypocrisy
The United States penal system disproportionately incriminates minorities.
Human Rights Watch, 13
[World Report 2013, Human rights organization that yearly summarizes human rights
conditions in over 90 countries, “United States,” http://www.hrw.org/worldreport/2013/country-chapters/united-states?page=3, accessed 7/2/13, MC]
Racial and ethnic minorities have long been disproportionately represented in the US criminal justice
system. While accounting for only 13 percent of the US population, African Americans represent 28.4
percent of all arrests. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics approximately 3.1 percent of African
American men, 1.3 percent of Latino men, and 0.5 percent of white men are in prison. Because they
are disproportionately likely to have criminal records, members of racial and ethnic minorities are more
likely than whites to experience stigma and legal discrimination in employment, housing, education,
public benefits, jury service, and the right to vote.
Whites, African Americans, and Latinos have comparable rates of drug use but are arrested and
prosecuted for drug offenses at vastly different rates. African Americans are arrested for drug
offenses, including possession, at three times the rate of white men.
In 2008, African American motorists were three times as likely as white motorists and twice as likely as
Latino motorists to be searched during a traffic stop. In New York City, 86 percent of persons “stopped
and frisked” by the police were African American or Latino, even though they represented 52 percent
of the population. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), 89 percent of those
stopped were innocent of any wrongdoing.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 137
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Terrorism
2012 report on terrorism shows that it is not justified to have Cuba on the terrorist list
– no terrorism in Cuba
Richter, Foreign Policy Reporter, 13 (Paul Richter, 5/30/13, Latin American Times, “Cuba still on U.S. list of
state sponsors of terrorism,” http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/30/world/la-fg-terror-list-20130531, accessed 7-3-13, KB)
Cuba further distanced itself from terrorist activities last year but the U.S. government still considers it
a state sponsor of terrorism along with Syria, Iran and Sudan, according to the State Department's
annual report.¶ The report for 2012, released Thursday, says the government in Cuba last year reduced
support for Basque separatists in Southern Europe, joined a regional group that seeks to block
terrorism financing, and sponsored peace talks between Colombia and an armed rebel group.¶ The
report finds "no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to
terrorist groups."¶ Countries listed by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism face
economic and political sanctions, including U.S. opposition to any aid from the International Monetary
Fund and other major financial institutions.¶ The report says there was a sharp uptick in Iran's
sponsorship of terrorism around the world, including attacks or attempted attacks in India, Thailand,
Georgia and Kenya.¶ Critics contend that Cuba's inclusion on the list is not justified and reflects the
views of members of Congress who are fiercely opposed to the communist leaders in Havana. State
Department officials are not considering delisting Cuba, which has been under a U.S. economic embargo
since 1962.¶ "The report makes it clear that the State Department doesn't really believe that Cuba is a
state sponsor of terrorism," said Geoff Thale, program director at the Washington Office on Latin
America, a liberal advocacy group. "Cuba is clearly on the terrorist list for political reasons."¶ Cuba still
shelters about two dozen members of the separatist group Basque Homeland and Freedom, or ETA, one
of the groups on the terrorist list, according to the report. But Havana has been reducing its support for
the group and no longer provides it with travel documents, the report says.¶ Cuba also has provided
haven for members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, another organization on
the terrorist list. But in November, Cuba began hosting peace talks between the Colombian
government and the rebels.¶ Washington had faulted Cuba for doing too little to prevent money
laundering and international terrorist financing. But last year Cuba joined the Financial Action Task
Force of South America, an intergovernmental group that seeks to enforce U.S.-supported standards
on such illicit activities.¶ Cuba's shift reflects changes in the country's leadership and a preoccupation
with domestic economic problems, analysts say.¶
Gonzaga Debate Institute 138
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Mexico Aff
Gonzaga Debate Institute 139
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Human Trafficking
The Government is doing a lot to try to prevent and stop Human Trafficking
The News – Mexico, 11
(3/30/11 “Mexico: US committed to Drug War” http://politicojunkie.blogspot.com/2011/03/mexico-us-commited-to-drug-war.html 7/5/13 MG)
John Feeley, the Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States Embassy to Mexico, said on Tuesday that
the U.S. government would not abandon the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime.¶ “We
are doing a lot. Obviously, the dimension of the problem is great, but we will not give up and we will
continue working closely with the (Mexican) government,” Feeley said.¶ He said that Mexico lost a great
friend when Carlos Pascual resigned his position as ambassador, but this situation will not affect the
bilateral relationship.¶ Regarding the Merida Initiative, Feeley said that this strategy was not a U.S. plan,
it was a joint plan stemming from President Felipe Calderón’s decision to tackle criminal
organizations.¶ Feeley said the United States has not stopped fighting organized crime. Furthermore,
the U.S. government has been fighting members of Mexican cartels “who are distributing drugs and
poisoning the youth” in at least 230 U.S. cities¶ Mexico has also played its part by launching actions
against human trafficking and by guaranteeing the human rights of immigrants, Feeley added.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 140
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Torture – US Hypocrisy
Cops in the U.S. are torturers too
Eng, NBC News Reporter, 12
(James 12/11/12 NBC NEWS, “Cops gone bad: Some notorious cases of officers who wound up on the wrong side of the law”
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/11/15845678-cops-gone-bad-some-notorious-cases-of-officers-who-wound-up-on-the-wrongside-of-the-law?lite 7/6/13 MG)
In law enforcement, as in most every other profession, there are good ones and bad ones, but what
most people seem to remember are the really bad ones.¶ Manuel Pardo, a former Florida police officer
turned serial killer who was executed Tuesday, was one of the latter, officials say. He shot nine people
to death in the late 1980s, claiming he was a ”soldier” ridding the streets of the wicked.¶ Most of Pardo's
victims were reportedly involved with drugs, and Pardo claimed he was doing society a favor by ridding
the streets of low-lifes who “have no right to live.” Authorities say he was a cold-blooded serial killer;
one retired detective described him as “Ted Bundy-esque," while a retired prosecutor called him “very
cold.Ӧ Michael Tabman, a former Fairfax County, Va., police officer and former FBI agent, said law
enforcement agencies have better screening tools these days to weed out potential problem applicants,
"but we haven't perfected predicting behavior."¶ 'Death Row Romeo' faces execution in Florida¶ He said
people attracted to police work often have personalities that are "machismo-oriented" and
"comfortable with a lot of authority," among other traits.¶ "A lot of that is a type of personality that in a
perfect storm … can morph into anti-social behavior," said Tabman, an author who also blogs about
crime and security. ¶ Herewith are some other notorious cases involving cops gone bad:¶ Drew Peterson¶
The former Bolingbrook, Ill., police sergeant was convicted in September of murdering his third wife,
Kathleen Savio, who was found dead in her bathtub in 2004. Authorities presume his fourth wife,
Stacy Peterson, who vanished in 2007, is also dead; Peterson is a suspect but has never been charged
in that case.¶ Before his 2009 arrest, according to media reports, Peterson seemed to taunt authorities,
joking on talk shows and even suggesting a "Win a Date With Drew" contest.¶ After his conviction,
Savio’s family members said justice was finally served. "Game over, Drew," Stacy Peterson's sister,
Cassandra Cales, said. "He can wipe the smirk off his face. It's time to pay."¶ Rodney King beating¶ It was
perhaps the most famous of all homemade videos – the 1991 clip of Los Angeles police officers beating
black motorist Rodney King following a car chase.¶ A year later, a California jury acquitted three officers
and deadlocked on charges for a fourth. The verdict sparked violent race riots in Los Angeles, and by the
time order was restored, more than 50 people had died.¶ A federal jury later convicted two of the police
officers, Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell, of a federal charge of violating King’s civil rights and
sentenced them to 30 months in prison.¶ King died in June at age 47.¶ Katrina bridge shootings¶ In the
chaos after Hurricane Katrina, six unarmed civilians were shot – two of them fatally – on the Danziger
Bridge in New Orleans on Sept. 4, 2005. One of the dead, Ronald Madison, was a 40-year-old mentally
disabled man who was shot in the back. Police claimed they opened fire because they thought people
were shooting at them from the base of the bridge.¶ In August 2011, four former New Orleans police
officers -- Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso and Robert Faulcon – were convicted of
civil-rights violations and firearms and other charges in the shootings. A fifth former officer, Arthur
"Archie" Kaufman, who was assigned to investigate the shootings, was convicted of helping to
orchestrate a cover-up.¶ “The officers who shot innocent people on the bridge and then went to great
lengths to cover up their own crimes have finally been held accountable for their actions,” Thomas E.
Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said when the men
were sentenced to long prison terms in April.¶ Abner Louima beating¶ Louima, a Haitian immigrant,
was brutally beaten and sodomized with the handle of a toilet plunger in the bathroom of the 70th
Gonzaga Debate Institute 141
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Precinct station house in Brooklyn, N.Y., after being arrested outside a night club in August 1997.¶
One cop, Justin Volpe, was sentenced in 1999 to 30 years in prison for what the judge called an
“unusually heinous” crime and a “barbarous misuse of power.” Another, Charles Schwartz, who was
initially accused of holding Louima down, pleaded guilty to perjury and was given a five-year
sentence. Two other officers who were indicted for allegedly trying to cover up the assault had their
convictions reversed due to insufficient evidence.¶ Louima sued New York City and its main police union
and won a $8.75 million settlement.¶ Watch US News crime videos on NBCNews.com¶ Jon Burge¶ Burge
was a former Chicago Police Department detective and commander who, along with the “Midnight
Crew” of officers under his command, allegedly beat and tortured criminal suspects in the 1970s and
'80s in order to gain confessions. Victims said they were burned with cigarette butts, smothered with
plastic bags, shocked in the genitals and forced to play Russian roulette with a .44-caliber gun.¶
Although Burge was protected by the statute of limitations on the claims of abuse, he was convicted of
lying about the torture. He was sentenced in January 2011 to 4 ½ years in prison.¶ The city agreed to pay
more than $7 million to settle two torture lawsuits involving Burge.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 142
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Venezuela Aff
Gonzaga Debate Institute 143
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Anti-Semitism
Venezuela is not Anti-Semitic- Maduro is of Jewish descent
Benari, reporter for Israeli National News, 2013
(Elad, 5/21/13, “Maduro: I'm Not Anti-Semitic; My Grandparents Were Jewish” Israeli National News,
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/168163#.UdeOO_mwWaU Accessed 7/6/13, JM)
Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, has denied accusations that he is anti-Semitic and claimed that
he is, in fact, of Sephardic Jewish descent, according to a report in the Venezuelan news site Apporea.
Maduro, who won an election last month in which he succeeded Hugo Chavez who passed away in
March, dismissed allegations by Claudio Epelman, director of the Latin American Jewish Congress.
Apporea quoted Epelman as having said, during the recent World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in
Budapest, Hungary, that the growing ties between Iran and various Latin American countries, especially
Venezuela, "are driving the rise of anti-Semitism in the region.” Chavez was known to be a good friend
of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who travelled to Venezuela to attend his funeral. He
frequently criticized Israel and in 2009, during the counterterrorism Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, cut off
Venezuela’s diplomatic ties with Israel and expelled the Israeli ambassador from Caracas. "I'm sorry
about the statements by Claudio Epelman, director of the Latin American Jewish Congress, whom I know
and have received in Venezuela many times, who said that there is anti-Semitism in Venezuela,” Maduro
said in response to the statements, according to Apporea. “He can accuse me, but leave Chavez out of
it,” he added. “We reject this campaign. We are a humanist people, we are not anti-Semitic,” Maduro
said, emphasizing that “there has never been anti-Semitism in Venezuela. Here we welcome all
religions. We are an open-hearted people.” He insisted that while his country has differences with
Israel, those differences have nothing to do with the Jewish people. "We have differences with the
state of Israel ... We reject the state of Israel’s attack on Damascus, the Syrian people and attacks on the
Gaza Strip and the Palestinian people,” said Maduro, who added that his country will continue to fight
against the “repressive state of Israel.” He added, however, that, “if there are a people that have a
socialist tradition, it is the Jewish people. And we respect their history.” Maduro then claimed,
according to Apporea, “My grandparents were Jewish, from a Moorish background, who converted to
Catholicism in Venezuela ... The mother of [Minister of Communication and Information] Ernesto
Villegas, also comes from that tradition.”
Gonzaga Debate Institute 144
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Human Trafficking
Venezuela is making significant efforts to stop human trafficking- allegations by the US
that say otherwise are a double standard
Suggett, Venezuelan Analysis staff-writer, 2009
(James, 6/19/09, “Venezuela Says U.S. Report on Human Trafficking Reflects “Double Standards”,
Accessed 7/6/13, JM http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/4531)
Mérida, June 19th 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) - The Venezuelan Foreign Relations Ministry issued a
statement on Wednesday accusing the United States government of arbitrarily wielding its annual
Trafficking in Persons Report as a political tool to injure its enemies and reward its allies. "The false
accusations against our country over the course of recent years in this report on the trafficking of
persons have served as a justification for a brutal aggression against our people and our government,"
the Ministry stated. "These reports are nothing other than a tool for imperial politics and aggression
toward the countries in the world that develop independent policies." The Ministry also called it
hypocritical for the U.S. to criticize the human rights records of other countries when its own record
has been so dismal. "It is scandalous that a country where immigrants are repressed and exploited,
especially Latin Americans, their families are separated and border walls are built, and where torture
has been practiced and terrorists are protected, pretends to prop itself up as a judge of human rights
in the world," stated the Ministry. In the brief statement, the Ministry demanded an end to "unilateral
certifications that, far from helping to promote human rights, seek to hide the double standards that
are practiced in the United States and to create obstacles for the establishment of relationships of
equality and respect that should prevail between our countries." The 2009 report released by the U.S.
State Department this week categorizes more than 170 countries into three tiers according to how
effectively the U.S. government judges them to be combating human trafficking. Last year, Venezuela
was taken off the lowest tier, Tier 3, where it had been placed along with Cuba and Iran, and placed on
the Tier 2 "Watch List," where it remained this year. "The Government of Venezuela does not fully
comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making
significant efforts to do so," says the report. However, "the [Venezuelan] government did not show
evidence of progress in convicting and sentencing trafficking offenders and providing adequate
assistance to victims; therefore, Venezuela is placed on Tier 2 Watch List."
Gonzaga Debate Institute 145
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
AT: Socialism is Evil
Socialism is good- it creates equality, allowing all people to live decently.
Mises, leader of the Austrian School of economic thought, a prodigious originator in
economic theory, 1992 [Ludwig von, 1922, “Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis”
http://files.libertyfund.org/files/1060/Mises_0069_EBk_v6.0.pdf, Accessed 7/9/13- JM]
The Right to Existence can be defined in various ways. If one understands by this the claim of people,
without means and unfit for work and with no relation to provide for them, to subsistence, then the
Right to Existence is a harmless institution which was realized in most communities centuries ago.
Certainly the manner in which the principle has been carried into practice may leave something to be
desired, as for reasons that arise from its origin in charitable care of the poor, it gives to the necessitous
no title recoverable by law. By “Right to Existence,” however, the socialists do not mean this. Their
definition is: “that each member of society may claim that the goods and services necessary to the
maintenance of his existence shall be assigned to him, according to the measure of existing means,
before the less urgent needs of others are satisfied.“22 The vagueness of the concept, “maintenance of
existence,” and the impossibility of recognizing and comparing how urgent are the needs of different
persons from any objective standpoint, make this finally a demand for the utmost possible equal
distribution of consumption goods. The form which the concept sometimes takes—that no one should
starve while others have more than enough—expresses that intention even more clearly. Plainly, this
claim for equality can be satisfied, on its negative side, only when all the means of production have
been socialized and the yield of production is distributed by the State. Whether on its positive side it
can be satisfied at all is another problem with which the advocates of the Right to Existence have
scarcely concerned themselves. They have argued that Nature herself affords to all men a sufficient
existence and only because of unjust social institutions is the provisioning of a great part of humanity
insufficient; and that if the rich were deprived of all they are allowed to consume over and above what is
“necessary,” everyone would be able to live decently. Only under the influence of the criticism based on
the Malthusian Law of Population23 has socialist doctrine been amended. Socialists admit that under
non-socialist production not enough is produced to supply all in abundance, but argue that Socialism
would so enormously increase the productivity of labour that it would be possible to create an earthly
paradise for an unlimited number of persons. Even Marx, otherwise so discreet, says that the socialist
society would make the wants of each individual the standard measure of distribution. 24
Gonzaga Debate Institute 146
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Consequentialism/Util Framework
Gonzaga Debate Institute 147
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Must Weigh Consequences
Must weigh consequences – their moral tunnel vision is complicit with the evil they
criticize
Isaac, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University 2
(Jeffrey C, Dissent Magazine, 49(2), “Ends, Means, and Politics”, Spring, Proquest)
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 one’s 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 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.
Failing to prevent a horrible outcome is just as bad as causing it – the aff is moral
evasion.
Nielsen, philosophy prof @ U of Calgary - 93
(Kai, Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber, 1993, p. 170-2)
Forget the levity of the example and consider the case of the innocent fat man. 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 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)." 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. 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
Gonzaga Debate Institute 148
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
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 not
plainly always opt for the lesser evil? And 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. 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 herethough 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 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.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 149
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
No Difference between Killing and Letting Die
Utilitarianism is the most ethical option- no difference between killing and letting die.
Cummisky, Professor of Philosophy at Bates, 96
(David, Kantian Consequentialism, p. 131)
Finally, even if one grants that saving two persons with dignity cannot outweigh and compensate for
killing one-because dignity cannot be added and summed in this way-this point still does not justify
deontological constraints. On the extreme interpretation, why would not killing one person be a
stronger obligation than saving two persons? If I am concerned with the priceless dignity of each, it
would seem that I may still save two; it is just that my reason cannot be that the two compensate for
the loss of one. Consider Hill's example of a priceless object: If I can save two of three priceless statues
only by destroying one, then I cannot claim that saving two makes up for the loss of the one. But
similarly, the loss of the two is not outweighed by the one that was not destroyed. Indeed, even if
dignity cannot be simply summed up, how is the extreme interpretation inconsistent with the idea that
I should save as many priceless objects as possible? Even if two do not simply outweigh and thus
compensate for the loss of the one, each is priceless; thus, I have good reason to save as many as I can.
In short, it is not clear how the extreme interpretation justifies the killing/letting-die distinction or
even how it conflicts with the conclusion that the more persons with dignity who are saved, the better
Gonzaga Debate Institute 150
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Policymakers Must Be Utilitarian
In the face of extinction risks, policymakers must be utilitarian.
George Kateb, Professor of Politics at Princeton University. 1992
(The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture., Pg.12. )
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 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 is, sacrifice—a 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 be 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 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.
There’s a distinction between public and private morality – Governments must make
utilitarian calculations
Goodin, Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the
Australian National University, 95
(Robert E., Cambridge University Press, “Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy” pg 63)
My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of
public officials that makes utilitarianism more plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes them
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 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
Gonzaga Debate Institute 151
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
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.
Deontology is irrelevant in policy making - intentions are impossible to know, only the
outcome matters
Hinman, Professor of Ethics, 98
(Lawrence, 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 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.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 152
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
Nuclear War Outweighs
Nuclear war outweighs- survival is a prerequisite to other values.
Nye, Professor of Political Science @ Harvard, 86
(Joseph S., 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 allout 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 life and cherished freedoms
that give meaning to life beyond mere survival. 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.
Utilitarianism is the only moral option in a nuclear age.
Nye, Professor of political science @ Harvard, 86
(Joseph S., Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs “Nuclear Ethics” pg.
18-19)
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a
hypothetical case.34 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 two peasants lined up against
a wall. When you ask the reason, 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.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 153
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
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 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.35 Absolutist ethics bear a heavier burden of proof in the nuclear
age than ever before.
Risk of extinction shatters the framework for evaluating impacts- the impact is infinite
and must be avoided at any cost.
Schell 82
[Jonathan Schell 1982 “Fate of the Earth” pp. 93-96]
To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course, be a misrepresentation – just as it would be
a misrepresentation to say that extinction can be ruled out. To begin with, we know that a holocaust
may not occur at all. If one does occur, the adversaries may not use all their weapons. If they do use all
their weapons, the global effects in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are
not moderate but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to withstand them without
breaking down catastrophically. These are all substantial reasons for supposing that mankind will not be
extinguished in a nuclear holocaust, or even that extinction in a holocaust is unlikely, and they tend to
calm our fear and to reduce our sense of urgency. Yet at the same time we are compelled to admit that
there may be a holocaust, that the adversaries may use all their weapons, that the global effects,
including effects of which we as yet unaware, may be severe, that the ecosphere may suffer
catastrophic breakdown, and that our species may be extinguished. We are left with uncertainty, and
are forced to make our decisions in a state of uncertainty. If we wish to act to save our species, we
have to muster our resolve in spite of our awareness that the life of the species may not now in fact be
jeopardized. On the other hand, if we wish to ignore the peril, we have to admit that we do so in the
knowledge that the species may be in danger of imminent self-destruction. When the existence of
nuclear weapons was made known, thoughtful people everywhere in the world realized that if the great
powers entered into a nuclear-arms race the human species would sooner or later face the possibility of
extinction. They also realized that in the absence of international agreements preventing it an arms race
would probably occur. They knew that the path of nuclear armament was a dead end for mankind. The
discovery of the energy in mass – of "the basic power of the universe" – and of a means by which man
could release that energy altered the relationship between man and the source of his life, the earth. In
the shadow of this power, the earth became small and the life of the human species doubtful. In that
sense, the question of human extinction has been on the political agenda of the world ever since the
first nuclear weapon was detonated, and there was no need for the world to build up its present
tremendous arsenals before starting to worry about it. At just what point the species crossed, or will
have crossed, the boundary between merely having the technical knowledge to destroy itself and
actually having the arsenals at hand, ready to be used at any second, is not precisely knowable. But it is
clear that at present, with some twenty thousand megatons of nuclear explosive power in existence,
and with more being added every day, we have entered into the zone of uncertainty, which is to say the
Gonzaga Debate Institute 154
Lundeen/Lundeen - Shunning
zone of risk of extinction. But the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically
different from, and immeasurably greater than that of any other risk and as we make our decisions we
have to take that significance into account. Up to now, every risk has been contained within the
framework of life; extinction would shatter the frame. It represents not the defeat of some purpose
but an abyss in which all human purpose would be drowned for all time. We have no right to place the
possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on the same footing as risk that we run in the ordinary
conduct of our affairs in our particular transient moment of human history. To employ a
mathematician's analogy, we can say that although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the stake
is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn
that a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game
will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance. Therefore, although,
scientifically speaking, there is all the difference in the world between the mere possibility that a
holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same, and we have
no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their
use would put an end to our species. In weighing the fate of the earth and, with it, our own fate, we
stand before a mystery, and in tampering with the earth we tamper with a mystery. We are in deep
ignorance. Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder, our wonder should make us humble, our
humility should inspire us to reverence and caution, and our reverence and caution should lead us to
act without delay to withdraw the threat we now post to the world and to ourselves.