A is the negative advocacy:
The virtuous individual would treat juveniles as adults in the criminal justice system.
B is the Competition:
The position is logically incompatible with the aff because it will function as a rejection
of the ought based logic of the aff. The affirmative defines ought as imply a moral
obligation, thus utilizing a conception of logic predicated on an obligation. G.E.M.
Anscombe1 explains
The terms “should” or “ought” or “needs” relate to good and bad: e.g. machinery needs oil, or should or ought to be oiled,
in that running without oil is bad for it, or it runs badly without oil. According to this conception, of course, "should" and "ought" are
not used in a special "moral" sense when one says that a man should not bilk. (In Aristotle's sense of the term "moral" [ήθικός], they
are being used in connection with a moral subject-matter: namely that of human passions and [non-technical] actions.) But they
have now acquired a special so-called "moral" sense--i.e. a sense in which they imply
some absolute verdict (like one of guilty/not guilty on a man) on what is described in the "ought" sentences used in
certain types of context: not merely the contexts that Aristotle would call "moral"--passions and actions--but also some of the contexts
that he would call "intellectual." The ordinary (and quite indispensable) terms "should," "needs," "ought," "must"--acquired
this special sense by being equated in the relevant contexts with "is obliged," or "is
bound," or "is required to," in the sense in which one can be obliged or bound by
law, or something can be required by law.
Thus by affirming the resolution the affirmative advocates that there is an obligation to
treat juveniles like adults. This is completely different from the purely descriptive logic
of my counter advocacy. Within the counter advocacy normative is merely a descriptive
term like red. I can call an object red, virtuous or good and no matter how many different
articulations never pass to an obligation to act upon such principles.
This functions to control the internal link to the AC contentions. My opponents offense
fails to supply any reason why we ought to treat juveniles as adults and thus they lack
any reason why they affirm the resolution unless my opponents wins the preferability of
a command approach to normatively as opposed to a virtue approach.
C is the reason to prefer
Command approach to ethics leads to absurdity and lack any sort of logical meaning or
coherency.
Contention 1.
Moral interpretations of ought were born out of the Christian doctrine and must be
rejected if such an idea is given up. Anscombe2 TWO explains
How did this come about? The answer is in history:
between Aristotle and us came Christianity, with
its law conception of ethics. For Christianity derived its ethical notions from the Torah. (One might be inclined to
think that a law conception of ethics could arise only among people who accepted an allegedly divine positive law; that this is not so
is shown by the example of the Stoics, who also thought that whatever was involved in conformity to human virtues was required by
In consequence of the dominance of Christianity for many centuries, the concepts
of being bound, permitted, or excused became deeply embedded in our language and thought. The
divine law.)
“Modern Moral Philosophy.” G. E. M. Anscombe. Originally published in Philosophy 33, No. 124
(January 1958). http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/mmp.html.
2
“Modern Moral Philosophy.” G. E. M. Anscombe. Originally published in Philosophy 33, No. 124
(January 1958). http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/mmp.html.
1
Greek word " ἁμαρτάνειν," the aptest to be turned to that use, acquired the sense "sin," from having
meant "mistake," "missing the mark," "going wrong." The Latin peccatum which roughly corresponded to ἁμαρτημα was
even apter for the sense "sin," because it was already associated with "culpa"--"guilt"--a juridical notion. The blanket term "illicit,"
"unlawful," meaning much the same as our blanket term "wrong," explains itself. It is interesting that Aristotle did not have such a
blanket term. He has blanket terms for wickedness--"villain," "scoundrel"; but of course a man is not a villain or a scoundrel by the
performance of one bad action, or a few bad actions. And he has terms like "disgraceful," "impious"; and specific terms signifying
defect of the relevant virtue, like "unjust"; but no term corresponding to "illicit." The extension of this term (i.e. the range of its
application) could be indicated in his terminology only by a quite lengthy sentence: that is "illicit" which, whether it is a thought or a
consented-to passion or an action or an omission in thought or action, is something contrary to one of the virtues the lack of which
To have a
law conception of ethics is to hold that what is needed for conformity with the
virtues failure in which is the mark of being bad qua man (and not merely, say, qua
craftsman or logician)--that what is needed for this, is required by divine law.
Naturally it is not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a
law-giver; like Jews, Stoics, and Christians. But if such a conception is dominant for many centuries, and then
is given up, it is a natural result that the concepts of "obligation,” of being bound or required as by a
law, should remain though they had lost their root; and if the word "ought" has become
invested in certain contexts with the sense of "obligation," it too will remain to be spoken with a
shows a man to be bad qua man. That formulation would yield a concept co-extensive with the concept "illicit."
special emphasis and special feeling in these contexts.
Anscombe furthers
its suggestion is one of a verdict on my action, according as it agrees or disagrees
with the description in the "ought" sentence. And where one does not think there is a
judge or a law, the notion of a verdict may retain its psychological effect, but not its
meaning. Now imagine that just this word "verdict" were so used--with a characteristically solemn emphasis--as to retain its
atmosphere but not its meaning, and someone were to say: "For a verdict, after all, you need a law and a
judge." The reply might be made: "Not at all, for if there were a law and a judge who gave a verdict, the question for us would
For
be whether accepting that verdict is something that there is a Verdict on." This is an analogue of an argument which is so frequently
referred to as decisive: If someone does have a divine law conception of ethics, all the same, he has to agree that he has to have a
judgment that he ought (morally ought) to obey the divine law; so his ethic is in exactly the same position as any other: he merely has
a "practical major premise"; "Divine law ought to be obeyed" where someone else has, e.g., "The greatest happiness principle ought
to be employed in all decisions."
However the conception of Good being provided by the law of a good fails to provide
any normative reason to follow such a good James Rachels3 explains the problem with
divine command theory.
First, we might mean that conduct is right because God commands it. For example, according to Exodus 20:16, God commands us to
be truthful.
On this option, the reason we should be truthful is simply that God requires it. Apart from the divine command,
God’s command that makes truthfulness right. [P-BRK] But this
leads to trouble, for it represents God’s commands as arbitrary. It means that God could have
given different commands just as easily. He would have commanded us to be liars, and then lying and not
truth telling is neither good nor bad. It is
3
“Does Morality Depend on Religion?” by James Rachels. (Chapter 4 of Rachels’ The Elements of
Morality 4th ed). http://faculty.uca.edu/rnovy/Rachels%20-%20Does%20Morality%20Depend%20on%20Religion.htm
truthfulness, would be right. (You may be tempted to reply: “but God would never command us to be liars!” But why not? If he did
God would not be commanding us to do wrong, because his command would
make lying right.) Remember that on this view, honesty was not right before God commanded it.
Therefore, he could have had no more reason to command it than its opposite; and so,
from a moral point of view, his command is perfectly arbitrary. [P-BRK]Moreover, on this view, the doctrine of
the goodness of God is reduced to nonsense. It is important to religious believes that God is
not only all-powerful and all-knowing, but that he is also good; yet if we accept the idea that good and bad are
defined by reference to God’s will, this notion is deprived of any meaning. What could it
mean to say that God’s commands are good? If “X is good” simply means “X is commanded by
God,” then “God’s commands are good” would mean only “God’s commands are commanded by
God”—an empty truism. In his Discourse of Metaphysics (1686) Leibniz put the point very clearly:[P-BRK]“So in
saying that things are not good by any rule of goodness, but shearly by the will of
God, it seems to me that one destroyers, without realizing it, all the love of God and all of his glory.
For why praise him for what he has done if he would be equally praiseworthy in
doing exactly the contrary.”[P-BRK]Thus if we choose the first of Socrates’ two options we are stuck
consequences that even the most religious people must find unacceptable.
endorse lying,
Contention 2. No coherent meaning can be understood when we use the idea of ought to
express moral propositions. Anscombe4 THREE explains
When Hume produced his famous remarks about the transition from "is" to "ought," he was, then, bringing together several quite
different points. One I have tried to bring out by my remarks on the transition from "is" to "owes" and on the relative "bruteness" of
It would be possible to bring out a different point by enquiring about the
transition from "is" to "needs"; from the characteristics of an organism to the environment that it needs, for
example. To say that it needs that environment is not to say, e.g., that you want it to have
that environment, but that it won't flourish unless it has it. Certainly, it all depends whether
you want it to flourish! as Hume would say. But what "all depends" on whether you want it to flourish
is whether the fact that it needs that environment, or won't flourish without it, has the slightest
influence on your actions, Now that such-and-such "ought" to be or "is needed" is supposed to
have an influence on your actions: from which it seemed natural to infer that to
judge that it "ought to be" was in fact to grant what you judged "ought to be"
influence on your actions. And no amount of truth as to what is the case could
possibly have a logical claim to have influence on your actions. (It is not judgment as such that
sets us in motion; but our judgment on how to get or do something we want.) Hence it must be impossible to
infer "needs" or "ought to be" from "is." But in the case of a plant, let us say, the
inference from "is" to "needs" is certainly not in the least dubious. It is interesting and worth
facts.
examining; but not at all fishy. Its interest is similar to the interest of the relation between brute and less brute facts: these relations
have been very little considered. And while you can contrast "what it needs" with "what it's got"--like contrasting de facto and de
iure--that does not make its needing this environment less of a "truth."
Anscombe5 explains the conclusion.
“Modern Moral Philosophy.” G. E. M. Anscombe. Originally published in Philosophy 33, No. 124
(January 1958). http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/mmp.html.
5
“Modern Moral Philosophy.” G. E. M. Anscombe. Originally published in Philosophy 33, No. 124
(January 1958). http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/mmp.html.
4
I should judge that Hume and our present-day
ethicists had done a considerable service by
showing that no content could be found in the notion "morally ought"; if it were not that
the latter philosophers try to find an alternative (very fishy) content and to retain the psychological force of the term. It would
be most reasonable to drop it. It has no reasonable sense outside a law conception of
ethics; they are not going to maintain such a conception; and you can do ethics
without it, as is shown by the example of Aristotle. It would be a great improvement
if, instead of "morally wrong," one always named a genus such as "untruthful,"
"unchaste," "unjust." We should no longer ask whether doing something was
"wrong," passing directly from some description of an action to this notion; we
should ask whether, e.g., it was unjust; and the answer would sometimes be clear at
once.
Contention 3. The state lacks the rational foundation necessary to make normative claims
in terms of ought. In order to be able say I ought to act an agent must be able to connect
their nature with normativity. Gregory Strom6 writes,
Now, the ―ought-ought gap‖ is our fanciful term for a mental ailment in which one knows that there is some reason such
that any good person would respond to it by doing A, but in which one does not know what that reason is. But this way of
someone
may know a great deal about the reason to
do A and nonetheless fail to understand why she ought to do it. Anyone who
says, for example, something like ―I know I should return the money—but if I don‘t,
no one will ever know I acquired it, and I won‘t get into any trouble—so why should I do
it?‖ is not entirely in the dark about the reasons that there are to return the
money. We can even imagine her able to supply herself with a demonstration, grounded in secure a
priori principles about (say) the concept of property, that morality requires her to return
this money, and nonetheless unable to understand why she should return it. This shows that what someone in such a
formulating the problem obscures a great many issues, for if we consider any particular case in which
wrestles with the ought- ought gap, it is clear that she
fix really needs is not merely to appreciate that a good person would return the money because of such-and-such a reason.
What is really needed,
therefore, is for her to recognize these facts as having to do with her. That is,
she must relate herself to the concept of a good person in such a way that,
for her, recognition that a good person returns the money for such-and-such
a reason is the same thing as practical recognition of the rational force of
this reason that manifests itself in her returning the money. In other words, not only
For this can appear to her merely as an alien fact having nothing to do with her.
must she learn to refine her concept of a good person to the point where it is adequate to her situation, but also she must
she must learn to think of herself as primarily or
essentially what she learns about when she learns about good people.
However a state can not be self aware and thus can not utilize the logic of an ought based
ethic Fist the government has no self awarenss and thus no moral agency Gerson7
think of herself as a good person;
6
Gregory Strom. In Defense of the Practical Imagination. University of Pittsburgh. No date.
http://www.pitt.edu/~gbs4/In%20Defense%20of%20the%20Practical%20Imagination.pdf
7
Lloyd Gerson. “The Morality of Nations: An Aristotelian Approach.” Published in Aristotle’s
Politics Today, compiled by Lenn E. Goodman and Robert B. Talisse. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
explains that even though nations have deliberative bodies and enact policy, they do not
have intentionality,
Having said this, I still think that the argument that seeks to include nations within the class of moral agents on the basis of
intentionality is a weak one. Here is why. There is an ambiguity in the term “intentionality” that this argument exploits. In
the
sense in which nations have intentionality, the attribution of moral agency does not
follow. In the sense of intentionality according to which moral agency does follow, this argument does not show that nations have
that. Intentionality in the first sense can characterize any goal-directed behavior and can
also be applied to any behavior that is understandable in the light of that goal. For example, it is perfectly
reasonable to say that a squirrel is gathering nuts for the purpose of eating
throughout the winter, or that the rattle of the snake’s tail shows that it intends to strike, or that the field mouse is trying
to get into the house in the autumn in order to keep warm, or that the chess-playing robot is trying to pin
down my knight. But the sense of intentionality that applies to such goal-directed
behavior by agents obviously does not indicate moral agency. Intentionality in the
second sense, the sense according to which its applicability does imply moral agency, is
something else. In this sense, intentionality refers first and foremost to the self-awareness
of the presence of the purpose and the self-awareness of the mental states leading to
its realization. That is, of course, precisely why we refrain from claiming that someone
is responsible for her actions when she is unaware of what she is doing, especially
when she could not have been aware. The acknowledgement of self-awareness is
necessary for the attribution of moral agency. I would in fact argue that all and only nondefective human
beings have this ability to be self-aware. But that is not my point here. There may be agents other than human beings that are moral
agents. My present point is that a
group of human beings, such as the group that comprise a
nation, cannot be self-aware in this way and therefore cannot be a moral agent.
Additionally, The only way to be consistent with our understanding of ethical
propositions is to reject a prescription-based ethical semantic. Geach8 explains the FregeGeach problem:
The theory that to call a kind of [an] act "bad" is not to describe but to condemn it is
open to similar objections. Let us consider this piece of moral reasoning: If doing a thing
is bad, getting your little brother to do it is bad. Tormenting the cat is bad. Ergo,
getting your little brother to torment the cat is bad. The whole nerve of the reasoning is that "bad"
should mean exactly the same at all four occurrences-should not, for example, shift from
an evaluative to a descriptive or conventional or inverted-commas use. But in the
major premise the speaker (a father, let us suppose) is certainly not uttering acts of
condemnation: one could hardly take him to be condemning just doing a thing.
Finally, a world of oughts cant make sense of the realm of permissibility and so you
would reject that ought based logic and instead use principles of duty disproving that we
should affirm. Geach9 writes.
MORAL utterances are sometimes regarded as being a kind of imperatives, or
resembling imperatives in their logic. In fact, the two sorts of utterance have essentially
different logical features; in particular, as regards negation. Of course the
8
P.T. Geach “The Philosophical Review, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 1965), pp. 449-465. JSTOR.
9
P. T. Geach. “Imperative and Deontic Logic” Vol. 18, No. 3 (Jan., 1958).
at least as
contradictory of a moral utterance is itself a moral utterance, just as the
contradictory of an imperative is itself an
imperative; but that is as far as the resemblance goes. Let 'P' represent the
contemplated act of a given agent in given circumstances. In answer to a request for orders, "
am I to do P? ", only two answers are possible-" do P " and " do not do P
", which are contradictories. No other order is a
direct answer to the question; and to say "you may either do P or not "
would not be an answer but a refusal to answer-I was asked for an order and I refuse to
give any.' But there are three relevant answers to the moral enquiry "ought I to do
P?,, (A) It is your duty to do P. (B) It is all right for you to do P, and also all
right for you not to do P; (C) It is your duty not to do P. (B) is the
conjunction of the negations of (C) and (A), which themselves are
not contradictories and do not even appear to be. If, however, I had written " You
ought "instead of " It is your duty " in (A) and (C), they would have looked
like con- tradictories; this is a trivial linguistic fact "(contrast (;erman ich muB3 ", " ich muf3 nicht
", which can be genuine contra- dictory forms), but I suspect that it fosters confusion, and would suggest
to writers on ethics that they use " duty " rather than "ought ". (B) is not a refusal to
give moral advice, as " you may either do P or not " would be refusal to give an order in the matter; it expresses a definite moral
attitude. It might be suggested that in giving moral advice I
am not just enunciating an imperative
for the particular case but appealing to a general moral precept, and that the general precepts
by which (A) and (C) would be supported would be not con- tradictory but contrary; this would explain why (A) and (C) themselves
are contraries, although the corresponding plain imperatives are contradictories.
Kant frontlines
Anscumbe
Kant introduces the idea of “legislating for oneself,” which is as absurd as if in
these days, when majority votes command great respect, one were to call each
reflective decision a man made a vote resulting in a majority, which as a matter of
proportion is overwhelming, for it is always 1-0. The concept of legislation requires
superior power in the legislator. His own rigoristic convictions on the subject of
lying were so intense that it never occurred to him that a lie could be relevantly
described as anything but just a lie (e.g. as “a lie in such-and-such
circumstances”). His rule about universalizable maxims is useless without
stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view
to constructing a maxim about it.
Issues of permissibility can only exist under my conception fo ought