Morality Updates
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Morality Updates
Morality Extensions ................................................................................................................................................ 2
AT: Predictions Bad ................................................................................................................................................ 5
Magnitude Outweighs ............................................................................................................................................. 6
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Morality Extensions
1) Their call for decision rule means that they can’t evaluate the circumstances- this links back into their
criticism of current Iraq policy.
Their 1AC talks about how the US had an absolute commitment in the past to bring democracy to Iraq
without considering the impacts, but they have the same ideal: they create a universal ideal to troop
withdrawal without considering the consequences.
2) Our Yar evidence mindicates that judges must use spontaneity when evaluating policy and shift away
from the old traditions of morality, which led to things like Stalin’s purges, world war, and the
Holocaust. This shift away from morality is key to understand the circumstances surrounding each
policy.
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3) Demanding intervention on the foundation of morality shows a fixation with logic.
Understanding the complexity of politics is key to prevent war.
Jeffery Isaac, Political Science Professor at Indiana University, 1989 (“Arendt, Camus and Postmodern Politics”, Praxis
International)
For both Arendt and Camus politics involves risks, opens up difficult paths, involves the possibility of doing good or harm.
Limits are therefore crucial, but limits in and of themselves are only a token of desperate surrender. What is called for is
not that we aspire toward limits but that we limit our aspirations. As Camus puts it: “Rebellion itself only aspires to the
relative and can only promise an assured dignity coupled with relative justice.”70 Richard Bernstein has recently argued
that Arendt’s work is best understood against the backdrop of contemporary “doubts about the project of grounding
philosophy, knowledge, and language,” and that it exhibits an overriding concern with “the practical task of furthering the
type of solidarity, participation, and mutual recognition that is founded in dialogical communities.”71 This is attested to by
many facets of her thought – her agreement with Aristotle’s notion that language is the essential human capacity, her vision
of politics as a realm of praxis, based on “the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the
common world presents itself,” and her later interest in Kant’s notion of representative thinking. A similar claim could be
made about Camus, who concludes The Rebel, for instance, by asserting that: “The mutual understanding and
communication discovered by rebellion can survive only in the free exchange of conversation. Every ambiguity, every
misunderstanding, leads to death; clear language and simple words are the only salvation from his death.”72 I fear,
however, that Bernstein’s formulation about “dialogic community” fails to give sufficient weight to the political principles,
institutions and commitments which might give substance to such a community. The key problem of our civilization,
Camus writes, is “whether man without the help of either the eternal or rationalistic thought, can unaided create his own
values.” This is clear repudiation of any notion of normative foundations as given by nature or history. We are “out in the
cold,” bereft of the pillars of political life; we must “think without bannisters,” and can expect no doctrine or natural
force to decide our fate. We must decide. But for both writers our decisions, our dialogical communities, must be
constrained. For, despite their common rejection of any a priori or ideological view of human nature, they both insist that
the “we’’ – we humans – are creatures of a certain definite sort, and that this carries certain normative implications. In
short, both are reconstructed humanists, and both are democrats. Camus, we may recall, insisted that “Man is that force
which ultimately cancels all tyrants and gods. He is the force of evidence.”73 He invokes some kind of elementary reality
about human being and human dignity as an obstacle to tyranny. Arendt accomplishes a similar move with her concept of
natality: “the freedom of man, which even totalitarian rulers cannot deny, for this freedom – irrelevant and arbitrary as they
may deem it – is identical with the fact that men are being born and that therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins,
in a sense, the world anew.”74 She relates this naturalistic concept of natality to the notion of plurality, which she defines
as “the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as
anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”75 For both thinkers this elemental human reality is not only an obstacle to
tyranny; it is also the premise of authentic political life. Now, this itself sounds like a reversion to philosophical
essentialism – deep down, beneath the surface of contemporary man and his murderous propensities and complicities, lies
the true man, in whom we can find solace. Tyrants will be cancelled. Given everything that both of them have written,
however, it is impossible to interpret their remarks in this way. Arendt is most explicit about this in a response to Eric
Voegelin, who questioned her observation that the concentration camp is a “laboratory” for experiments in changing human
nature. Voegelin insisted that a nature “cannot be changed or transformed.” Arendt replied: The success of totalitarianism is
identical with a much more radical liquidation of freedom as a political and as a human reality than anything we have ever
witnessed before. Under these conditions, it will hardly be consoling to cling to an unchangeable nature of man . . .
Historically we know of man‘s nature only insofar as it has existence and no realm of eternal essences will ever console us
if man loses his essential capabilities.76 There no clearer contemporary statement of the necessity of abandoning
essentialism in political theory. The capability of free action may not be an eternal characteristic of human beings. Man will
not necessarily cancel tyranny. And yet Arendt insists that historical reality evidences that freedom has been, and still is,
constitutive of human nature. One can go even further. Her concept of natality suggests that, while we cannot predict what
transformations of human nature the future may bring, the mere fact of human difference, rooted in both biology and
phenomenology, makes a complete identification of humans and their world highly unlikely if not impossible. There is,
then, some ground, some basis, for resistance to totalitarianism and for the reconstruction of political life. It may not be
much, a slender pebble rather than a pillar, but it is something, and it is something Arendt is unwilling to abandon. So too
Camus, who concludes The Rebel by appealing to “an irrepressible demand of human nature, of which the Mediterranean,
where intelligence is intimately related to the blinding light of the sun, guards the secret...” hoping that “a limit, under the
sun, shall curb them all.”77 Both thinkers, in short, refuse to completely abandon the notion of human nature, however
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much they revise it. Their dialogic communalism is thus grounded in a humanism with distinctly naturalist overtones. It is,
to be sure, a humanism shorn of the self-righteous optimism and the god-like pretensions which characterized much of the
tradition of modern political thought; but it is a humanism, a commitment to human dignity and freedom, nonetheless.
Neither of them, it should be remarked, has provided a fully adequate account of this humanism. But both refuse to make
this a condition of their commitment. It is something almost taken on faith, but a faith itself grounded on the untenability of
its opposite, the barbarous consequences of abandoning it altogether, and leaving the historical field to the nihilists.78
Indeed, Camus would undoubtedly insist that only the cowardice of logic could lead us to deny human dignity simply
because we cannot adequately demonstrate it. We might not fully know what man is, but he is the force of evidence, even if
the evidence is, in Orwell’s words, the human face on which totalitarian boots stamp79 (although, as Arendt and Camus
make clear, this is not the only evidence of man, as witness the various forms of resistance to totalitarianism). In any case,
Camus has not hidden his own theoretical intentions: “the important thing, therefore, is not, as yet, to go to the root of
things, but, the world being what it is, to know how to live in it.”80
4) Our Isaac evidence draws a key distinction- it is not as important to solve for the root cause of
problems as it is to learn how to live in the world as it is. Solving for the root cause is impossible
because we must consider the limits on the status quo. The call to fix things kills free
decisionmaking, leading to totalitarian regimes and violations of liberty. Each of us must create
our own way to thinking in order to access successful political action.
5) They say that we are doomed to the squo, but our Arendt evidence indicates why this is good- cross
apply the analysis here.
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AT: Predictions Bad
We should make predictions even if they aren’t perfect
Fuyuki Kurasawa, Associate Professor of Sociology at York University, ‘4 (Constellations, Vol. 11, No. 4)
When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one is likely to encounter from some intellectual
circles is a deep-seated skepticism about the very value of the exercise. A radically postmodern line of thinking, for
instance, would lead us to believe that it is pointless, perhaps even harmful, to strive for farsightedness in light of the
aforementioned crisis of conventional paradigms of historical analysis. If, contra teleological models, history has no
intrinsic meaning, direction, or endpoint to be discovered through human reason, and if, contra scientistic futurism,
prospective trends cannot be predicted without error, then the abyss of chronological inscrutability supposedly opens up at
our feet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of chance. Therefore, rather than embarking upon grandiose
speculation about what may occur, we should adopt a pragmatism that abandons itself to the twists and turns of history; let
us be content to formulate ad hoc responses to emergencies as they arise. While this argument has the merit of underscoring
the fallibilistic nature of all predictive schemes, it conflates the necessary recognition of the contingency of history with
unwarranted assertions about the latter’s total opacity and indeterminacy. Acknowledging the fact that the future cannot be
known with absolute certainty does not imply abandoning the task of trying to understand what is brewing on the horizon
and to prepare for crises already coming into their own. In fact, the incorporation of the principle of fallibility into the work
of prevention means that we must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for responses that provoke
unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in the final section of this paper). In addition, from a
normative point of view, the acceptance of historical contingency and of the self-limiting character of farsightedness places
the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present generations. The future no longer appears to be a
metaphysical creature of destiny or of the cunning of reason, nor can it be sloughed off to pure randomness. It becomes,
instead, a result of human action shaped by decisions in the present – including, of course, trying to anticipate and prepare
for possible and avoidable sources of harm to our successors.
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Magnitude Outweighs
Magnitude outweighs- prefer the impact that avoids the fastest and most probable internal link into
extinction
Bostrom, 02
Nick Bostrom, PhD and Professor at Oxford University, March, 2002 [Journal of Evolution and Technology, vol
http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html
Previous sections have argued that the combined probability of the existential risks is very substantial. Although there is
still a fairly broad range of differing estimates that responsible thinkers could make, it is nonetheless arguable that because
the negative utility of an existential disaster is so enormous, the objective of reducing existential risks should be a dominant
consideration when acting out of concern for humankind as a whole. It may be useful to adopt the following rule of thumb
for moral action; we can call it Maxipok: Maximize the probability of an okay outcome, where an “okay outcome” is any
outcome that avoids existential disaster. At best, this is a rule of thumb, a prima facie suggestion, rather than a principle of
absolute validity, since there clearly are other moral objectives than preventing terminal global disaster. Its usefulness
consists in helping us to get our priorities straight. Moral action is always at risk to diffuse its efficacy on feel-good
projects[24] rather on serious work that has the best chance of fixing the worst ills. The cleft between the feel-good projects
and what really has the greatest potential for good is likely to be especially great in regard to existential risk. Since the goal
is somewhat abstract and since existential risks don’t currently cause suffering in any living creature[25], there is less of a
feel-good dividend to be derived from efforts that seek to reduce them. This suggests an offshoot moral project, namely to
reshape the popular moral perception so as to give more credit and social approbation to those who devote their time and
resources to benefiting humankind via global safety compared to other philanthropies. Maxipok, a kind of satisficing rule,
is different from Maximin (“Choose the action that has the best worst-case outcome.”)[26]. Since we cannot completely
eliminate existential risks (at any moment we could be sent into the dustbin of cosmic history by the advancing front of a
vacuum phase transition triggered in a remote galaxy a billion years ago) using maximin in the present context has the
consequence that we should choose the act that has the greatest benefits under the assumption of impending extinction. In
other words, maximin implies that we should all start partying as if there were no tomorrow. While that option is
indisputably attractive, it seems best to acknowledge that there just might be a tomorrow, especially if we play our cards
right.
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