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Aff K Stuff
Aff K Stuff ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 1
AT: Ontology/Epistemology first .............................................................................................................................................................. 3
AT: Ontology First..................................................................................................................................................................................... 4
AT: Ontology First ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 5
AT: Value to Life Impact ........................................................................................................................................................................... 6
Ethics First ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 7
Calculations good ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 9
AT: Nietzche-Cede the political .............................................................................................................................................................. 10
AT: Neitzche-Cede the political .............................................................................................................................................................. 11
AT: Nietzche-Util .................................................................................................................................................................................... 12
AT: Nietzsche-Nussbaum ........................................................................................................................................................................ 13
AT: Nietzsche- Nussbaum ....................................................................................................................................................................... 14
AT: Nietzche-Nussbaum .......................................................................................................................................................................... 15
AT: Nietzsche-Frazer ............................................................................................................................................................................... 16
AT: Nietzsche-Fraser extensions ............................................................................................................................................................. 17
At: Nietzsche-Fraser extensions............................................................................................................................................................... 18
AT: Nietzsche-Pragmatism perm ............................................................................................................................................................. 19
AT: Capitalism-Key to peace ................................................................................................................................................................... 20
AT: Cap-Free Rider ................................................................................................................................................................................. 21
Cap- AT: “We don’t know until we do the alternative” .......................................................................................................................... 22
Cap-A2:Financial crisis means collapse .................................................................................................................................................. 23
AT: Zizek ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 24
AT: Zizek ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 25
AT: Zizek ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 26
AT: Zizek ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 27
AT: Zizek ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 28
AT: Zizek- quals ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 29
AT: Zizek ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 30
AT: Zizek ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 31
AT: Zizek ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 32
AT: Security-Security inevitable ............................................................................................................................................................. 33
AT: Security-Security inevitable ............................................................................................................................................................. 34
AT: Security-Realism .............................................................................................................................................................................. 35
AT: Security K- Threats Are Real ........................................................................................................................................................... 36
AT: Security K ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 37
Security-A2-“Reps key” .......................................................................................................................................................................... 38
Security- A2-“Securitization leads to aggressive pre-emption”............................................................................................................... 39
Realism .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 40
Realism .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 41
Realism Good- War ................................................................................................................................................................................. 42
Realism Good- Rights .............................................................................................................................................................................. 43
Realism- No Alt ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 44
Realism- No Alt ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 45
Realism .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 46
Realism- Perm.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 47
AT: Objectivism- Genocide ..................................................................................................................................................................... 48
AT: Objectivism ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 49
AT: Objectivism- No ethical egoism ....................................................................................................................................................... 50
AT: Objectivism- Western Exceptionalism ............................................................................................................................................. 51
AT: Objectivism- Environment ............................................................................................................................................................... 52
AT: Objectivism- Morality ...................................................................................................................................................................... 53
AT: Objectivism – communitarian ethics ................................................................................................................................................ 54
AT: Objectivism- Liberty ........................................................................................................................................................................ 55
AT: Objectivism (Healthcare specific) .................................................................................................................................................... 56
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AT: Objectivism ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 57
AT: Objectivism- murder ......................................................................................................................................................................... 58
AT: Objectivism- White Supremacy........................................................................................................................................................ 59
AT: poverty K .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 60
AT: Poverty K .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 61
AT: Poverty K .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 62
Reps Don’t shape reality .......................................................................................................................................................................... 63
Reps Don’t shape reality .......................................................................................................................................................................... 64
AT: Reps Ks............................................................................................................................................................................................. 65
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AT: Ontology/Epistemology first
There are no prior questions to problem oriented IR- empirical validity is a sufficient justification for
action. Emphasis on metaphysical hurdles destroys any chance of effectively describing the world and
guiding action
Owen, university of Southampton, 02
(David Owen, Reader of Political Theory at the Univ. of Southampton, Millennium Vol 31 No 3 2002 p. 655-7)
Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘[a] frenzy for words like “epistemology” and
“ontology” often signals this philosophical turn’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4
However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the
contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences
that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different
theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the
commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such a philosophical turn is not
without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to
promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with the philosophical turn is that it has
an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the
latter two were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a theoretical
account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these
features would not be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on
these philosophical commitments. Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theory to recognise
that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas
of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give
a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the
relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory)
and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this does not undermine the point that, for a certain class of
problems, rational choice theory may provide the best account available to us. In other words, while the critical judgement
of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement,
it is not the only or even necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that
because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it
cultivates a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like
this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon,
the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in
question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘theory-driven work is part of a reductionist program’
in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or
theory’.5 The justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because
general explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro
points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since ‘whether there are general explanations for classes of
phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry’.6 Moreover, this
strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity. The third danger is that
the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might be
called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with
each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the
disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulates
the idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets
its ontology and epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a
potentially vicious circle arises.
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AT: Ontology First
Instead of a focus on ontology, we should look first to pragmatism
Putnam, Harvard University, 04
(Hilary Putnam , Harvard University, 2004,
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ethics_without_ontology.htm)
When in the last of these four lectures I present an obituary on the project of Ontology, it will be an obituary on all of these
versions, the deflationary as well as the inflationary. In place of Ontology (note the capital “O”), I shall be defending what
one might call pragmatic pluralism, the recognition that it is no accident that in everyday language we employ many
different kinds of discourses, discourses subject to different standards and possessing different sorts of applications, with
different logical and grammatical features—different “language games” in Wittgenstein’s sense—no accident because it is
an illusion that there could be just one sort of language game which could be sufficient for the description of all of reality!
My pragmatic pluralism may, perhaps, make it clear why I reject eliminationism in both its materialist, or Democritean,
form and its idealist, or Berkleyan, form; but why will I be rejecting inflationary (for example, “Platonic”)metaphysics? My
answer is that I hold, with the pragmatists and again with Wittgenstein, that pragmatic pluralism does not require us to find
mysterious and supersensible objects behind our language games; the truth can be told in language games that we actually
play when language is working, and the inflations that philosophers have added to those language games are examples, as
Wittgenstein said—using a rather pragmatist turn of phrase—of “the engine idling.
Survival is a prerequisite to rethinking ontology –a true relationship with ourselves and others springs
from responsible awareness of the limits of our existence
Robbins, doctoral student at Duquesne University, 99
(Brent Dean Robbins, doctoral student
http://mythosandlogos.com/Boss.html ])
in
clinical
psychology
at
Duquesne
University,
1999
[“Medard
Boss,”
"Death is an unsurpassable limit of human existence," writes Boss (119). Primarily, however, human beings flee from death
and the awareness of our mortality. But in our confrontation with death and our morality, we discover the "relationship"
which "is the basis for all feelings of reverance, fear, awe, wonder, sorrow, and deference in the face of something greater
and more powerful." (120). Boss even suggests that "the most dignified human relationship to death" involves keeping it-as a possibility rather than an actuality--constantly in awareness without fleeing from it. As Boss writes: "Only such a
being-unto-death can guarantee the precondition that the Dasein be able to free itself from its absorption in, its submission
and surrender of itself to the things and relationships of everyday livingn and to return to itself." (121) Such a recognition
brings the human being back to his responsibility for his existence. This is not simply a inward withdrawal from the world-far from it. Rather, this responsible awareness of death as the ultimate possibility for human existence frees the human
being to be with others in a genuine way. From this foundation--based on the existentials described above--Boss is able to
articulate an understanding of medicine and psychology which gives priority to the freedom of the human being to be itself.
By freedom, Boss does not mean a freedom to have all the possibilites, for we are finite and limited by our factical history
and death. Yet within these finite possibilities, we are free to be who we are and to take responsibility for who we are in the
world with others and alongside things that matter.
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AT: Ontology First
Prioritizing ontology prevents engagement with reality, trapping us in the abstract world of false destiny.
Wolin, professor of history, 90
Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. 90. The Politics of Being,
p.164.
Heidegger's inability to conceptualize the sociohistorical determinants and character of modern technology raises the oftdiscussed question of the "pseudo-concreteness of his philosophy"; that is, its apparent incapacity to fulfill its original
phenomenological promise as a philosophy of "existential concretion." The problem was already evident in the tension
between the ontological and ontic levels of analysis that dominated the existential analytic of Being and Time. For there the
sphere of ontic life seemed degraded a priori as a result of its monopolization by the "They" and its concomitant inauthentic
modalities. As a result, both the desirability and possibility of effecting the transition from the metalevel of ontology to the
"factical" realm of ontic concretion seemed problematical from the outset. Nowhere was this problem better illustrated than
in the case of the category of historicity. And thus despite Heidegger's real insight into limitations of Dilthey's historicism,
the inflexible elevation of ontology above the ontic plane virtually closes off the conceptual space wherein real history
might be thought. In truth, it can only appear as an afterthought: as the material demonstration of conclusions already
reached by the categories of existential ontology. Consequently, the "ontology of Being and Time is still bound to the
metaphysics that it rejects. The conventional tension between existentia and essentia stands behind the difference between
everyday (factical) and 'authentic historical existence.'
Ontology focus is useless
Graham, Queensland University of Technology, 99
(Philip Graham School of Communication Queensland University of Technology, Heidegger’s Hippies Sep 15 1999
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html)
To state their positions more succinctly: ‘Heraclitus maintained that everything changes: Parmenides retorted that nothing
changes’ (Russell 1946: 66). Between them, they delineated the dialectical extremes within which the “problem of the
subject” has become manifest: in the extremes of questions about ontology, the nature of “Being”, or existence, or
‘Existenz’ (Adorno 1973: 110-25). Historically, such arguments tend towards internalist hocus pocus:
The popular success of ontology feeds on an illusion: that the state of the intentio recta might simply be chosen by a
consciousness full of nominalist and subjective sediments, a consciousness which self-reflection alone has made what it is.
But Heidegger, of course, saw through this illusion … beyond subject and object, beyond concept and entity. Being is the
supreme concept –for on the lips of him who says “Being” is the word, not Being itself –and yet it is said to be privileged
above all conceptuality, by virtue of moments which the thinker thinks along with the word “Being” and which the
abstractly obtained significative unity of the concept does not exhaust. (Adorno 1973: 69)
Adorno’s (1973) thoroughgoing critique of Heidegger’s ontological metaphysics plays itself out back and forth through the
Heideggerian concept of a universalised identity –an essentialist, universalised being and becoming of consciousness,
elided from the constraints of the social world. Adorno’s argument can be summed up thus: there can be no universal
theory of “being” in and of itself because what such a theory posits is, precisely, non-identity. It obscures the role of the
social and promotes a specific kind of politics –identity politics (cf. also Kennedy 1998):
Devoid of its otherness, of what it renders extraneous, an existence which thus proclaims itself the criterion of thought will
validate its decrees in authoritarian style, as in political practice a dictator validates the ideology of the day. The reduction
of thought to the thinkers halts the progress of thought; it brings to a standstill would thought would need to be thought, and
what subjectivity would need to live in. As the solid ground of truth, subjectivity is reified … Thinking becomes what the
thinker has been from the start. It becomes tautology, a regressive form of consciousness. (Adorno 1973: 128). Identity
politics - the ontological imperative - is inherently authoritarian precisely because it promotes regression, internalism,
subjectivism, and, most importantly, because it negates the role of society. It is simplistic because it focuses on the
thingliness of people: race, gender, ethnicity. It tries to resolve the tension of the social-individual by smashing the problem
into two irreconcilable parts. Identity politics’ current popularity in sociological thought, most well-evidenced by its use
and popularity in “Third Way” politics, can be traced back to a cohort I have called Heidegger’s Hippies –the failed, halfhearted, would-be “revolutionaries” of the 60s, an incoherent collection of middle-class, neo-liberal malcontents who got
caught up in their own hyperbole, and who are now the administrators of a ‘totally administered’ society in which
hyperbole has become both lingua franca and world currency (Adorno 1964/1973 1973).
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AT: Value to Life Impact
Subjectivity is shaped historically not theoretically- focus on ontology and value to life produces mass
murder
Graham, Queensland University of Technology, 99
(Philip Graham School of Communication Queensland University of Technology, Heidegger’s Hippies Sep 15 1999
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html)
Societies should get worried when Wagner’s music becomes popular because it usually means that distorted interpretations
of Nietzsche’s philosophy are not far away. Existentialists create problems about what is, especially identity (Heidegger
1947). Existentialism inevitably leads to an authoritarian worldview: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally selfcreating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,”
without a goal, unless the joy of the circle itself is a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself – do you
want a name for this world? A solution to all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid,
most midnightly men? – This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to
power – and nothing besides! (Nietzsche 1967/1997).
Armed with a volume of Nietzsche, some considerable oratory skills, several Wagner records, and an existentialist
University Rector in the form of Martin Heidegger, Hitler managed some truly astounding feats of strategic identity
engineering (cf. Bullock, 1991). Upon being appointed to the Freiberg University, Heidegger pronounced the end of
thought, history, ideology, and civilisation: ‘No dogmas and ideas will any longer be the laws of your being. The Fuhrer
himself, and he alone, is the present and future reality for Germany’ (in Bullock 1991: 345). Heidegger signed up to an
ideology-free politics: Hitler’s ‘Third Way’ (Eatwell 1997).
The idealised identity, the new symbol of mythological worship, Nietzsche’s European Superman, was to rule from that day
hence. Hitler took control of the means of propaganda: the media; the means of mental production: the education system;
the means of violence: the police, army, and prison system; and pandered to the means of material production: industry and
agriculture; and proclaimed a New beginning and a New world order. He ordered Germany to look forward into the next
thousand years and forget the past. Heidegger and existentialism remain influential to this day, and history remains bunk
(e.g. Giddens , 1991, Chapt. 2).Giddens’s claims that ‘humans live in circumstances of … existential contradiction’, and
that ‘subjective death’ and ‘biological death’ are somehow unrelated, is a an ultimately repressive abstraction: from that
perspective, life is merely a series of subjective deaths, as if death were the ultimate motor of life itself (cf. Adorno
1964/1973). History is, in fact, the simple and straightforward answer to the “problem of the subject”. “The problem” is
also a handy device for confusing, entertaining, and selling trash to the masses. By emphasising the problem of the
‘ontological self’ (Giddens 1991: 49), informationalism and ‘consumerism’ confines the navel-gazing, ‘narcissistic’ masses
to a permanent present which they self-consciously sacrifice for a Utopian future (cf. Adorno 1973: 303; Hitchens 1999;
Lasch 1984: 25-59). Meanwhile transnational businesses go about their work, raping the environment; swindling each other
and whole nations; and inflicting populations with declining wages, declining working conditions, and declining social
security. Slavery is once again on the increase (Castells, 1998; Graham, 1999; ILO, 1998).
There is no “problem of the subject”, just as there is no “global society”; there is only the mass amnesia of utopian
propaganda, the strains of which have historically accompanied revolutions in communication technologies. Each person’s
identity is, quite simply, their subjective account of a unique and objective history of interactions within the objective social
and material environments they inhabit, create, and inherit. The identity of each person is their most intimate historical
information, and they are its material expression: each person is a record of their own history at any given time. Thus, each
person is a recognisably material, identifiable entity: an identity. This is their condition. People are not theoretical entities;
they are people. As such, they have an intrinsic identity with an intrinsic value. No amount of theory or propaganda will
make it go away.
The widespread multilateral attempts to prop up consumer society and hypercapitalism as a valid and useful means of
sustainable growth, indeed, as the path to an inevitable, international democratic Utopia, are already showing their disatrous
cracks. The “problem” of subjective death threatens to give way, once again, to unprecedented mass slaughter. The numbed
condition of a narcissistic society, rooted in a permanent “now”, a blissful state of Heideggerian Dasein, threatens to wake
up to a world in which “subjective death” and ontology are the least of all worries.
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Ethics First
Ethics must always come before ontology
Cohen, University of North Carolina, 2005
(Richard A. Cohen, the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, pg. 5
“Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas,” Cambridge University Press)
Philosophy as ethical exegesis – discovering the ethical in the ontological, seeing the lower in the light of the higher, not
anthropology but ethics – is attuned to this deeper, weightier, truer history that defies straightforward language and is
refractory to the light of publicity. Its commitments are not to visible history alone, the history of historiography, but rather
to a more insecure but deeper history, that of the humanity of the human. The human is not a biological or a rational
category. Rather, the human emerges when and where morality is at work. Humanity is not a given but an achievement, an
accomplishment, an elevation. Moral rectitude and justice are rare enough for philosophy also to miss them. Ethical
exegesis is philosophy attentive to responsibilities beyond epistemology, and higher than the aesthetic celebration of the
spectacle of be-ing or its language. It is thinking bound to the “difficult freedom” of moral responsibilities and obligations –
for fellow humans, for sentient life, and finally for all of creation in all its diversity. And as such it is wisdom, or the quest
for wisdom – philosophy.
Just as the aesthetic dimension is not by itself evil (or good), one cannot say that the aesthetic life is false (or true). Like
good and evil, truth and falsity are not its standard. They are standards of epistemology. Epistemology need not refrain
from judging aesthetics, but neither epistemology nor aesthetics has the right to the last word. Ethics, in contrast, can and
must remind us that the aesthetic life is inferior to the moral life. The aesthetic world – however spectacular, grand, or
beautiful – is too small a world. When aesthetics takes itself for a world it becomes precious, as in Huysmans, or both
precious and precocious, as in Heidegger and Derrida, or fascist, its true moral face. And let there be no doubt, the aesthetic
life revolves around the self, is indeed its very cult. And thus it is essentially linked to death or, by dialectical rebound,
linked to youth, for the self by itself is a mortal being.
Regarding not the truth but the superiority of morality, of ethical commitment (“either/or”) over aesthetic disengagement
(“both/and”), Kierkegaard has written penetrating and moving tributes to this wisdom. The great nineteenth-century
German Orthodox rabbi and scholar, Samson Raphael Hirsch, in the Jewish tradition, commenting on Proverbs (chapter
two, “Wise Men and Fools”), notes that the word that text opposes to “wisdom” (Hebrew: chochmah), namely,
“foolishness” (Hebrew: olat), “is related to oulai, 'perhaps, ' and ahfal, 'darkness'. ” 6 Again, Levinas's “temptation of
temptation, ” the perhaps, the maybe, the possible, opposed to and by the actual, the here, the now, not the real but the
moral “demands of the day. ” No one would oppose beauty, to be sure, but when self-regard becomes disregard for others –
and surely it tends in this direction – then aesthetic desires become evils, hardening rather than softening the heart. There
are worthier, nobler tasks. Ethical exegesis – penetrating through the spectacle and its display of signs to its human
dimension, the dimension of suffering and moral demand – articulates the fragile but overpowering solidarity of a human
community on the difficult road of redemption. It will say and say again the rupture of the masks of being demanded by
morality and of justice.
Beyond but through morality, ethical exegesis will also dare to suggest, obliquely, to be sure, the glimmer of another
exigency – spirit, inspiration, absolution – more intense, higher, brighter, illuminating and not illuminated by the light of
sun, moon and stars. Micah 6:8: “For he has told thee, oh humans, what is good, and what the Lord thy God does require of
thee, but to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God. ” Not a “proof text, ” to be sure, but a
confirmation.
The difference putting ethics first makes is of no less consequence than that which, according to Husserl, separates
philosophy and psychology. That difference was at once the greatest chasm and yet barely discernible, in that the findings
of these two disciplines would be strictly parallel to one another, so parallel that a sentence from one could be transposed
word for word into the other, yet their significance would be entirely different. Philosophy – in this case ethics, what I am
calling ethical exegesis – would be the absolute source of all meaning, hence the ground of psychology and sociology and
all the sciences, social or natural. While not another epistemological grounding of epistemology, ethical exegesis
nonetheless still has the pretension to provide the reason for philosophy. But “reason” in the sense of “end, ” “purpose, ”
“aim” – what is most important, most significant. Without returning to pre-modern philosophy, without imposing one
arbitrary ontotheo-logy or another, without making a fetish of science or of its drifting, and most especially without the
pretended “second innocence” of aesthetic celebration, ethical exegesis – in moral responsibilities and obligations, and in
the call to justice built upon these – supplies a reason for philosophy, a reason for knowledge and a reason for living. No
doubt this is a very large claim. And in this sense, this is an ambitious book. Very simply: nothing is more significant than
serving others. All other significations, in all other registers, derive from this deepest or highest significance.
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Calculations good
Acting to prevent extinction is primary- independent of util and calculations
John Foster, 1997, in Valuing Nature? Ethics, economics, and the environment (232-3)
The economistic thinking about environment which this book has been largely engaged in criticising is founded in a certain
way of approaching questions of value: a way which nevertheless answers clearly to something very important in the idea
of value itself. The difficulties with such thinking which become prominent from the environmental perspective are
unlikely, therefore, to reveal merely the contours of a mistake, rather, they may help to shape our understanding of the
nature of value-judgment, considered as a human practice of engagement with the world at large.
To what central characteristics of this practice does economistic thinking respond? Consider a claim such as, *We should,
all things considered, prevent the further extinction of species': one which environmentalists from a variety of camps would
certainly be happy to make. The line of thinking which can lead (though it need not) to neo-classical environmental
economics takes such a claim as equivalent to:
[W] The benefits of preventing further extinctions outweigh the costs of so doing
What we have here is the assumption that practical claims have an essentially meliorist ethical structure; our motivation for
action arises as our impulse to pursue perceived goods, to want the good is necessarily to prefer the better, and therefore to
judge of the good to be pursued in action is to weigh the available options in some scale of betterness.
It is crucial to see that the language of 'costs and benefits', just as used in [W], need not commit us to any more than this; in
particular, it need not commit us to any view implying that cost-benefit analysis within a utilitarian framework offers an
appropriate form of decision-procedure to institutionalize such judgment.
For one thing, the term ‘benefit carries no necessary implication that such claims as [W] are reducible to expressions of
self-interest, still less to expressions of differentially-forceful subjective preference. We might equally have said, in
objective mode, that the good involved in or associated with preventing further extinctions outweighs that involved in or
associated with the alternative. Nor need the good in question even be thought of as somebody's good (necessarily it will be
perceived from someone's perspective, but that is a rathei different matter); it could perfectly well be a general, impersonal
good such as we all - or at least, many of us -disinterestedly acknowledge in the preservation of things like species.
Of course, many of the concerns which lead us to make such claims as [W] will indeed be, in a fairly loose and unpejorative
sense, self-interested: we want to maintain our credit in the gene bank, we want to avoid blundering into ecosystem
catastrophe through the ignorant destruction of keystone species, we want a world delightful with dolphins and abounding in
koala bears. But it seems at least prima font that [W] leaves room for another general kind of concern, of the sort which
environmental economics tries to capture with the notion of 'existence value': concern for species as in themselves or
intrinsically worth saving.
By the same token, it is not necessary to read [W] in any flady consequential spirit, with benefits and costs seen as distinguishable
results or products of the possible actions under review. All that is so far at stake is that our assessment of the comparative
goodness or tightness of acts has the particular structure implied in the idea of 'weighing'. Aspects of the relevant benefits —
such as the strong positive value of respecting rights or moral standing where these arc recognisable - can perfecdy well belong
intrinsically to the acts under consideration.
Most importandy, such statements about the comparative weight of benefit as against cost need not be seen as giving or
anticipating the result of any calculation; rather, they represent an eminendy natural way of embodying and conveying a
judgement. The evaluative claim that the benefits of doing A outweigh the costs is not, in fact, typically a claim of the
form: The benefits sum to x, the costs to_* therefore . . .'. Instead, it constitutes, as it were, a single interpretive move by
which the various relevant aspects confronting us are brought into a unitary motivating relation. These aspects we realise to
ourselves, as we consider them, not quantitatively but in terms of a very wide-ranging normative-descriptive vocabulary; to
do A would (say) be decent and honourable, but would have consequences B and C which would be respectively
uncomfortable and anti-social, while a good many people would take it as implying D which would seem pretentious . . .
and so on. All these terms carry for us their distinctively different vibrations of pleasure and distaste, appeal and recoil,
requirement and prohibition. Needing to act, or not, on the basis of what we take A to involve, we resolve all these various
qualitative perceptions together into a single pattern of these outweighing those which the judgement or evaluative claim
expresses.
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Nietzsche’s philosophy freezes political action and replicates the atrocities of the bush administration
Marcel, a free-lance journalist who lives in Vermont and writes about culture, politics, economics, and travel, 6[Joyce Marcel, a
free-lance journalist who lives in Vermont and writes about culture, politics, economics, and travel, March 8, 2006, “Be Happy Happy
Happy all the time”, http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0308-35.htm]
Polar bears are drowning but what the hell. Don't worry, be happy. At least that's the Republican philosophy as
spelled out - at last! - by a letter-writer to the Boston Globe. According to her, Democrats are miserable. Republicans are
happy. It's as easy as that. Where have liberals gone wrong? Headlined "Conservatives Have More Fun," the
writer lays it out with a simplicity that is nothing short of breathtaking. "Could it be that we conservatives
have a more positive world view?" she says. "How about a more positive view of the future?" How can you be
happy, she asks, when you think your country "consists of imperialist occupiers trying to take over the world." But if, like
her, you "realize the true road to freedom happens when democracies lead to thriving societies, you're
feeling pretty good right now." As that thriving democracy in Iraq hangs by a hair over a cauldron of
civil war, as Muslims all over the world are so outraged at our invasion and occupation that they take to the streets to
protest a few cynical cartoons, as every Middle Eastern country that gets a choice between modernity and Sharia law goes
for that old-time religion, it becomes clear that President George W. Bush could be leaving behind him a string of
democratically-elected fundamentalist governments. But let's not worry. Be happy. "Let's think about the
environment," the letter-writer continues in her merry, bubbly way. "Liberals believe we've ruined the earth and it's
just a matter of time before it's uninhabitable. By now, if you're a liberal, you're really depressed. In reality, the United
States is a model for the world and has some of the best air and water quality of any industrialized
nation." Sure we do. In bottles. For sale. But the oceans are over. The polar ice caps are melting, hence the
drowning polar bears. Deforested mountains are producing killer mud slides. There's a drought in the Midwest. Bird
migration routes are changing. Up here in Vermont, we can't eat the fish in our rivers and streams because of mercury
poisoning. The aquifers that feed our wells are polluted by acid rain. Sugaring season is disrupted by global warming. The
other day I heard about a study predicting that snowfall in Vermont will end in about 20 years. This is scary stuff. What
this woman is really saying is, "I've got my McMansion and my Escalade and my kids are in a private
school, and America works for me." The letter-writer's thinking drips with selfishness and arrogance
about her place in the universe. Jesus didn't say, "don't worry, be happy." I seem to recall him saying that "it
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." The
combination of the "I've got mine, Jack" philosophy with the "my happiness is the only thing that
matters, and to hell with everybody else" is how the George Bushes of the world gain power. Why
should we care if we're torturing brown skinned folk in secret prisons? Who cares if the government is
listening to our phone calls and reading our e-mails - we have nothing to hide. We must hate freedom. Only
namby pamby civil libertarians care about due process and rule of law. There's a war on, don't you know? By ignoring
the many real problems that fester around her, the letter-writer can delude herself that everything is fine
and liberals are just crabby cry-babies. But even many Republicans are finally realizing that their Dear Leader is an
incompetent fool. Is this is a case of buyers remorse, or are they starting to see that despite the generally messed-up state of
the Democratic Party, the GOPs could still lose control of Congress out of general voter disgust? "We have a choice each
morning we're lucky enough to open our eyes," says the letter-writer. "We can look at our lives and society in a positive
manner and work toward making a better world for our children, or we can endlessly dwell on every negative aspect of
life... I know which one will make me a happier person." Happy, happy, happy. But on analysis, the letter-writer
is confusing personal happiness with political happiness. Speaking strictly for my liberal self, I'm a pretty happy
person. Most of the people I know are, too. Just because we hate the direction our government has taken
doesn't mean we don't love and enjoy our families, our homes, our friends, our community and our
work. I refuse to allow my disgust at Bush and his policies spoil my personal life. Life is short and wasting eight years of
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it being miserable doesn't make any sense. If you fall into that trap, the terrorists have won. America today isn't a case of
happiness or depression. It's a matter of facing reality or living in a rose colored bubble where everything is fine. And when
the jumbo jet crashes into the office tower, you wonder what the hell happened. Why do they hate us? Speaking of being
happy, Tuesday was Town Meeting day in Vermont. My town, along with several others, voted to ask our Washington
representative to start impeachment proceedings against Bush. The Associated Press picked up the story. Reading it,
liberals across America learned that they are not alone. Hopefully, this will further support them in their struggles for
political change and social justice. Frankly, a little political change and social justice will make a lot of
people very, very happy. In fact, when Bush is gone, there will be dancing in the streets.
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AT: Nietzche-Util
Global extinction risks require a re-reading of Nietzsche’s ethic: we must accept pity for utilitarian
reasons
Winchester, teacher of Philosophy at Spelman College, 94 [James J. Winchester, teacher of Philosophy at Spelman College, 1994,
“Nietzche’s Aesthetic Turn”]
As uniformed as it is to assume that there is an easy connection between thought and National Socialism, it is neither
difficult nor misguided to consider his lack of social concern. Nietzsche saw one danger in our century, but failed
to see a second. His critique of herd mentality reads like a prophetic warming against the dictatorships
that have plagued and continue to haunt the twentieth century. But the context of our world has
changed in ways that Nietzsche never imagined. We now have, as never before, the ability to destroy the
planet. The threat of the destruction of a society is not new. From the beginnings of Western literature in the
Iliad and the Odyssey, the Western mind has contemplated the destruction that, for example, warfare has wrought. Although
the Trojan war destroyed almost everyone involved, both the victors and the vanquished, it did not destroy the entire world.
In the twentieth century, what has changed is the scale of destruction. If a few countries destroy the ozone
layer, the whole world perishes, or if two countries fight a nuclear or biological war, the whole planet
is threatened. This is something new in the history of the world. The interconnectedness of the entire world has grown
dramatically. We live, as never before, in a global community where our actions effect ever-larger numbers
of the world’s population. The earth’s limits have become more apparent. Our survival depends on
working together to solve problems like global pollution. Granted mass movements have instituted reigns of terror,
but our survival as a planet is becoming ever-more predicated on community efforts of the sort that
Nietzsche’s thought seems to denigrate if not preclude. I do not criticize Nietzsche for failing to predict
the rise of problems requiring the communal efforts such as the disintegration of the ozone layer, acid
rain, and the destruction of South American rain forests. Noting his lack of foresight and his occasional
extremism, I propose, in a Nietzschean spirit, to reconsider his particular tastes, without abandoning his
aesthetic turn. Statements like “common good is a self-contradiction” are extreme, even for Nietzsche. He
was not always so radical. Yet there is little room in Nietzche’s egoism for the kind of cooperation and
sense of community that is today so important for our survival. I am suggesting that the time for Nietzshe’s
radical individualism is past. There are compelling pragmatic and aesthetic reasons why we should now be
more open to the positive possibilities of living in a community. There is nothing new about society’s
need to work together. What has changed is the level of interconnectedness that the technological age
has pressed upon.
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AT: Nietzsche-Nussbaum
Case turns and disproves the alt: Nietzscheans can’t account for pity because they don’t get poverty-you
can’t rise above when you are structurally oppressed, destroying value to life
Nussbaum, American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, and
ethics, 94 [Martha Nussbaum, American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political
philosophy, and ethics, 1994]
We now turn to the heart of the matter, the role of “external goods” in the good human life. And here we encounter a rather
large surprise. There is no philosopher in the modern Western tradition who is more emphatic than
Nietzsche is about the central importance of the body, and about the fact that we are bodily creatures. Again and
again he charges Christian and Platonist moralities with making a false separation between our spiritual and our physical
nature; against them, he insists that we are physical through and through. The surprise is that, having said so
much and with such urgency, he really is very loathe to draw the conclusion that is naturally suggested by his position: that
human beings need worldly goods in order to function. In all of Nietzsche’s rather abstract and romantic praise
of solitude and asceticism, we find no grasp of the simple truth that a hungry person cannot think well;
that a person who lacks shelter, basic health care, and the basic necessities of life, is not likely to
become a great philosopher or artist, no matter what her innate equipment. The solitude Nietzsche describes
is comfortable bourgeois solitude, whatever its pains and loneliness. Who are his ascetic philosophers? “Heraclitus,
Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer”-none a poor person, none a person who had
to perform menial labor in order to survive. And because Nietzsche does not grasp the simple fact that if our
abilities are physical abilities they have physical necessary conditions, he does not understand what the democratic and
socialist movements of his day were all about. The pro-pit tradition, from Homer on, understood that one
functions badly if one is hungry, that one thinks badly if one has to labor all day in work that does not
involve the fully human use of one’s faculties. I have suggested that such thoughts were made by Rousseau the
basis for the modern development of democratic-socialist thinking. Since Nietzsche does not get the basic idea, he
does not see what socialism is trying to do. Since he probably never saw or knew an acutely hungry
person, or a person performing hard physical labor, he never asked how human self-command is affected by
such forms of life. And thus he can proceed as if it does not matter how people live from day to day,
how they get their food. Who provides basic welfare support for Zarathustra? What are the “higher men”
doing all the day long? The reader does not know and the author does not seem to care. Now Nietzsche
himself obviously was not a happy man. He was lonely, in bad health, scorned by many of his contemporaries. And yet,
there still is a distinction to be drawn between the sort of vulnerability that Nietzsche’s life contained and the sort we find if
we examine the lives of truly impoverished and hungry people. We might say, simplifying things a bit, that there are two
sorts of vulnerability: what we might call bourgeois vulnerability-for example, the pains of solitude, loneliness, bad
reputation, some ill health, pains that are painful enough but still compatible with thinking and doing philosophy-and what
we might call basic vulnerability, which is deprivation of resources so central to human functioning that
thought and character are themselves impaired or not developed. Nietzsche, focusing on the first sort of
vulnerability, holds that it is not so bad; it may even be good for the philosopher. The second sort, I claim, he simply
neglects-believing, apparently, that even a beggar can be a Stoic hero, if only socialism does not inspire him
with weakness.
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AT: Nietzsche- Nussbaum
Nietzsche’s Kritik doesn’t go far enough-compassion is the best way to capture all the values he
endorses-A lack there off is just fear
Nussbaum, American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, and
ethics, 94 [Martha Nussbaum, American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political
philosophy, and ethics, 1994]
the deepest question about the anti-pity position: is its ideal of strength
really a picture of strength? What should we think about a human being who insists on caring deeply
for nothing that he himself does not control; who refuses to love others in ways that open him to serious risks of pain and
Finally, we arrive at what is perhaps
loss; who cultivates the hardness of self-command as a bulwark against all the reversals that life can bring? We could say,
with Nietzsche, that this is a strong person. But there clearly is another way to see things. For there is a
strength of a specifically human sort in the willingness to acknowledge some truths about one’s
situation: one’s mortality, one’s finitude, the limits and vulnerabilities of one’s body, one’s need for food and drink and
shelter and friendship. There is a strength in the willingness to form attachments that can go wrong and
cause deep pain, in the willingness to invest oneself in the world in a way that opens one’s whole life
up to the changes of the world, for the good and for bad. There is, in short, a strength in the willingness
to be porous rather than totally hard, in the willingness to be a mortal animal living in the world . The
Stoic, by contrast, looks like a fearful person, a person who is determined to seal himself off from risk, even at the cost of
loss of love and value. Nietzsche knows, or should know, this. For a central theme in his work is that Christianity
has taught us bad habits of self-insulation and self-protection, alienating us from our love of the world and all
of its chanciness, all of its becoming. On this account we have become small in virtue, and remain small, unless we learn
once again to value our own actions as ends, and our worldly existence as their natural home. I think that in the end
Nietzsche fails to go for enough with this critique. He fails, that is, to see what the Stoicism he endorses
has in common with the Christianity he criticizes, what “hardness” has in common with otherworldliness: both
are forms of self-protection, both express a fear of this world, and its contingencies, both are incompatible with the deepest
sort of love, whether personal or political.
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AT: Nietzche-Nussbaum
The failure of compassion in the face of poverty destroys value to life-It is only achieved through the
possibility of risky identifications
Nussbaum, American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, and
ethics, 94 [Martha Nussbaum, American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political
philosophy, and ethics, 1994]
Nietzsche draws on many of the central images for the riskiness
of human functioning in the pro-pity tradition: the eagle, the boat in the wind, the sacrificial animal. He glosses
Here, with characteristic stylistic exuberance,
them, as so often, in a typically Romantic manner; and yet there is no doubt that he is, in a sense, aligning himself with the
view of the moral depth and importance of contingency that animates the defense of pity in the Greek literary and
philosophical tradition. But Nietzsche, like the famous wise men, is in the end too comfortable by half. Like
them, he really doesn’t see what it is really like to love someone with all our heart and be betrayed.
These experiences, and their depth, are at the heart of the pro-pity tradition; and I don’t think that
Nietzsche could make that sort of risk central to his thought without endorsing pity (as the tradition does)
as a morally valuable response. But he is determined to have it both ways: to play-act at romantic risktaking while retaining Stoic hardness; to have as his spokesman a character who makes nice speeches about eagles
and boats and risk-taking and solitude—but who never seems to endure a moment’s human grief or thirst or
hunger, wrapped up, as he is, in his own self-commanding thought and speech; to make a rhetorical gesture in the
direction of the contingencies to which pity is a response, while repudiating pity in favor of self-sufficiency. This comes
about, I think, because Nietzsche is really all along, despite all his famous unhappiness, too much like the
“famous wise men”: an armchair philosopher of human riskiness, living with no manual labor and
three meals a day, without inner understanding of the way in which contingency matters for virtue.
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AT: Nietzsche-Frazer
Nietzsche views compassion itself as the most difficult test – embrace it as a tool to overcome what is most
difficult and then employ it in a new ethics
Frazer, Ph.D recipient from Princeton University who’s research focuses on Enlightenment political philosophy and its relevance
for contemporary political theory, 6[Michael Frazer, Ph.D recipient from Princeton University who’s research focuses on
Enlightenment political philosophy and its relevance for contemporary political theory, 2006, “The Review of Politics”, 68: 49-78]
This conventional interpretation of the close of Nietzsche's epic, however, is surely incorrect. A close examination of the
passage in question reveals that Zarathustra never “overcomes” his compassion in the sense of ridding
himself of it once and for all. There is no indication that our hero will fail to experience compassion upon
further encounters with suffering, or even that he has ceased to feel compassion for the higher men. Achieving
“mastery” over a virtue or sentiment, remember, necessarily implies retaining it in one's psyche, not
abandoning it. Rather than ridding himself of all sympathetic sentiments once and for all, Zarathustra affirms his feelings
for the higher men as having had their “time” as an essential component of his destiny. Compassion may cause him real
misery, but, when properly harnessed, it helps rather than hinders Zarathustra's creativity. Indeed, as tightly bound as
sympathetic feelings are with the possession of knowledge and the faculty of imagination, they are necessarily present in
any creative psyche. Remembering, then, that the telos of human striving is not happiness but creation
(more specifically value-creation), the experience of compassion is nothing to be regretted. While Rosen
acknowledges that “the pitiful must be accepted as a natural part of human existence,” he nonetheless interprets Nietzsche
to maintain that “it must also be destroyed in order for the creation of higher values that will themselves exclude or
minimize pity by the imposition of a natural hardness that … is for Nietzsche the indispensable complement to the birth of
a race of warrior-artists.”48 Yet value-creation does not require the “destruction” of compassion; it requires
affirmation of the imaginative strength which allows the wise to share suffering with the objects of their allencompassing knowledge. A mere brute warrior may not need to experience compassion, but a warriorartist and value-creator surely must, albeit without allowing this suffering to interfere with his work. Though the
weak may be unable to withstand even the slightest pain, the strong and creative not only withstand their
suffering and their sympathetic suffering—they positively embrace them. Such suffering is of no “matter” to
them, for it is no hindrance in their creative task, only a hindrance to the pursuit of happiness undertaken by the “last man”
and other such degenerates (See Z I Prologue 5, p. 129). Compassion, Zarathustra concludes, is an unbearable
burden only for those who mistakenly believe the true goal of human existence to be contentment
rather than creation. Elsewhere, speaking of his philosophical honesty, Nietzsche reasons that, despite this honesty's
regrettable aspects, “supposing that this is our virtue from which we cannot get away, we free spirits—well, let us work on
it with all our malice and love and not weary of ‘perfecting’ ourselves in our virtue” (JGB VII:227, p. 345).49 Zarathustra
treats compassion similarly, realizing that sympathetic suffering is inseparable from his imaginative creativity,
and then returning to his destined task with the glow of a healthy soul ready to use all his faculties—including
compassionate imagination—in pursuit of his chosen task.50 This, remember, is how value-creation first appears, as
a great self-affirmation on the part of the naturally noble (see GM I:2, p. 462). Such a value-creator seizes the
right to call even his propensities for suffering—including a propensity for the sympathetic suffering of
Mitleid—by the name of virtue. The virtue so chosen will inevitably shine forth as a sign of his
strength, and be put to service in the advancement of life.
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Our reading of Nietzsche is better: compassion is good because it motivates creativity, and because it is so
difficult and fraught with risk.
Frazer, Ph.D recipient from Princeton University who’s research focuses on Enlightenment political philosophy and its relevance
for contemporary political theory, 6[Michael Frazer, Ph.D recipient from Princeton University who’s research focuses on
Enlightenment political philosophy and its relevance for contemporary political theory, 2006, “The Review of Politics”, 68: 49-78]
There is a second way in which the painful experience of compassion can threaten human excellence. Not
only do we risk developing contempt for all but the suffering masses, but we also risk developing contempt for the
compassion that forces us to suffer with them. The terrible experience of shared suffering might lead some of the
would-be great on a futile quest to abolish human misery. Others, however, are likely to conclude that their
sympathetic pain could be most efficiently relieved by extirpating the faculties responsible for it. When
we do not hate the suffering of others, but only our own sharing of this suffering, we seek only to banish compassion
from our own breasts. Doing so, however, requires us to shield ourselves from the troubling awareness of
our fellows' plight, to sever the imaginative and emotional bonds which connect us to others. It requires that we
turn against our own strength of intelligence and imagination, that we sacrifice knowledge for
ignorance by denying our insights into the human condition. Some of us might succeed in turning ourselves into
such isolated, unthinking beings, but such individuals are not destined for creative achievement. By
contrast, the natural philosopher, poet, or psychologist—the born and inevitable unriddler of human souls—
could no more destroy his own sense of compassion than he could abolish the human suffering which
compassion compels him to share. A futile quest to extirpate his sympathetic sentiments would only
turn such an individual against the world, against life, and against himself; in the end, it might even
destroy him. Zarathustra does not pass the greatest test of his strength by purging compassion from his psyche. To the
contrary, he affirms his painful experience of the emotion as creativity-enhancing and life-promoting. In
doing so, Nietzsche's protagonist warns against those who unduly oppose compassion as well as those who unduly
celebrate it. Both sides treat pain as something to be soothed away rather than harnessed for creative purposes; they differ
only in whether the pain to be alleviated is our own or that of others. From the ethically authoritative perspective of life,
both can be seen as opponents of human flourishing.
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Nietzsche’s biography proves that we need to endorse the vulnerability of intersubjectivity and love
Frazer, Ph.D recipient from Princeton University who’s research focuses on Enlightenment political philosophy and its relevance
for contemporary political theory, 6[Michael Frazer, Ph.D recipient from Princeton University who’s research focuses on
Enlightenment political philosophy and its relevance for contemporary political theory, 2006, “The Review of Politics”, 68: 49-78]
Zarathustra's success in embracing compassion, however, does not necessarily reflect such success on
the part of his creator. Throughout his interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pippin reminds us to keep careful track
of an “irony” infusing Zarathustra's teachings, an irony stemming from “a lack of identity between the self-understanding of
a character and that of the author and, by virtue of that difference, a potential negative qualification of what is said or done
by that character.”54 While Zarathustra may have resolved the question of compassion by affirming his sympathetic
sentiments, “there is no reason to think that the ironic distance between Zarathustra and Nietzsche has been overcome.”55
Yet the distinction between an author and his character need not privilege the real over the fictional
person; the “potential negative qualification” might be better applied to what is said or done by the writer, not by his
creation. Nietzsche may have crafted a great test and created a character capable of passing this test,
without having sufficient strength to pass it himself.56 Indeed, Nietzsche repeatedly complains in his
correspondence that “Schopenhauer's ‘compassion’ has always been the major source of problems in my life.”57 It has
even been suggested that his hostility toward compassion may have played a role in Nietzsche's ultimate
destruction; the famous breakdown of 1889 has been interpreted by several of Nietzsche's biographers
as being brought on by an unbearable compassion with the lowliest of sufferers, a horse being beaten by its
driver.58 In this way, Nietzsche might not only pronounce a warning about the life-denying dangers of
excessive opposition to compassion; he might also serve as such a warning himself. Nietzsche was well
aware that his general approach to ethics, together with his insightful evaluation of Mitleid, demanded that the
noble soul embrace its own sympathetic sentiments. Yet Nietzsche was also aware that every great philosophy is
“the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir” (JGB I:6, p. 203). Perhaps the
greatest sin that Nietzsche confesses in his philosophy is a failure to make peace with a world filled
with misery in which knowledge of the human condition is inseparable from compassionate suffering.
Since his fierce denunciations of the undue celebration of compassion so overwhelmingly outnumber his denunciations of
its undue rejection, Nietzsche appears to be a much more straightforward critic of shared suffering than his immoralist
ethics warrants.59 Although Nietzsche may have lacked the fortitude to endure the pain of his tremendous
compassion for others, this very compassion animated his greatest creative achievements, most notably
the fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The moving portraits of the higher men—not to mention the compelling account
of Zarathustra's long struggle to endure and ultimately embrace his sympathetic feelings for them—would have been
impossible had the author lacked deep compassion for each and every one of his characters, as well as for their
real-world models. Yet even as Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains an eloquent example of the creative achievements possible
only through compassion, the anguish which allowed for its composition may have been too much for its
author to bear.
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AT: Nietzsche-Pragmatism perm
Perm: Do both - a private embrace of Nietzsche doesn’t preclude the value of solidarity in social
intuitions
Brassett, RCUK Research Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, 4 [James Brassett,
RCUK Research Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, 2004, “The Politics of Global
Ethics” , http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/csgr/research/workingpapers/2005/wp17105.pdf.]
For Rorty, ‘liberal irony’ mediates the extremes of Platonism and post-structuralism by refusing to accept that the public
and private should be fused in theory. Rorty posits, “Skeptics like Nietzsche have urged that metaphysics and
theology are transparent attempts to make altrusim look more reasonable than it is. Yet such sceptics
typically have their own theories of human nature. They, too, claim that there is something common to all human beings –
for example, the will to power, or libidinal impulses. Their point is that at the “deepest” level of the self there is no sense of
human solidarity, that this sense is a “mere” artefact of human socialization. So such skeptics become antisocial.
They turn their backs on the very idea of a community larger than a tiny circle of initiates.” (Rorty, 1989:
viii) For Rorty, the opposition between these two strands of thinkers is unnecessary. One type seeks to
explore what private perfection might be like. The other – people like Rawls and Habermas - is engaged in a
shared social effort: “the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel.” (Rorty,
1989: xiv) Of course, along the way the two types of writer have ruffled each others feathers. Each side has done a
good job of setting their project in terms of an opposition towards the other. But Rorty argues that to
conclude from these frictions that we must choose between camps would be to make a theoretical
problem out of a dispute between personalities. Instead he argues, “We shall only think of these two
kinds of writers as opposed if we think that a more comprehensive philosophical outlook would let us
hold self-creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision.” ( Rorty, 1989:
xiv). For Rorty “[t]he vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument.
The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange.” (Rorty,
1989: xiv) If we accept Rorty’s position – that nothing will synthesize the public and private at the level of
theory – then we could start to use writers like Marx or Heidegger, Habermas or Foucault rather like “tools” –
“as little in need of synthesis as paintbrushes and crowbars” (Rorty, 1989: xiv). To illustrate, Rorty sketches a
figure of the liberal ironist for whom “cruelty is the worst thing we do” and seeks to show how they can face up to the
contingency of their own beliefs and desires. The desires of the liberal ironist are “ungroundable” in the same ways as
philosophy has no firm foundations for making claims to knowledge. All they can do is distinguish between “less
useful and more useful ways of talking” (Rorty, 1998: 1).
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AT: Capitalism-Key to peace
Capitalism statistically causes peace-Economic interdependence, sanctions, and new economic
opportunities
Bandow, J.D. from Stanford University, 5 [Doug Bandow, J.D. from Stanford University, November 10, 2005, “Spreading
Capitalism is Good for Peace”, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5193]
In a world that seems constantly aflame, one naturally asks: What causes peace? Many people, including U.S. President
George W. Bush, hope that spreading democracy will discourage war. But new research suggests that expanding free
markets is a far more important factor, leading to what Columbia University's Erik Gartzke calls a "capitalist peace." It's a
reason for even the left to support free markets. The capitalist peace theory isn't new: Montesquieu and Adam Smith
believed in it. Many of Britain's classical liberals, such as Richard Cobden, pushed free markets while opposing
imperialism. But World War I demonstrated that increased trade was not enough. The prospect of economic ruin did not
prevent rampant nationalism, ethnic hatred, and security fears from trumping the power of markets. An even greater
conflict followed a generation later. Thankfully, World War II left war essentially unthinkable among leading industrialized
- and democratic - states. Support grew for the argument, going back to Immanual Kant, that republics are less warlike than
other systems. Today's corollary is that creating democracies out of dictatorships will reduce conflict. This contention
animated some support outside as well as inside the United States for the invasion of Iraq. But Gartzke argues that "the
'democratic peace' is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom." That is, democracies
typically have freer economies than do authoritarian states. Thus, while "democracy is desirable for many reasons," he
notes in a chapter in the latest volume of Economic Freedom in the World, created by the Fraser Institute, "representative
governments are unlikely to contribute directly to international peace." Capitalism is by far the more important factor. The
shift from statist mercantilism to high-tech capitalism has transformed the economics behind war. Markets generate
economic opportunities that make war less desirable. Territorial aggrandizement no longer provides the best path to riches.
Free-flowing capital markets and other aspects of globalization simultaneously draw nations together and raise the
economic price of military conflict. Moreover, sanctions, which interfere with economic prosperity, provides a coercive
step short of war to achieve foreign policy ends. Positive economic trends are not enough to prevent war, but then, neither
is democracy. It long has been obvious that democracies are willing to fight, just usually not each other. Contends Gartzke,
"liberal political systems, in and of themselves, have no impact on whether states fight." In particular, poorer democracies
perform like non-democracies. He explains: "Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low
levels of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels." Gartzke considers other
variables, including alliance memberships, nuclear deterrence, and regional differences. Although the causes of conflict
vary, the relationship between economic liberty and peace remains. His conclusion hasn't gone unchallenged. Author R.J.
Rummel, an avid proponent of the democratic peace theory, challenges Gartzke's methodology and worries that it "may
well lead intelligent and policy-wise analysts and commentators to draw the wrong conclusions about the importance of
democratization." Gartzke responds in detail, noting that he relied on the same data as most democratic peace theorists. If it
is true that democratic states don't go to war, then it also is true that "states with advanced free market economies never go
to war with each other, either." The point is not that democracy is valueless. Free political systems naturally entail free
elections and are more likely to protect other forms of liberty - civil and economic, for instance. However, democracy alone
doesn't yield peace. To believe is does is dangerous: There's no panacea for creating a conflict-free world. That doesn't
mean that nothing can be done. But promoting open international markets - that is, spreading capitalism - is the best means
to encourage peace as well as prosperity. Notes Gartzke: "Warfare among developing nations will remain unaffected by the
capitalist peace as long as the economies of many developing countries remain fettered by governmental control." Freeing
those economies is critical. It's a particularly important lesson for the anti-capitalist left. For the most part, the enemies of
economic liberty also most stridently denounce war, often in near-pacifist terms. Yet they oppose the very economic
policies most likely to encourage peace. If market critics don't realize the obvious economic and philosophical value of
markets - prosperity and freedom - they should appreciate the unintended peace dividend. \
Trade encourages prosperity and stability; technological innovation reduces the financial value of conquest; globalization
creates economic interdependence, increasing the cost of war. Nothing is certain in life, and people are motivated by far
more than economics. But it turns out that peace is good business. And capitalism is good for peace.
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AT: Cap-Free Rider
The alternative’s wealth distribution system would politically distribute wealth creating more inequality
then capitalism
Nee, Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, 89[Victor Nee, Professor of Sociologist at Cornell, 1989, A Theory of Market
Transition: From redistribution to Markets in State Socialism”, American Sociological Review,pg.665-666]
Ivan Szelenyi (1978) formulated a theory of social inequality in state socialism in response to perceived shortcomings of
Djilas's thesis. By applying the concept of nonmarket trade (Polanyi 1957b) in a substantive analysis of the redistributive
mechanism in state socialism, Szelenyi's theory specifies the underlying processes through which surplus is appropriated in
state socialist economies. A feature of state socialism, argues Szelenyi, is that the price of labor is set administratively by
the state. Just as labor markets are the central institution of capitalist economies, so the core institution of state socialist
economies is the nonmarket trade of labor. When salaries and wages are set administratively and not through transactive
market relationships, surplus is directly centralized in the state budget and redistributed according to centrally defined goals
and values. Hence the state socialist redistributive mechanism appropriates surplus directly from the immediate producer
and creates and structures social inequalities through the processes of its reallocation. Szelenyi innovatively argues that the
redistributive mechanism in state socialism differs fundamentally from that of the capitalist welfare state. In the welfare
state, redistribution reduces the inequalities produced in the marketplace (Wilensky 1975). Though the welfare state has a
decidedly procapital bias, the pattern of state expenditures has resulted in modest gains for labor (Devine 1983) and in the
reduction of poverty, though without changing the underlying pattern of wealth concentration (Danziger and Weinberg
1986; Gough 1979). Scholars commonly assume that redistribution in the socialist state would be more progressive than in
the welfare state (Stephens 1986). Contrary to expectations, the redistributive mechanism in state socialist economies does
not give rise to more equality, but to greater social inequality (Konrad and Szelenyi 1979; Szelenyi 1983). In state
socialism, argues Szelenyi, the expansion of the dominant redistributive sector of the economy adds to the advantages of
the already privileged and powerful. The effect of redistribution is more evident in higher nonwage compensations for the
"redistributive class," such as housing, access to higher education, subsidies for certain commodities, the health and pension
plans, and is only partially reflected in salaried income (Szelenyi 1983). Redistributors are "selfish" in that they "favor 'their
own kind' (or more sociologically speaking: the class which is organized around the monopoly of redistributive power)
when they allocate scarce resources" (Szelenyi 1978, p. 77).
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Cap- AT: “We don’t know until we do the alternative”
The alternative will fail without a viable alternative to capitalism beginning the revolution-it will become
self-limiting
Kliman, Professor of Economics at pace University, 6 [Andrew Kliman, Professor of Economics at pace University, April 2, 2006,
“Not by Politics Alone”, presentation for panel on “Thinking Through a Post-Capitalist Future” at Left Forum conference,
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:W7WV0BP2LGoJ:akliman.squarespace.com/writings/not%2520by%2520politics%2520alone
%25204.2.06.doc+alternative+to+capitalism&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=128&gl=us]
I believe that the central problem faced by people struggling for freedom today is the widespread acceptance of Margaret
Thatcher’s TINA – the belief that “there is no alternative.” The main things that have led to the acceptance of TINA are the
collapse of the state-capitalist regimes that called themselves “Communist” and the widespread failures of social democracy
to remake society. The struggles for freedom do not stop because of this, of course. Yet the acceptance of TINA acts to
confine the struggles. They become self-limiting. In the perceived absence of an alternative, it is perfectly sensible that
social struggles stop short of even trying to remake society totally. As Bertell Ollman has argued, “Why bother to struggle
for a change that cannot be? … people [need to] have a good reason for choosing one path into the future rather than
another.” People need to have a good reason. That’s because they are rational. It is rational to engage in struggles to
change what can be changed, and it’s rational to refrain from struggling against what cannot be changed. People who do
not want to hear about socialism because of the failures and horrors of what they believe to have been socialism are making
perfect sense. On the other side, of course, is a new global justice movement, part of which identifies itself as anticapitalist, and which has raised the slogan “Another World is Possible.” This slogan, too, is eminently rational, if one
interprets it, as I do, as a call to think through the possibility of another world and to prefigure another world. But
ultimately, the rationality of struggles that are not only struggles against injustice and exploitation, but struggles for a
completely different, non-capitalist, human society rests on whether another world is indeed possible. At the present
moment, I believe, no activist or theorist can really answer with confidence that it is possible. I do not think this is a reason
to despair. The effort to work out how another world might be possible is really just beginning. This problem received
almost no attention throughout most of the last century. Until the collapse of so-called communism and living proof that
social democracy is a futile dream, almost everyone on the Left simply assumed that socialism was possible, because it
actually existed. Some were willing to critique Russia, China, Cuba, etc., to varying degrees, but they too tended to think
that the actual existence of these countries was proof that socialism was possible. As they saw it, the defects or evils in
these countries didn’t flow out of their mode of production; they were essentially political. What was needed was political
change – “socialism and democracy” instead of socialism without democracy, or “socialism from below” instead of
socialism from above, etc. And other people were confident that effective political action would enable the achievements
of social democracy to be sustained and gradually extended to encompass more and more aspects of social and economic
existence. So it is only in recent years that any significant theoretical attention has been paid to whether another world is
possible. I believe that this is the central problem of revolutionary thought today. Exposing the evils of capitalism is an
insufficient approach when the question being asked by tens of millions of people is whether there is any alternative. Nor is
it sufficient to focus on organizing or movement building, or to leave everything up to spontaneous action alone. Freedom
struggles will no doubt continue, because the impulse to change things, the felt need to change things, arises spontaneously
out of the defects of existing society. But again, the struggles will not reach for a wholly different future as long as such as
future is perceived as pie-in-the-sky.
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Cap-A2:Financial crisis means collapse
Capitalism isn’t collapsing
Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, 9[Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, June 13 th, 2009, “The Capitalist
Manifesto: Greed Is Good (To a point)”, http://www.newsweek.com/id/201935]
A specter is haunting the world—the return of capitalism. Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits
have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of
pain to fix. Nothing will ever be the same again. "Another ideological god has failed," the dean of financial commentators,
Martin Wolf, wrote in the Financial Times. Companies will "fundamentally reset" the way they work, said the CEO of
General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt. "Capitalism will be different," said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. No economic
system ever remains unchanged, of course, and certainly not after a deep financial collapse and a broad global recession.
But over the past few months, even though we've had an imperfect stimulus package, nationalized no banks and undergone
no grand reinvention of capitalism, the sense of panic seems to be easing. Perhaps this is a mirage—or perhaps the
measures taken by states around the world, chiefly the U.S. government, have restored normalcy. Every expert has a
critique of specific policies, but over time we might see that faced with the decision to underreact or overreact, most
governments chose the latter. That choice might produce new problems in due course—a topic for another essay—but it
appears to have averted a systemic breakdown. There is still a long road ahead. There will be many more bankruptcies.
Banks will have to slowly earn their way out of their problems or die. Consumers will save more before they start spending
again. Mountains of debt will have to be reduced. American capitalism is being rebalanced, reregulated and thus restored.
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AT: Zizek
Traverse the fundamental fantasy will fail
Bowman and Stamp, 7 (Paul Bowman- lecturer in cultural studies at Cardiff University, and Richard Stamp- Lecturer in
Cultural Studies at Bath Spa Universit, The truth of Žižek, 2007 pg. 64,)
Where does this leave us? Zizek claims that class is the structuring horizon of contemporary forms of hegemonic politics, but
does not offer nay sustained analysis of capital which would allow for a specification of class identity, or even the articulation of
a class politics opposed to capital. Moreover, he contends that class cannot be directly expressed, that it takes on other forms.
Forms the viewpoint of the political characterized by contingency, the determining role of class cannot even be viewed. Yet this
is precisely what is required if the act is to traverse the fundamental fantasy, the disavowed of contemporary politics. In political
terms Zizek’s account of the act is marked by this failure. Pg 64
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AT: Zizek
Zizek fails to understand the true nature of politocs
Bowman and Stamp, 7 (Paul Bowman- lecturer in cultural studies at Cardiff University, and Richard Stamp- Lecturer in
Cultural Studies at Bath Spa Universit, The truth of Žižek, 2007,pg. 37)
In contrast to Zizek’s usage, Laclau and Mouffe argue that the economic cannot be divorced from the political. What this
means becomes apparent when one translate Laclau’s terms back into those of the crude Marxism that they reject. In this
retranslation, and transformation in the ‘ideological superstructure’ may well have effects on the ‘economic base’, because
base and superstructure are no longer conceived of as separable, but rather as contingent political establishments and
constellation in the larger discursive movements of history. In other words, the notion of hegemony subverts the ‘ideology’
(and paradigm) of crude Marxism, in which the superstructure is regarded as distinct from, yet determined by the economic
base. In the post-Marxist theory of hegemony, in fact, there is no fundamentally distinct base and superstructure, only
contingent political establishments, which will take the form of different forms of socio-political arrangements. Human life
is not a passive reflection of economic dictates. It can and does intervene decisively into the ‘economic system’.
The way of Changeless change: zizek’s limit problem.
But Zizek does not accept the Laclauian argument about hegemony nor does he accept the efficacy or econ the reality of
politics construed as changes in legislation, inter-institutional organization, or anything ‘pragmatic’ like that. Indeed, he
refers to every such kind of non-revolutionary politics as proof of ‘the sad predicament of today’s Left’. This he says is
characterized by ‘the acceptance of the Cultural Wars (feminist, gay anti-racist, etc.. multiculturalist struggles) as the
dominant terrain of emancipatory politics; [and] the purely defensive stance of protecting the achievement of the Welfare
State (Zizek 2002a: 308). To this impulse in Zizek’s work Laclau replies: because Zizek “refuses to accept the aims of all
cotetatory movements in the name of pure anti- capitalist struggle, one is left wondering: who for him are the agents of a
historical transformation? Martians, perhaps? (Laclau 2004). 37
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AT: Zizek
Zizek uses empty rhetoric without arguments- cast doubt on their evidence
Bowman and Stamp, 7 (Paul Bowman- lecturer in cultural studies at Cardiff University, and Richard Stamp- Lecturer in
Cultural Studies at Bath Spa Universit, The truth of Žižek, 2007,pg. 39-40)
This 'system' or 'structure', construed through an ultra-formalist perspective is the problem for Zizek (2002:308). It is also
the problem of Zizek, in the sense that his hyperbolically ‘consistent’ ultra-political stance paradoxically reject all forms of
politics other than something he conceives of as complete 'systemic' global, anti-capitalist revolution (2002:170). His
polemical target is perceived contemporary 'consensus’ (that he regards as "'resigned and cynical') that capitalism is 'the
only game in town' (2000:95). From ' this perspective, all non-revolutionary or non-anti-capitalist: theory and practice
cannot see the changeless 'backdrop' to its own activity: capitalism, the horizon within which all actually existing politics
drone on, but always avoiding 'the problem itself’. This is why Zizek accuses contemporary cultural, intellectual and
political life of' having fallen all but entirely under the sway of capitalism. He portrays 'capitalism' and its liberal or neoliberal ideology as the total, and universal backdrop against or within which things appear to' change but fundamentally
remain the same, "but, just to be clean the basic problem here remains that this very position arises only through the optic of
what Laclau calls very crude version of the base/superstructure model' (Laclau 2000:205).
Adopted in the name of furthering radical politics it paradoxically rejects all politics, because none could possibly hope to
measure up to the impossibility total demands generated by such a caricatural and hyperbolic paradigm. It totalizes
everything ‘the global capitalist system’), and so precludes the value of specific action. In insisting on inferred fundamental
(ontological’ or real) structures it refuses even to look at any significant aspect of actually existing (‘ontic’) reality. In
insisting on radical politics, it even prohibits working out what valid political action might be. (It merely evokes some
enigmatic kind of universal spontaneous political combustion.) In fact, Zizek’s totalizing leads to a prohibition of any
analysis.
This is because Zizek’s polemical gestures levy a very heavy rhetorical and analytical toll. In order to make them, Zizek
cannot analyze or question his own central categories (the notions he champions or denounces). This is so much the case
that, rather than treating ‘neoliberalism’ (for example) as a complex, historically real, deliberately implemented geopolitical
economic ‘experiment’ of ongoing, piecemeal, pragmatic, legislative violence (Kingsnorth 2003), Zizek merely pucks up
some familiar emotive terms – ‘capitalism’, the ‘system’ – and deploys the mall as if they are already fully understood and
as if they simply must be taken to be millenarian signifiers of pure evil. IN short, ‘capitalism’ ‘liberalism’, etc. function
within Zizek’s discourse purely as emotive rhetorical devices, whilst being analytically empty (not to mention often
categorically dubious). That is, on the one hand, these terms are irreducible, central to his discourse: they actually over
determine, constitute, and orientate the shape and form of his intellectual production through and through. But, on the other
hand (and unfortunately for anyone concerned with knowledge, analysis, or politics), thy also signal the limit of his
thought. ‘Capitalism’ is the central, fundamental point beyond which Zizek cannot or will not go; something that a Rortyan
perspective might regard as Zizek’s ‘final vocabulary’: the tautological start and endpoint of his discourse; as if the entire
political dimension of the work of Zizek consists in the repetition of the following mantra or koan: ‘what is the problem?
Capitalism. What is capitalism? The problem.’ 39-40
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AT: Zizek
Zizek’s position is untenable- his lacks analysis proves
Bowman and Stamp, 7 (Paul Bowman- lecturer in cultural studies at Cardiff University, and Richard Stamp- Lecturer in
Cultural Studies at Bath Spa Universit, The truth of Žižek, 2007,42)
What is particularly striking, however, is the way that the rhetoric points de caption' that structure Zizek's texts - signifies
like 'capitalism', 'the system', 'anti-capitalism', 'revolution* - are entirety hypostasized place-holders. That is, they are never
specified further. Indeed, one might say, within Zizek's discourse, his key categories are supplements, in an almost
exemplary sense.6 And they do exactly the same kind of work as the recourse to spiritualism that he criticizes in his-object
of critique. His key categories are uninterrogated 'pegs'; ■pins', whose removal would cause his text to unravel entirely.
But, furthermore, these place-holders are actually elevated to something very like the status of the figure of 'the eternal Tao'
in the Tao te Ching. In deconstructive terms, this means that the central categories of Zizek's system are actually radically
external to it strangely excluded from it. They are there on full show, yet concealed from inspection. Placing them on full
show is actually the way Zizek con-ceals them from inspection, To echo Zizek's 'formula' of the non-politics of politics, his
approach is thus: 'Let's go on talking about something all the time so as to avoid talking about it: (see Zizek 2002: 170,
quoted above). This rhetorical (anti-) analytical strategy puts Zizek’s entire approach on a par with the very style of
mystificatory Non engagement and intellectual failure that he critiques as being the move of the hegemonic ideology of
global capitalism.
Does this mean that the way of Zizek is somehow a manifestation of the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism? This
would be the deepest irony, given Zizek*s explicit declaration to try to 'remain faithful to the Old in the new conditions'.
The problem is that his (e)very effort to move involves tying his laces together. Every possible theoretical or political move
meets one of his own unnecessary \ self-imposed puritanical 'prohibitions* (Zizek 2001: 204-205. 220). The most striking
is perhaps the refusal to question the supposedly 'old’ paradigm itself, in the name of 'remaining faithful" to it. This
amounts to the avocation of an anti-theoretical and straightforwardly anti-intellectual, quasi-religious or spiritualist
‘denkverbot’ or ‘prohibition against thinking’ (Zizek 2001: 3).
Of course, such a strangely paranoid defensive reaction might- possibly- but only tentatively, and forever only tenuously some-times - be strategically justifiable in the context of Zizek’s claim that he sees his role and intellectual contribution to
be that of 'holding the place', of keeping traditional radical political questions and perspectives on the agenda, so to speak,
lest we forget. But there are many other, more honest, intellectually open ways to do this than simply refusing to think,
theorize or analyze. But, even if as an intellectual, philosopher, theorist or academic one could possibly decide something
like 'it's not how crude it is but what you do with it that counts*, the problem remains that Zizek refuses to do anything with
* his crude paradigm. He refuses to question, interrogate or to analyze anything to do with the supposedly determinant
‘base’ at all. This refusal begs a question of the point of analyzing anything, especially anything in or of the superstructure.
In other words, Zizek does not do with the paradigm the very thing that the paradigm is supposedly set up to do, the very
thing it seems to demand and that he implicitly most advocates. That is. as 'the economy' is placed in a determinant
position, one might expect some analysis of it — perhaps of , consequential moments, movements, acts, interventions or
events "that have taken place in the determinant realm. But this never appears. This is because any attempt at such analysis
would reveal the economic system to be contingently and politically instituted and modifiable, thus revealing the
inadequacy and untenability of his paradigm and his entire position (Laclau & Mouffe 1985; Laclau 20fJ4).
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AT: Zizek
Zizek’s position is consistent with the logic of capitalism
Bowman and Stamp, 7 (Paul Bowman- lecturer in cultural studies at Cardiff University, and Richard Stamp- Lecturer in
Cultural Studies at Bath Spa Universit, The truth of Žižek, 2007, pg. 43)
Thus Zizek’s own position is strictly fetishistic. According to his own argument, this makes Zizek entirely consistent with
the logic of contemporary capitalism. As a ‘position’, Zizek’s work straightforwardly relies upon the logic of the
supplement. It falls apart according to that same logic too. Bus Zizek does not care, because although he relies upon the
deconstructive supplement, his work proceeds according to the psychoanalytic logic of the fetish. This his mantras enable
him to ‘fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist fame while sustaining the belief that he is not really in it, that he
is well aware of how worthless the spectacle is…unaware that the “truth” of his existence is the social involvement which
he tends to dismiss as a mere game’ (Zizek 2001a:15).
For Zizek, the name of the game is ‘holding the place’. This relies on ‘place holders’: repeated evocation of the names of
problematics as if naming them is everything. Naming is both to gesture and yet thereby bracket off, silence, close down
analysis, in the same gesture. This is a structure of foreclosure and denial in which what apparently holds the structure in
place actually lacks any possible content. Were the supplements- the place holders- engages, fleshed out, the structure
would collapse. Zizek joyously ignores this untenable incoherence because he obeys his fetish: ‘I know very well [that what
I am saying is untenable and emty], but nevertheless [I will continue to say it- because I enjoy it/it enables me to “face”
things]” So what? Who cares? The issue here, as Zizek so completely demonstrates, is that this gesture is anti-theoretical,
anti-intellectual, anti-philosophical, anti-analytical and anti-political – indeed, arguably exemplifying the very ideological,
intellectual and political problem of out time and place. 43
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AT: Zizek- quals
Zizek’s work would be laughed at in academia- lack of citation, generalization, no authority
Bowman and Stamp, 7 (Paul Bowman- lecturer in cultural studies at Cardiff University, and Richard Stamp- Lecturer in
Cultural Studies at Bath Spa Universit, The truth of Žižek, 2007, pg. 62)
Let us begin with certain indisputable truths about Zizek. In recent times an extraordinary quantity of words has been
published under his name. This work has been published under his name. this work ahs almost all been published by
publishers largely known for academic publishing (although Verso, his usual publisher, is not merely an academic press).
Yet this work does not even approach the standards of academic rigor that would normally be expected of an undergraduate
essay. It does not include substantial references to the texts on which it offers opinions from frequently making enormous
generalizations about the ideas of a particular writer or even typically of an entire field of enquiry without a single reference
to an actual page of actual text, and rarely cites its objects in any detail. Frequently (I am straying into the realm of the
disputable here, but will justify this view shortly), Zizek actually demonstrates no greater familiarity with the work in
question than that which could be acquired by any literate person standing around in a bookshop for 10 minutes, reading the
blurbs on the back of books or leafing through introductory guides to the thinkers of the subject in question. For the
moment I make no value judgment here. We may consider it a healthy thing that books published under the minimal degree
of authority on the subjects they pronounce upon. We may consider it fully justified that these books are required to display
a level of scholarship which would be considered pitiable in the work of an undergraduate student. We may decide that
Zizek’s authority is so indisputable and the quality of his analysis so extraordinary that he need not tire himself or bore his
readers with such annoyances as footnotes, citations and page references. But that he does not do so, when other scholars
and philosophers, even those on international renown, are expected to do so, is not in question. 62
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AT: Zizek
Bowman and Stamp, 7 (Paul Bowman- lecturer in cultural studies at Cardiff University, and Richard Stamp- Lecturer in
Cultural Studies at Bath Spa Universit, The truth of Žižek, 2007,pg. 55)
Where does this leave us? Zizek claims that class is the structuring horizon of contemporary forms of hegemonic politics,
but does not offer any sustained analysis of capital which would allow for a specification of class identity, or even the
articulation of a class politics opposed to capital. Moreover, he contends that class cannot be directly expressed, that it takes
on other forms. From the viewpoint of the political characterized by contingency, the determining role of class cannot even
be viewed. Yet this is precisely what is required if the act is to traverse the fundamental fantasy, the disavowed of
contemporary politics. In political terms Zizek account of the act is marked by this failure. 55
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AT: Zizek
Zizek links to his own criticism- his critique of political correctness is based on his self sustainment
Bowman and Stamp, 7 (Paul Bowman- lecturer in cultural studies at Cardiff University, and Richard Stamp- Lecturer in
Cultural Studies at Bath Spa Universit, The truth of Žižek, 2007,pg. 21-23)
Let us take his most consistent demand: that we must look beyond capitalism, that we must continue to envision a Marxist
and revolutionary agenda and possibility, a demand which we have already seen is deeply and dialectically intertwined with
a critique of liberal politics through the pejorative optic of 'political correctness'. Ernesto Laclau has. quite properly, called
Zizek on this. Laclau explains that he knew what Lenin and Trotsky meant when they issued calls for revolutionary seizures
of state power, but Zizek? Does 'he have a secret plan of which he is careful not to inform anyone?' Laclau asks (2000:
206). Of course not, we can easily respond. Nonetheless it is pleasurable and possibly even germane for Zizek to demand
revolutionary social transformation. So, then, is this what Zizek really wants, socialism? Would a decisive, historical
reconciliation between the forces of production and the relations of production satisfy him? Or is this a classic example of a
resistive transference demand that is itself symptomatic? Is Zizek confusing his criticism of marginalized political Others
with his demands on the big Other? And, more problematic still, has his readership-as-analyst slipped into a stage of
'mutual, narcissistic regression', with him, where he is gratified that we continue to buy his monographs and we are
gratified that he continues to publish them?
We now understand that despite his frequent rhetorical endorsements of the struggles of various subaltern constituents
(women, gays, racial minorities), Zizek is critical, of most, if not all, of the programmes that elevated and/or assisted their
minimal social ascent; consciousness-raising groups, affirmative action, queer litigation feminism and so on. He is further
critical of any attempt at theorization of such praxis, whether realized as Lacan and Mount's 'chain of equivalences', or
larger discourses like queer theory. Taken together these dramatic refusals by Zizek reveal a symptom. Is his constant
denigrating of political Others not the intellectual equivalent of the infamous analysis and who cannot make progress in his
"analysis because he cannot quit complaining about the state of the "analyst's office? If only your couch were more
comfortable, then 1 might be able to free associate'. 'If only you had better magazines in your waiting room, then I wouldn't
be so angry and disappointed. What Zizek is essentially saying, pleading is; if only we did not have political correctness,
then we might have a proper revolution. If only we did not have liberalism, then we might have socialism. But within the
transference, these claims should be read as; if only I [Zizek] was not busy attacking postmodernism, then I might very well
be able to formulate a political economic critique.
One deduction that Zizek could not phantasmatically make, however; is; 'if only the Others didn't get so much more
recognition, then I might get more’. Quite the opposite, in fact; if the Others and their postmodern episteme were to vanish,
Zizek would get less recognition, not more. 'Everyone's analysis unearths a central fantasy', one analyst has claimed, and
now we come to the object of our writing cure, the fundamental traumata.19 Zizek, through his transference, is revealing to
us his symptom: namely that the ascent of identity politics and the symbolic redress of grievances from the white-male
establishment is in fact sustaining his very own subjectivity. This is the fantasy that Zizek must traverse for the writing cure
to be salutary. Zizek keeps obsessively, repetitively, desperately writing of the various problems of political correctness
precisely to make sure that they will still be thought of as problems, problems designed for him to address= exactly what he
accuses its proponents of doing which is the surest indication of a symptom.
The PC [politically correctt attitude is an exemplary case of the Sartrean mauvaise foi of the intellectuals: it provides new
and newer answers in order to keep the problem alive. What this attitude really fears is that the problem will disappear, i.e..
that the white male heterosexual form of subjectivity will actually, cease to exert its hegemony... The PC attitude is the
form of appearance of its exact opposite: it bears witness to the inflexible will to stick to the white-male-heterosexual form
of Subjectivity. (Zizek 1993:214)
This is perhaps the clearest transference manifestation thus far during the course of Zizek's writing cure.20 He, a white
heterosexual male who is neurotically invested in the criticism of political correctness, has accused the liberal, politically correct
establishment of being fearful that he himself might disappear. That establishment, the very demographic that purchases Zizek’s
more-than-annual Verso monographs and showers adulation upon him when he frequently descends upon the university lecture
circuit, is being accused of hating him so much that it secretly loves him; of wanting him gone so desperately that it cannot resist
regularly attending his engagements. And yet this precise dynamic is but another projection: for it is Zizek himself who is caught
in a dialectic of love-hate. recognition with his object of study. It is he who has claimed that the Others are preventing the
realization of the proper study of political economy, and it is he who is trying to offer a criticism thereof in ~ order to move the
object of critique from superstructure to base. But it is also he who is limited in his critical scope because his recognition is tied
to theirs. 21-3
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Bowman and Stamp, 7 (Paul Bowman- lecturer in cultural studies at Cardiff University, and Richard Stamp- Lecturer in
Cultural Studies at Bath Spa Universit, The truth of Žižek, 2007, pg. 24)
At the same time, the Others' postmodern, politically correct plat-form has been internalized and transformed by Zizek into
a symptom, his symptom, that which is pleasurable and pathological simultaneously, that which serves as the base of his
neurotic control. Zizek entitles one of his monographs Enjoy Your Sympton (1991a) and we can see now that he certainly
does. Of course he resents the Others' myriad political demands; at the same time, his resentment has become the most
stable part of him, the part which allows him to ground his intellectual work. And now, like most analysands, Zizek is
reluctant to forgo his symptom which, after all, is the base for his clarion and 'Utopian call" of Marxist revolution, and for
his career as well.
To keep reading/critiquing Zizek is to be trapped in this dichotomy, which has all the structure of a stalemated threat: either
you destroy the analysis or I will, is always, in a sense, the analysand's ultimate threat. The discursive analysis he has
constructed between himself and his readership provides the circuit for sustaining: his projective assaults on the postmodern
serve reaffirm his own ego (unconscious) as modern. Once this interpretation Has been offered in the service of his writing
cure, it seems we should then rest with a classically modern response: analytic silence. 24
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AT: Security-Security inevitable
Ending our own securitization doesn’t affect other countries- they’ll just see it as a weakness and an
opportunity to attack.
Montgomery, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, 6 [Evan Branden, Ph.D. candidate in the
Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, “Breaking out of the Security Dilema: Realism, Reassurance, and the Problem of
Uncertainty,” International Security, 151-2)
Defensive realism's main observations indicate that hard-line policies often lead to self-defeating and
avoidable consequences. If so, then conciliatory policies should have the opposite effect. Several scholars have
elaborated this intuitive logic. Drawing on rational-choice deterrence theory, 3 cooperation theory, 4 and Charles Osgood's
GRIT strategy, 5 they argue that benign states can reveal their motives, reassure potential adversaries, and avoid
unnecessary conflict with costly signals—actions that greedy actors would be unwilling to take. In particular, by engaging
in arms control agreements or unilateral force reductions, a security seeker can adopt a more defensive military posture and
demonstrate its preference for maintaining rather than challenging the status quo. This argument generates an obvious
puzzle, however: If states can reduce uncertainty by altering their military posture, why has this form of
reassurance been both uncommon and unsuccessful? Few states, for example, have adopted defensive weapons to
de-escalate an arms race or demonstrate their intentions, 7 and repeated efforts to restrain the Cold War
competition between the United States and the Soviet Union either failed or produced strategically
negligible agreements that, at least until its final years, "proved incapable of moderating the
superpower rivalry in any deep or permanent way." How can scholars and policymakers understand why states
often avoid military reassurance, when they choose to undertake it, why it fails, and when it can succeed? In 1906
Britain tried to prevent a further escalation of its naval race with Germany by decreasing the number of
battleships it planned to construct, but this gesture was unreciprocated and the competition continued.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union substantially reduced its conventional forces, yet
the United States did not view these reductions as proof of benign motives.
Realism is inevitable - State competition for power and military buildup is here to stay
Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, 1 [John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, “The Tragedy
of Great Power Politics”]
The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers has been burned out of the system is wrong.
In fact, all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power and are
destined to compete for power among themselves for the foreseeable future. Consequently, realism
will offer the most powerful explanations of international politics over the next century, and this will be
true even if the debates among academic and policy elites are dominated by non-realist theories. In short, the real world
remains a realist world. States still fear each other and seek to gain power at each other's expense,
because international anarchy—the driving force behind great-power behavior—did not change with
the end of the Cold War, and there are few signs that such change is likely any time soon . States remain
the principal actors in world politics and there is still no night watchman standing above them. For sure, the collapse of
the Soviet Union caused a major shift in the global distribution of power. But it did not give rise to a change in
the anarchic structure of the system, and without that kind of profound change, there is no reason to
expect the great powers to behave much differently in the new century than they did in previous
centuries. Indeed, considerable evidence from the 1990s indicates that power politics has not disappeared from Europe
and Northeast Asia, the regions in which there are two or more great powers, as well as possible great powers such as
Germany and Japan. There is no question, however, that the competition for power over the past decade has been low-key.
Still, there is potential for intense security competition among the great powers that might lead to a major war.
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Realism inevitable—it’s grounded in human nature
Thayer, Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University and a consultant to the Rand Corporation, 4 [Thayer Bradley, Ph.D, Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a consultant to the Rand Corporation, "Darwin
and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict"]
In chapter 2, I explain how evolutionary theory contributes to the realist theory of international relations and to rational
choice analysis. First, realism, like the Darwinian view of the natural world, submits that international relations is a
competitive and dangerous realm, where statesmen must strive to protect the interests of their state before the interests of
others or international society. Traditional realist arguments rest principally on one of two discrete ultimate causes, or
intellectual foundations of the theory. The first is Reinhold Niebuhr's argument that humans are evil. The second,
anchored in the thought of Thomas Hobbes and Hans Morgenthau, is that humans possess an innate animus dominandi - a
drive to dominate. From these foundations, Niebuhr and Morgenthau argue that what is true for the individual is also true
of the state: because individuals are evil or possess a drive to dominate so too do states because their leaders are individuals
who have these motivations. argue that realists have a much stronger foundation for the realist argument than that used by
either Morgenthau or Niebuhr. My intent is to present an alternative ultimate cause of classical realism: evolutionary
theory. The use of evolutionary theory allows realism to be scientifically grounded for the first time, because evolution
explains egoism. Thus a scientific explanation provides a better foundation for their arguments than either theology or
metaphysics. Moreover, evolutionary theory can anchor the branch of realism termed offensive realism and advanced most
forcefully by John Mearsheimer. He argues that the anarchy of the international system, the fact that there is no world
government, forces leaders of states to strive to maximize their relative power in order to be secure. I argue that theorists of
international relations must recognize that human evolution occurred in an anarchic environment and that this explains why
leaders act as offensive realism predicts. Humans evolved in anarchic conditions, and the implications of this are profound
for theories of human behavior. It is also important to note at this point that my argument does not depend upon "anarchy"
as it is traditionally used in the discipline - as the ordering principle of the post-1648 Westphalian state system. When
human evolution is used to ground offensive realism, it immediately becomes a more powerful theory than is currently
recognized. It explains more than just state behavior; it begins to explain human behavior. It applies equally to non-state
actors, be they individuals, tribes, or organizations. Moreover, it explains this behavior before the creation of the modern
state system. Offensive realists do not need an anarchic state system to advance their argument. They only need humans.
Thus, their argument applies equally well before or after 1648, whenever humans form groups, be they tribes in Papua New
Guinea, conflicting city-states in ancient Greece, organizations like the Catholic Church, or contemporary states in
international relations.
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AT: Security-Realism
A departure from realism leads to power war.
Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, 1 [John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, “The Tragedy
of Great Power Politics”]
The possible consequences of falling victim to aggression further amplify the importance of fear as a motivating force in
world politics. Great powers do not compete with each other as if international politics were merely an economic
marketplace. Political competition among states is a much more dangerous business than mere economic intercourse; the
former can read to war, and war often means mass killing on the battlefield as well a5 mass murder of civilians. In extreme
cases, war can even lead to the destruction of states. The horrible consequences of war sometimes cause states to view each
other not just as competitors, but as potentially deadly enemies. Political antagonism, in short, tends to be intense, because
the stakes are great. States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because other states are
potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911, states can’ t just
depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to
provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those who help themselves. This emphasis on self-help
does not preclude states from forming alliances.” But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: today’s
alliance partner might be tomorrow’s enemy, and today’s enemy might be tomorrow’s alliance partner. For example, the
United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in World War II, but soon thereafter flipflopped enemies and partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold
War.
Realism prevents extinction
Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, 1 [John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, “The Tragedy
of Great Power Politics”]
It should be apparent from this discussion that offensive realism is mainly a descriptive theory. It explains how great
powers have behaved in the past and how they are likely to behave in the future. But it is also a prescriptive theory. States
should behave according to the dictates of offensive realism, because it outlines the best way to survive in a dangerous
world. One might ask, if the theory describes how great powers act, why is it necessary to stipulate how they should act?
The imposing constraints of the system should leave great powers with little choice but to act as the theory predicts.
Although there is much truth in this description of great powers as prisoners trapped in an iron cage, the fact remains that
they sometimes—although not often—act in contradiction to the theory. These are the anomalous cases discussed above.
As we shall see, such foolish behavior invariably has negative consequences. In short, if they want to survive, great powers
should always act like good offensive realists.
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AT: Security K- Threats Are Real
Threats aren’t arbitrary. can’t throw out security or wish away threatening postures—we have to
develop strategies for coping with threat perceptions.
Olav. F. Knudsen, Prof @ Södertörn Univ College, ‘1 [Security Dialogue 32.3, “Post-Copenhagen Security Studies: Desecuritizing
Securitization,” p. 360]
During the Cold War, peace research was struggling to gain the status of so- cial and intellectual respectability then only accorded
strategic studies. The concept of securitization has helped to change that. A key aspect of the securitization idea is to create awareness
of the (allegedly) arbitrary nature of ‘threats’, to stimulate the thought that the foundation of any national security policy is not given
by ‘nature’ but chosen by politicians and decisionmakers who have an interest in defining it in just that way. That interest (according
to this line of reasoning) is heavily embodied not just in each country’s military establishment, but also in the power and influence
flowing from the military’s privileged position with respect to the network of decisionmakers and politi- cians serving that
establishment. Hence, ‘securitization’ gave a name to the process, hitherto vaguely perceived, of raising security issues above politics
and making them something one would never question.
This argument is convincing as far as its description of the military estab- lishment and decisionmakers goes, but its heyday is gone.
It was a Cold War phenomenon, and things just aren’t so anymore. In the post-Cold War period, agenda-setting has been much
easier to influence than the securitization approach assumes. That change cannot be credited to the concept; the change in security
politics was already taking place in defense ministries and parlia- ments before the concept was first launched. Indeed, securitization
in my view is more appropriate to the security politics of the Cold War years than to the post-Cold War period.
Moreover, I have a problem with the underlying implication that it is unim- portant whether states ‘really’ face dangers from other
states or groups. In the Copenhagen school, threats are seen as coming mainly from the actors’ own fears, or from what happens
when the fears of individuals turn into paranoid political action. In my view, this emphasis on the subjective is a misleading
conception of threat, in that it discounts an independent existence for what- ever is perceived as a threat. Granted, political life is often
marked by misper- ceptions, mistakes, pure imaginations, ghosts, or mirages, but such phenom- ena do not occur simultaneously to
large numbers of politicians, and hardly most of the time. During the Cold War, threats – in the sense of plausible possibilities of
danger – referred to ‘real’ phenomena, and they refer to ‘real’ phenomena now. The objects referred to are often not the same, but that
is a different matter. Threats have to be dealt with both in terms of perceptions and in terms of the phenomena which are perceived to
be threatening.
The point of Wæver’s concept of security is not the potential existence of danger somewhere but the use of the word itself by political
elites. In his 1997 PhD dissertation, he writes, ‘One can view “security” as that which is in language theory called a speech act: it is
not interesting as a sign referring to something more real – it is the utterance itself that is the act.’ The deliberate disregard of
objective factors is even more explicitly stated in Buzan & Wæver’s joint article of the same year. As a consequence, the
phenomenon of threat is reduced to a matter of pure domestic politics. It seems to me that the security dilemma, as a central notion
in security studies, then loses its founda- tion. Yet I see that Wæver himself has no compunction about referring to the security
dilemma in a recent article.
This discounting of the objective aspect of threats shifts security studies to insignificant concerns. What has long made ‘threats’ and
‘threat perceptions’ important phenomena in the study of IR is the implication that urgent action may be required. Urgency, of
course, is where Wæver first began his argu- ment in favor of an alternative security conception, because a convincing sense of
urgency has been the chief culprit behind the abuse of ‘security’ and the consequent ‘politics of panic’, as Wæver aptly calls it. Now,
here – in the case of urgency – another baby is thrown out with the Wæverian bathwater. When real situations of urgency arise, those
situations are challenges to democracy; they are actually at the core of the problematic arising with the process of making security
policy in parliamentary democracy. But in Wæver’s world, threats are merely more or less persuasive, and the claim of urgency is just
an- other argument. I hold that instead of ‘abolishing’ threatening phenomena ‘out there’ by reconceptualizing them, as Wæver does,
we should continue paying attention to them, because situations with a credible claim to urgency will keep coming back and then we
need to know more about how they work in the interrelations of groups and states (such as civil wars, for instance), not least to find
adequate democratic procedures for dealing with them.
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Criticisms of state-centered security sacrifice most important international actor. loss of options far
outweighs the danger of legitimation.
Olav. F. Knudsen, Prof @ Södertörn Univ College, ‘1 [Security Dialogue 32.3, “Post-Copenhagen Security Studies: Desecuritizing
Securitization,” p. 364]
I hesitate to say what I have to say on this subject because it seems to me to be so utterly obvious. States and state-like organizations –
such as guerilla groups – are useful for many collective purposes, including making war and preparing for war. As IR specialists, we
therefore need to study the state and take it seriously as a social phenomenon. However, I keep running across reminders that many
don’t share this view. The best evidence is the way in which the term ‘state-centered approaches’ – a quick phrase with a subtle pejorative effect – is used. The debate of the 1990s has developed to the point where one understands immediately, without further
reading, that the study of states is a ‘no-no’. I find this a major ingredient in a mindless fad. Consider its place in the work of the
Copenhagen school. The ‘referent object’ is a key notion in the Copenhagen school’s conceptual apparatus – that ‘thing’ whose
security is at stake. Buzan et al. pedagogically point out the need to break away from the traditional fixation upon the state as the
referent object of security. However, as I read on in the book I get the impression that Buzan and his colleagues are not really that
convinced of this themselves – they keep referring to the state nevertheless. Other Copenhagen writings confirm this impression.
Indeed, studies of the state have not disap- peared even among researchers who style themselves as critical or who some- how
subscribe to a ‘new security studies’ agenda. The upshot is that their views on the role of the state are inconsistent. The Copenhagen
school will probably claim to have put this critique to rest. However, it is hard to read the argument in the 1997 article where the
discus- sion is perhaps best presented, then absorb the text in the multi-authored 1997 book and still claim to have found
consistency. On the one hand, the Copenhagen authors warn against ‘state-centrism’ and build a complicated reasoning on identity as
a replacement for the state; on the other hand, they continue to reason quite conventionally about states (as, for instance, in the
security-complex theory). Hence, their position on the state is at best mis- leading, at worst confused. In this, they reflect the general
picture in the field of IR itself. After a long pe- riod of neglect, two very different things started happening – sometime be- tween
1975 and 1985 – with the idea of the state. What took place was a strange and deep bifurcation of research. On one side, there was
what may be termed the ‘rediscovery of the state’, which began with the efforts of Charles Tilly and others but is perhaps best shown
in the work of Theda Skocpol. On the other, there was the attack on state-centered thinking coming from the happy trashers of
everything traditional in IR studies, the early post- modernists.
Currently, the postmodernists seem – regrettably – to have won out, because there is continuing paranoia about the state in studies of
international politics. To be politically correct these days, one must disavow state-centrism. At the same time, the state continues to
be there, as it is in the work of people as di- verse as Buzan, Wendt, and Walt. Better than most of their work, however, is the
research by Kal Holsti on the vagaries of the state and its relationship to war – a piece of mainstream work.
Though hardly the first to make this ar-gument, Holsti shows convincingly that internal wars are now by far the most important kind
of war. This point has been used to argue that interstate rela- tions have decreased in significance. If we compare two categories of
relations, intrastate and interstate, that is of course true in relative quantitative terms. However, one must not overlook what those
wars are about: the control of the state apparatus and its territory. Internal wars testify not to the disappearance of the state, but to its
continuing importance. Hence, the state must continue to be a central object of our work in IR, not least in security studies. We should
study the state – conceived as a penetrated state – specifically because it performs essential security functions that are rarely
performed by other types of organization, such as being: • the major collective unit processing notions of threat; • the mantle that
cloaks the exercise of elite power; • the organizational expression that gives shape to communal ‘identity’ and ‘culture’; • the chief
agglomeration of competence to deal with issue areas crossing jurisdictional boundaries; • the manager of territory/geographical space
– including functioning as a ‘receptacle’ for income; and • the legitimizer of authorized action and possession. Recognizing the
problems of state-focused approaches belongs to the beginner’s lessons in IR. There is the danger of legitimizing the state as such by
placing it at the center of research, and of legitimizing thereby the repression and injustice which on a massive scale have been and
still are perpetrated in its name around the globe. Some draw the conclusion on this basis that states should not be studied, a stance
which is obviously unwarranted and pointless. The state is an instrument of power on a scale beyond most other instruments of
power. For this reason alone, keeping a watch on how it is used should be a top priority for social scientists.
The mobilization – the assumption of the mantle – of state power by more or less arbitrarily chosen (or self-selected) individuals or
groups, to act on behalf of all, is something which requires continual problematization, not least when it is done vis-à-vis other
collectivities. The state is also the instrument of de- mocracy on a large scale in its most well-functioning forms. Surveying democracy’s state of health is a crucial responsibility for social scientists. Finally, when it comes to performing collective tasks on a large
scale, the state is the most potentially effective organizing instrument across an almost limitless range of objectives. Security is
among them.
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Security-A2-“Reps key”
Alternative doesn’t solve- Changing representational practices won’t alter policy, looking to structures
and politics is more vital
Tuathail, Department of Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Political Geography, 96 (Gearoid Tuathail, Department of
Geography at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Political Geography, 15(6-7), 664 )
While theoretical debates at academic conferences are important to academics, the discourse and concerns of foreignpolicy decision- makers are quite different, so different that they constitute a distinctive problem- solving, theory-averse,
policy-making subculture. There is a danger that academics assume that the discourses they engage are more significant in
the practice of foreign policy and the exercise of power than they really are. This is not, however, to minimize the obvious
importance of academia as a general institutional structure among many that sustain certain epistemic communities in
particular states. In general, I do not disagree with Dalby’s fourth point about politics and discourse except to note that his
statement-‘Precisely because reality could be represented in particular ways political decisions could be taken, troops and
material moved and war fought’-evades the important question of agency that I noted in my review essay. The assumption
that it is representations that make action possible is inadequate by itself. Political, military and economic structures,
institutions, discursive networks and leadership are all crucial in explaining social action and should be theorized together
with representational practices. Both here and earlier, Dalby’s reasoning inclines towards a form of idealism. In response
to Dalby’s fifth point (with its three subpoints), it is worth noting, first, that his book is about the CPD, not the Reagan
administration. He analyzes certain CPD discourses, root the geographical reasoning practices of the Reagan
administration nor its public-policy reasoning on national security. Dalby’s book is narrowly textual; the general
contextuality of the Reagan administration is not dealt with. Second, let me simply note that I find that the distinction
between critical theorists and post- structuralists is a little too rigidly and heroically drawn by Dalby and others. Third,
Dalby’s interpretation of the reconceptualization of national security in Moscow as heavily influenced by dissident peace
researchers in Europe is highly idealist, an interpretation that ignores the structural and ideological crises facing the Soviet
elite at that time. Gorbachev’s reforms and his new security discourse were also strongly self- interested, an ultimately
futile attempt to save the Communist Party and a discredited regime of power from disintegration. The issues raised by
Simon Dalby in his comment are important ones for all those interested in the practice of critical geopolitics. While I agree
with Dalby that questions of discourse are extremely important ones for political geographers to engage, there is a danger
of fetishizing this concern with discourse so that we neglect the institutional and the sociological, the materialist and the
cultural, the political and the geographical contexts within which particular discursive strategies become significant.
Critical geopolitics, in other words, should not be a prisoner of the sweeping ahistorical cant that sometimes accompanies
‘poststructuralism nor convenient reading strategies like the identity politics narrative; it needs to always be open to the
patterned mess that is human history.
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Security- A2-“Securitization leads to aggressive pre-emption”
Debates about threats in the academic world result in better policy-making—real threats can be
confronted and risks can be weighed.
Walt, Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago, 91 [Stephen Walt, Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago,
91, INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, p. 229-30]
A recurring theme of this essay has been the twin dangers of separating the study of security affairs from the academic
world or of shifting the focus of academic scholarship too far from real-world issues. The danger of war will be with us for
some time to come, and states will continue to acquire military forces for a variety of purposes. Unless one believes that
ignorance is preferable to expertise, the value of independent national security scholars should be apparent. Indeed, history
suggests that countries that suppress debate on national security matters are more likely to blunder into disaster, because
misguided policies cannot be evaluated and stopped in time. As in other areas of public policy, academic experts in security
studies can help in several ways. In the short term, academics are well placed to evaluate current programs, because they
face less pressure to support official policy. The long-term effects of academic involvement may be even more significant:
academic research can help states learn from past mistakes and can provide the theoretical innovations the produce better
policy choices in the future. Furthermore, their role in training the new generation of experts gives academics an additional
avenue of influence.
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Realism
Realism’s ethic of consequentialism checks unwise action.
Williams, Senior Lecturer, 05
(Michael Williams, Senior Lecturer, Department of International Politics, University of Wales, THE REALIST TRADITION AND
THE LIMITS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, 2005, 169)
questions of the construction of action,
and its ethical and political evaluation, lie at the core of the willful Realist tradition. This final chapter
Over the course of the preceding chapters, I have attempted to show that
seeks to demonstrate how this is expressed in two key and continuingly controversial Realist concepts: the ethic of
responsibility and the national interest. The relationship between these two concepts is at the heart of many understandings
of Realist ethics. In its most straightforward form, the national interest is seen to provide the value to be
pursued and defended, while a foreign policy limited to and by the pursuit of that national interest and
a prudent consequentialism provides a responsible limit on state action. While this certainly captures
important aspects of the Realist position, I will suggest that it fails to capture either the complexity or the continuing
significance of willful Realism’s engagement with the question of responsibility and its ethic of national interest.
Realism checks international concerns with national interests
Williams, Senior Lecturer, 05
(Michael Williams, Senior Lecturer, Department of International Politics, University of Wales, THE REALIST TRADITION AND
THE LIMITS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, 2005, 188)
In this difficult yet sophisticated synthesis, the nation will provide both the content - the socially and historically grounded
‘national purpose’ - and the affective solidarity for the pursuit of a collective politics of interest. However, the very
indeterminacy and contestability of the national interest within the state demonstrates the partiality of any particular
resolution. Since there is no fixed understanding of the national interest within the political community,
there is no absolute divide between inside and outside. The influence of the international on the
determination of the national interest is not limited to instrumental considerations of material power,
since the views of others or the legitimacy of the values and interests adopted by the state can impact
on the state’s own deliberations. These external considerations are by no means determining, and Morgenthau goes
to great lengths to demonstrate both their limits and need for careful analyses of the conditions under which they operate.
However, neither are they irrelevant and any Realistic understanding of the national interest must take
them into account.
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Realism
Realism protects the United States from harm.
Kaufman , Assistant Professor of Political Science, 96 (Robert Kaufman, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of
Vermont, ROOTS OF REALISM, 1996, 351)
Also, Churchill’s geopolitical priorities still remain compelling for US foreign policy during a post-cold war era; whether
the world returns to some version of multipolarity, with the United States, China, Japan, Russia, a United Europe, and
perhaps Germany as the major power centers; whether three rival trading blocs emerge in Europe, Asia, and the western
Hemisphere; or whether the world moves toward some form of unipolarity, cooperation among the industrial democracies
based on free trade, free markets and liberal democratic values. Time has not altered Churchill’s geopolitical axiom that the
United States must continue to direct its finite resources and energy on preventing any hostile state or combination of states
from dominating the Eurasian landmass, where the potential mortal danger to the US still lies. Decisions on US foreign
policy thus must continue to reflect an ordered scale of geopolitical interests, which sometimes may require the sacrifice of
desirable but less important and achievable goals, such as democracy in Haiti, to defend core interests in crucial regions.
Even so, American ideals and self-interest will stay significantly complementary as Churchill envisaged them during his
time. A foreign policy that encourages the promotion, establishment, and maintenance of stable liberal democracy abroad
when possible and prudential not only reflects US ideals, but US self-interest. For experience has confirmed what Churchill
and Niebuhr intuited from their anti-utopian premises: stable, democratic regimes not only tend not to fight one another, but
are more likely to cooperate and have less serious or frequent conflicts of interest.
Tolerance checks the imperialist urge; realism is key to reconciling difference.
Murray 97 (Alastair Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM, 1997, 147)
If Kissinger’s attempt to reformulate realism’s moral theory proves unacceptable, a fresh attempt is required. This raises the
question of the basis on which such an attempt might be made. The principal contenders in contemporary Anglo-American
political theory are said to be liberal and communitarian approaches, and it might seem logical to employ one of these. Yet
neither is ultimately satisfactory. Liberal perspectives depend on a pre-social conception of the self which is difficult to
accept. Such an approach neglects the extent to which individuals are located within, and constituted by, discrete
communities. An ethic based upon such an artificial conception cannot be anything but arbitrary. Yet, if we accept that the
self lacks a distinct center and acknowledge it to be a culturally rooted phenomenon, this does not imply an acceptance of
the alternative, communitarian position. Communitarianism overextends itself when it moves from this position to a
pluralist ethic. Without a standpoint above the fray, it is impossible to ascribe equal worth to different communities. An
ethic based on such an assertion effectively employs an implicit objectivity to produce an unfounded relativism. Ultimately,
such philosophical attempts to ground moral principles raise more problems than they solve, taking us away from the
central concern of a realist perspective, namely the articulation of a practical political ethic. This suggests that it would be
more sensible to adopt a pragmatic approach to the formulation of an ethic, which might offer the possibility of resolving
the central problem in realism without driving it away from its traditional concerns. The foremost advocate of this type of
approach in recent years has been Richard Rorty, and his work serves to illustrate many of the advantages of such an
approach. Rorty suggests that right and wrong be regarded not as objective qualities, but merely as statements relative to
the shared beliefs of a community. Morality can then be treated is a ‘we statement’, concerned with what the group does,
rather than anything more complicated. The principal obligation incumbent upon the individual becomes simply loyalty to
the traditions of his society, rather than anything more abstract. This implies that the interminable philosophical discussions
required to ground an objective conception of the good can be avoided. If this appears Eurocentric, Rorty points out that we
have nowhere else to go: we cannot escape our culturally determined western perspective. If we can be asked to empathize
with other cultures, in order to understand their perspective, we cannot be asked to abandon our own in the process. If we
can be asked to incorporate what is valuable in them when it is compatible with our values, we cannot be asked to accept
what is not. Ultimately, toleration of others is both all that can be expected of us and all that we can expect of others, and: If
members of the other culture protest that this expectation of tolerant reciprocity is a provincially Western one, we can only
shrug our shoulders and reply that we have to work by out own lights, even as they do, for there is no super-cultural
observation platform to which we might repair. The only common ground on which we can get together is that defined by
the overlap between their communal beliefs and desires and our own. This suggests a vision of a utopia ‘in which
everybody has had a chance to suggest ways in which we might cobble together a world (or Galactic) society, and in which
all such suggestions have been thrashed out in free and open encounters.’ This presupposes conversion, but, in keeping with
western principles, the method employed in this is persuasion rather than force. ‘We are good’, Rorty asserts, ‘because, by
persuasion rather than force, we shall eventually convince everybody else that we are.’ Thus Rorty’s historical narrative
takes on an additional color and ultimately becomes ‘the history of humanity as the history of the gradual replacement of
force by persuasion, the gradual spread of certain virtues typical of the democratic West.’
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Realism Good- War
Realism is empirically proven to be successful and is the best way to avert war
Guzzini, senior researcher, 98
Stefano Guzzini, Senior Researcher, research units on Danish and European foreign policy and on Defence and
security, 1998, Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy: The Continuing Story of A
Death Foretold, 30-31
The historical context of Munich and appeasement gave realism, as opposed to the idealist approaches prevailing in the
inter-war period, an enormous appeal. Carr and Morgenthau contributed to undermining the basic principles of what was
dubbed idealism (Carr’s Utopianism). Morgenthau was crucial in securing the ascendancy of realism in the newly founded
academic specialization of International Relations. Carr used realist scepticism to criticize a great power of his day, his
native Britain. He debunked the apparently universal harmony of interests as a status quo power ideology. Yet Carr’s
scepticism produces a restless circle of criticism which is, as he acknowledged, self-contradicting. Moreover, Carr’s
scepticism is neither able to define his exact mix of realism and idealism, nor to positively propose a coherent policy.
Morgenthau, in his attempt to teach the diplomatic lessons of the past, was torn between his earlier criticism (1946) of
idealists who confounded politics with science, and his own attempt to replace idealism by a claim to the scientific
superiority of realism (1948, 1960). The result is a theory which must find conceptual bridges starting from the eternal laws
of human nature, via the state as a unitary actor, to a necessary balance of power theory. It is much more complex and
contradictory than usually acknowledged. To take just one example, Kenneth Waltz (1959) proposed a famous distinction
between three images for understanding the causes of war. The first image is based on human nature, the second on the
nature of the political regime, and the third on the specific characteristics of the international realm (anarchy). Waltz plainly
placed Morgenthau within the first category. Yet, although Morgenthau derived power, and hence the essential
characteristics of all politics including war, from human nature, he could also qualify for the other two images. He argued
that the typical war of the gruesome twentieth century was a result of the democratization, and hence nationalization of
international politics. This was how he called the shift to mass societies whose rulers have to respond to large
constituencies. This is a form of a second image explanation. And finally, although it is true that politics is about the
struggle for power based on human nature, the specificity of the international realm, what he called multiplicity, explains
why the warlike struggle for power, while tamed at the domestic level, is endemic to the international level. How can Carr
and Morgenthau, so different in style and content, and whose approaches are filled with so many internal tensions, become
major reference points for one school of thought? Obviously they were perceived mainly through what they had in
common, the critique of idealism and the priority given to power and politics. Hence, this chapter should also serve as a
warning: as much as idealism was often idealized to allow a realist critique, realism has often been demonized by its
adversaries and misused by reactionary friends. The binary opposition of realism and idealism more often serves to provide
observers and practitioners with an identity than it does to provide analytical clarity. The realist world-view wants to be
pragmatic, not cynical. Its main purpose is the avoidance of great war through the management and limitation of conflicts
by a working balance of power supplemented by normative arrangements. Nevertheless, for realists, the struggle for power
will always arise. Conflicts cannot be abolished. For realists, foreign policy often brings choices that nobody wants to
make. Diplomats might at times have to gamble, but not because they like doing it. On the stage of world politics where
brute forces can clash unfettered, diplomats enter a theatre of tragedy. This is the fate of the statesman, who, in the writings
of Morgenthau, but also Kennan and Kissinger, appears as a romanticized heroic figure. Often misunderstood also by selfproclaimed realists, realist policy is not the external projection of a military or even reactionary ideology; it is the constant
adjustment to a bitter reality. For realists, Realpolitik is not a choice that can be avoided, it is a necessity which responsible
actors have to
moderate.
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Realism Good- Rights
Realism’s tradition of tolerance informs Western traditions of universal rights.
Murray 97 (Alastair Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM, 1997, 150)
If one had briefly to sum up the dominant political values of western civilization, one would probably conclude that the
current elements of constitutional government, representative democracy, the rule of law, the protection of individuals’ civil
rights, and the provision of at least some minimum economic safety net beneath them, These values could be said to
represent a common core uniting the diverse positions which characterize western political life. The specifics of these are
open to debate within western society - and, indeed, they are frequently so debated. However, whilst disagreements are
common, these are relative when placed in their appropriate context. If one examines the contemporary debate within the
West, it is striking the extent to which this framework is an unquestioned given. Politically, perhaps the only significant
constitutional questions on the contemporary agenda are those of the scope of government and the mechanism of ejecting it.
No one challenges the institutions of constitutional, representative democracy and is taken seriously. Socio-economically,
whilst the right claims the emergence of a dependency culture, and the left the imminent collapse of the welfare state,
neither side rejects the proposition that some form of safety net must be provided. The debate revolves around the form that
it should take. If the differences within western culture seem to loom large at times, we need only to contrast them with the
differences which separate western from other cultures, where elections are respected only if won, dominant groups’
institutionalized discrimination against other groups, and considerable proportions of the population are allowed to starve,
to see the homogeneity of western states around such principles, however much they might sometimes be vitiated by their
practice. Internationally, it is difficult to draw exclusionary boundaries for these principles based solely on state borders.
Inherent in them is the claim that they represent the best possible method of organizing a community, regardless of cultural
differences. The West is therefore caught in a double bind. First, there is an impulse contained within these values which
inevitably leads to universalism. This is juxtaposed to, and contradicted by, the adherence to reasoned persuasion over
coercion, and the acceptance of diversity, which together generate an imperative towards tolerance even in the face of
intolerance. The West effectively retains at once the Messianic urge towards the universal and the pacific tendency towards
self-abnegation. Hence its unfortunate tendency to insert itself into every dispute which racks civilization and then fail to
see it through. The consequences are often thoroughly counterproductive. Yet if the universalism of its values is abandoned,
something which is central to western identity is lost. To abandon the commitment to their universalizability is to abandon a
central claim underlying their valuation and to take the first step towards abandoning these values in toto. Yet, if toleration
is abandoned and replaced with radicalism, these values become damaged beyond repair. To vitiate one’s principles in
order to vindicate them runs the risk of defending a culture which has quietly become bankrupt. The reconciliation of these
two, often contradictory, impulses, the one promoting aggressive intervention and the other pacific non-intervention, is
perhaps the central task of realism in contemporary world politics.
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Realism- No Alt
Opposition to realism always fails.
Murray 97
(Alastair Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM, 1997, 3)
Such a conception of realism is, however, fundamentally erroneous. Realism arose in opposition to idealism; and, given
that the locus of idealism was a concern with the moral, realism’s genesis was oriented towards normative issues. Of
course, it never sought to engage in the type of abstract philosophy held to be necessary to generate detailed, grounded
conceptions of the good. Rather, realism sought to bring idealism into a relationship with the realities of politics, to foster
an awareness of the recalcitrance of these realities to abstract moral principles, and to introduce an awareness of the
pervasive influence of power in the determination of political outcomes. Yet, whilst this presupposed an intimate
involvement with ‘the facts as they really are’, the realist concern with the real was not exclusive, but rather a function of
its desire to juxtapose it to the ideal. It sought to interrelate morality and power in a viable synthesis, to generate a practical
ethic which might prove more realistic, and more productive, than those which ignored the ‘rules’ of international politics.
Realism ultimately represented a fundamentally practical tradition concerned with the moral understandings of participants,
with the productive application of these understandings, and with the task of generating some form of moral consensus in
international relations which might support a stable international order. Whatever the merits of its solutions to these issues,
it clearly was not a positivist, explanatory theory; it was profoundly concerned for normative issues and, in particular, for
the articulation of a self-consciously political ethic. Much of the confusion can be traced to the problematic nature of the
conceptions of ‘realism’ which inform the contemporary literature. Critics have tended to construct artificial composites of
‘realism’ which, whilst serving admirably to provide straw men susceptible to easy refutation, essentially bear little
relationship to reality. Our understanding of ’realism’ is ultimately constituted by the writings of the group of theorists who
first put forward their views under that label and were broadly referred to as such by the remainder of the ‘discipline,’ and it
is only if we address ‘realism’ on this basis that we can think about it meaningfully. In particular, it was the writings of a
central group of thinkers - E. H. Carr, who first articulated an explicitly realist critique of idealism; Morgenthau, who first
developed this critique into a coherent doctrine; Niebuhr, who provided much of the deeper grounding for realist thought;
Kennan and Lippman, who elucidated its implications for past and present American foreign policy; and Kissinger, who
expanded and developed both its historical and contemporary themes - who laid the foundations of what we effectively
consider to be realism today. More generally, certain other theorists have served to develop particular parts of this concern
in a distinctive manner - Aron and Herz, for example. Yet their realism is measured against a standard already established
by the work of individuals such as Morgenthau; indeed. Herz later moved to adopt a self-conscious position of ‘realist
liberalism,’ symbolizing his more peripheral position in the school. One can ultimately ask ‘how realist are they?’ in a way
that one cannot about core theorists such as Morgenthau. Finally, at somewhat greater distance, this core of realism
connects to many different approaches. For instance, the realist concern with the relative power of states generates a strong
affinity to geopolitics, developed preeminently, in Great Britain, by Mackinder and, in the United States, by Spykman. Yet
these remain spokes attached to the central hub provided by the core realist theorists; they can be said to articulate the
specifics of certain elements of a broader theoretical framework, but not to constitute that framework itself.
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Realism- No Alt
The alternative will not solve.
Murray 97 (Alastair Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM, 1997, 189)
Now, if this is directed at realism, as it would seem to be, it seriously misinterprets its approach. First, as we have seen the
‘logic of anarchy’ that realism portrays is not a material phenomenon, but the intersubjective emanation of cumulative past
choices, albeit choices rooted in a material account of human nature. If realism maintains that this logic represents a
relatively entrenched structure, it nevertheless holds that it is, potentially at least, malleable by judicious statecraft. If it
takes the state to be the principal focus of this logic in contemporary world politics, there is no sense that this is permanent
or final - indeed, no sense that it is even unproblematic. Second, the notion that realism ignores the clash between the
individual’s simultaneous identification as both man and citizen mistakes the entire thrust of its work. If realism is
concerned with the duties owed to the state, it is only for the conflict that this produces with the cosmopolitan moral
obligations which fall upon men. Third, if realism insisted that change must be compatible with the national interests of the
state, it also recognized that, particularly in an age of interdependence and nuclear weapons, a stable international order
could ultimately only be built on some broader sense of community than that which existed in states alone, and was thus
centrally concerned with the extension of community in international relations. It is this inability to articulate practical
strategies which suggests the central difficulty with such critical theoretical approaches. The progressive urge moves a stage
further here, leading them to abandon almost entirely the problem of establishing some form of stable international order at
this level in favor of a continuing revolution in search of a genuine cosmopolis. It generates such an emphasis on the pursuit
of distant, ultimate objectives that they prove incapable of furnishing us with anything but the most vague and elusive of
strategies, such an emphasis on moving towards a post-Westphalian, boundary-less world that they are incapable of telling
us anything about the problems facing us today. If, for theorists such as Linklater, such a difficulty does not constitute a
failure for critical theory within its own terms of reference, this position cannot be accepted uncritically. Without an ability
to address contemporary problems, it is unable to provide strategies to overcome even the immediate obstacles in the way
of its objective of a genuinely cosmopolitan society. And, without a guarantee that such a cosmopolitan society is even
feasible, such a critical theoretical perspective simply offers us the perpetual redefinition of old problems in a new context
and the persistent creation of new problems to replace old ones, without even the luxury of attempting to address them.
Rejecting realism makes it more dangerous – we have to use it strategically
Guzzini, professor at Central European University, 98
Stefano Guzzini, Assis. Prof @ Central European U, Realism in Int’l Relations, 1998, p. 212
Therefore, in a third step, this chapter also claims that it is impossible just to heap realism onto the dustbin of history and start
anew. This is a non-option. Although realism as a strictly causal theory has been a disappointment, various realist assumptions
are well alive in the minds of many practitioners and observers of international affairs. Although it does not correspond to a
theory which helps us to understand a real world with objective laws, it is a world-view which suggests thoughts about it, and
which permeates our daily language for making sense of it. Realism has been a rich, albeit very contestable, reservoir of
lessons of the past, of metaphors and historical analogies, which, in the hands of its most gifted representatives, have been
proposed, at times imposed, and reproduced as guides to a common understanding of international affairs. Realism is alive in
the collective memory and self-understanding of our (i.e. Western) foreign policy elite and public whether educated or not.
Hence, we cannot but deal with it. For this reason, forgetting realism is also questionable. Of course, academic observers
should not bow to the whims of daily politics. But staying at distance, or being critical, does not mean that they should lose the
capacity to understand the languages of those who make significant decisions not only in government, but also in firms, NGOs,
and other institutions. To the contrary, this understanding, as increasingly varied as it may be, is a prerequisite for their very
profession. More particularly, it is a prerequisite for opposing the more irresponsible claims made in the name although not
always necessarily in the spirit, of realism.
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Realism
Realism, it is impossible to reject and is too important to understanding world politics
Guzzini, senior researcher, 98
Stefano Guzzini, Senior Researcher, research units on Danish and European foreign policy and on Defence and
security, 1998, Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy: The Continuing Story of A
Death Foretold, 235
As a result of this double failure, realism is at a crossroads. Either it follows the scientific road, and then pursues its
fragmentation within and outside the narrowed discipline. Or it goes back to its normative and historical roots but, then, it
can no longer cover the research agenda of International Relations, nor claim the scientific core position that it has been
used to taking since 1945. In the past, realists have resisted this dilemma. This resistance, played out in both ways, has
given cadence to realism’s evolution, and now, also the evolution of international Relations as a discipline. This has been
the double story of this book. As long as this resistance continues, this story will continue. Third, this last chapter has
argued that although the evolution of realism has been mainly a disappointment as a general causal theory, we have to deal
with it. On the one hand, realist assumptions and insights are used and merged in nearly all frameworks of analysis offered
in International Relations or International Political Economy. One of the book’s purposes as to show realism as a varied and
variably rich theory, so heterogeneous that it would be better to refer to it only in plural terms. On the other hand, to dispose
of realism because some of its versions have been proven empirically wrong, a historical, or logically incoherent does not
necessarily touch its role in the shared understandings of observers and practitioners of international affairs. Realist theories
have a persisting power for constructing our understanding of the present. Their assumptions, both as theoretical constructs,
and as particular lessons of the past translated from one generation of decision-makers to another, help mobilizing certain
understandings and dispositions to action. They also provide them with legitimacy. Despite realism’s several deaths as a
general casual theory, it can still powerfully enframe action. It exists in the minds, and is hence reflected in the actions, of
many practitioners. Whether or not the world realism depicts is out there, realism is. Realism is not a casual theory that
explains international relations, but as long as realism continures to be a powerful mindset, we need to understand realism
to make sense of International Relations. In other words, realism is a still necessary hermeneutical bridge to the
understanding of world politics. Getting rid of realism without having a deep understanding of it, not only risks
unwarranted dismissal of some valuable theoretical insights that I have tried to gather in this book; it would also be futile.
Indeed, it might be the best way to tacitly and uncritically reproduce it.
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Realism- Perm
We can support both realism and critical theory to enable a transition
Murray, Politics at Wales, 97
Alastair J.H. Murray, Politics @ Wales, Reconstructing Realism, 1997, p. 178-9
In Wendt’s constructivism, the argument appears in its most basic version, presenting an analysis of realist assumptions
which associate it with a conservative account of human nature. In Linklater’s critical theory it moves a stage further,
presenting an analysis of realist theory which locates it within a conservative discourse of state-centrism. In Ashley’s poststructuralism it reaches its highest form, presenting an analysis of realist strategy which locates it not merely within a
conservative statist order, but, moreover, within an active conspiracy of silence to reproduce it. Finally, in Tickner’s
feminism, realism becomes all three simultaneously and more besides, a vital player in a greater, overarching, masculine
conspiracy against femininity. Realism thus appears, first, as a doctrine providing the grounds for a relentless pessimism,
second, as a theory which provides an active justification for such pessimism, and, third, as a strategy which proactively
seeks to enforce this pessimism, before it becomes the vital foundation underlying all such pessimism in international
theory. Yet, an examination of the arguments put forward from each of these perspectives suggests not only that the effort
to locate realism within a conservative, rationalist camp is untenable but, beyond this, that realism is able to provide
reformist strategies which are superior to those that they can generate themselves. The progressive purpose which motivates
the critique of realism in these perspectives ultimately generates a bias which undermines their own ability to generate
effective strategies of transition. In constructivism, this bias appears in its most limited version, producing strategies so
divorced from the obstacles presented by the current structure of international politics that they threaten to become counterproductive. In critical theory it moves a stage further, producing strategies so abstract that one is at a loss to determine what
they actually imply in terms of the current structure of international politics. And, in post-modernism, it reaches its highest
form producing an absence of such strategies altogether, until we reach the point at which we are left with nothing but
critique. Against this failure, realism contains the potential to act as the basis of a more constructive approach to
international relations, incorporating many of the strengths of reflectivism and yet avoiding its weaknesses. It appears, in
the final analysis, as an opening within which some synthesis of rationalism and reflectivism, of conservatism and
progressivism, might be built.
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AT: Objectivism- Genocide
Turn: Objectivism justifies suffering, despair and genocides
Gerald Porter, 1995 Writer for the Swaraj foundation, “The White Man's Burden, Revisited”,
http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/resources_porter.html
-=Max Rispsoli=-
Philosophers such as Sloan (1992), Pearce (1971, 1974), Griffin (1989, 1993), Berman (1981), and Bowers (1993) have
analyzed the core metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that provide the foundation of the modern mindset that
have led Western societies to the brink of human and environmental disaster. At the root of this worldview is an
objectivist position which holds that the subject and object are wholly separate and divorced, that the mind and body are
essentially disconnected. Knowledge— or at least all legitimate knowledge — of the outside world is derived from sense
experience and cannot come directly from intuition, inspiration, or spiritual insight. Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we
tend to live in a world of shadows where we substitute our representations of reality for reality itself, a peculiar way of
seeing conditioned by the materialistic education provided by modem schooling. Socialization in modern Western society
induces the separation of subject and object, and consequently the self is experienced as progressively more disengaged
from the world. As a result, the self is isolated and reduced to a mere ghost in the machine. An inevitable consequence of
the artificial separation of mind and body is the now traditional conviction that mind as discursive thought is purer and
loftier than the comparatively crude and debased body (Sloan 1992; Pearce 1971, 1974). Although contemporary thought
denies that the separate mind is constitutionally different from the body, it persists in thinking of the body as subservient in
function and value to the higher organizing principle of mind. The emphasis in Eurocentric thought on hierarchy and
evolution makes it difficult for modernists to consider that mind and body could be functionally different but qualitatively
equal. The modernist mindset has inevitably led to the arid vision of a dead, purposeless, meaningless universe that is
absent of God and devoid of ultimate value or meaning. This dead and purposeless world has inevitably led to untold
personal misery and despair. On a societal level, it has deprived people of the perennial values of basic humanity that might
have prevented the tragedies of projected and externalized self-hatred that arises when the self is cut off from meaning,
such as the Holocaust not just of Jews in Europe, but in Cambodia and Uganda, and now in the former Yugoslavia. The
brutal persecution and dehumanization found virtually everywhere in the world are made possible by the modem
worldview’s denial of the sacred and moral relativism. While modernism is not the only worldview that can lead to
tragedy and human degradation, it is the primary ideological architect of such in our time.
Objectivism and egoism creates a mindset that justifies genocidal actions.
Huemer, Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, No Date
(Michael Huemer, Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, No Date, “WHY I AM NOT AN
OBJECTIVIST,” http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand.htm#5)
What enables egoists to make replies like this is that it is almost impossible to assess the probabilities of all these possibilities in any
definitive manner. However, what needs to be kept in mind is that, on the egoist's view, the fact that the other
person is a sentient being, with a life of his own, is not what counts. All that counts is that he has a potential
to serve my life, or to hamper it if I destroy him. Therefore, how I treat him need not be , in principle, any different
from the way I treat inanimate objects. Sure, if there's a heap of trash lying on the sidewalk, it's possible that the heap of trash
will someday be useful for something. It's also possible that destroying it will have some negative effects on me. Some insane trashlover might get mad at me, though I have no reason to think that this is so. But none of this would prevent me from removing a heap
of trash that I found on the sidewalk, if it was getting in my way. You don't save just anything that might be useful. If egoism is
true, I should take exactly the same fundamental attitude towards other human beings as to inanimate objects: if
I decide that the likelihood of their being useful to me is sufficiently low and the likelihood of my suffering ill
effects of destroying them also sufficiently low, then I will go ahead and remove them . Every day I throw away
objects that have more likelihood of being useful to me some day than a homeless person on the street does. Every day I take actions,
like crossing the street, that involve more risk to my person than is involved in destroying the homeless man in my hypothetical
example. But even if the egoist is able to think of some very plausible harm that I would be likely to suffer from
killing another person, I will just modify the example to remove it. In other words, I stipulate that the homeless
guy is not a potential client of my company, he is not going to get a job, he does not have a gang of friends to
defend him, the passers-by on the street will not be angry with me, etc. And the question is, then does it seem
that it's right to kill him?
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AT: Objectivism
Objectivism’s free market model justifies Darwinistic control of humanity and loss of rights—
corporations must control human capital
Christina M., Anastasia, 2005 A Review of Objectivism, January, http://www.onlineadjunct.biz/OJECTIVISM.pdf
-=Max Rispoli=-
Rejecting the concept of a laissez-faire capitalistic market, Barry and Stephens (1998) argue that the fundamental principles
of objectivism must be questioned and critiqued. The authors go on to say “Our critique of objectivism rests on the fact that
its account of integrity provides no philosophical advance beyond the amoral theory of commerce; in essence, objectivism
constitutes a pseudo-ethical apologia for self-interested business as usual”(p. 163). However, the authors claim that because
the philosophy is not mentioned in several academic periodicals that it does not deserve recognition. This unfortunate view
shows bias and weakens the argument by asking the question, “Can a philosophy be discounted simply because it was
conceived by a non academic?” Hitchens (2001), states “A number of successful and smart dot-com moguls have recently
gone public as Randian or Objectivist models.” (p.1). Hitchens (2001) goes on to say, “Once again, it is difficult to see what
is specifically Objectivist about certain positions, just as it can be 14 hard to discern the difference between "the virtue of
selfishness" as Rand pugnaciously phrased it, and the milder statements of "enlightened self-interest" that date back at least
as far as Adam Smith and his injunction that it is "not from the benevolence" of the merchant that we expect our on-time
delivery of needed commodities” (p.2). Yet again, presenting another argument against a laissez-faire capitalistic market,
authors Knights and Mueller (2004) warn “The danger of the objective approach is to slip into a reification of the so-called
objective features of strategy and the context in which it resides”(p56). “The realm of the 'objective' exists through
structures, capital markets, corporate governance structures, and labour and product markets. The often economics-based
literature treats these as 'objective' in the sense that structures are independent of the actions of any one agent.” The authors
go so far as to hint that Objectivism falls into a Darwinist category. They continue their argument with, “Here corporations
are seen to depend almost completely on the resources that they can command, balanced against the pressures generated
externally in the environment. Strategy will be based on identifying the most critical resources for the survival of the
organization and ensuring some degree of control over them.”
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AT: Objectivism- No ethical egoism
There’s no such thing as ethical egoism – the theory is incorrect and it justifies atrocities.
Huemer, Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, No Date
(Michael Huemer, Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, No Date, “Critique of "The Objectivist Ethics",”
http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand5.htm)
Rand endorsed a version of 'ethical egoism': the view that a person should always do whatever best serves his own interests. I
have discussed the following objections to this doctrine in my "Why I Am Not an Objectivist", so I will be brief here. Here is one
general argument against egoism: 1. If ethical egoism is true, then if you could obtain a (net) benefit equal to a
dime by torturing and killing 500 people, you should do it. 2. It is not the case that, if you could obtain a (net)
benefit equal to a dime by torturing and killing 500 people, you should do it. 3. Therefore, egoism is not true.
This argument is very simple, but that should not fool us into thinking it is therefore illegitimate. It is true that an egoist could
simply deny 2, proclaiming that in that situation, the mass torture and killing would be morally virtuous. Any
person can maintain any belief, provided he is willing to accept enough absurd consequences of it . Here is a
second argument against ethical egoism: it contradicts Rand's own claim that each individual is an end-in-himself
and that it is therefore morally wrong to sacrifice one person to another. For either Rand meant that an
individual life is an end-in-itself in an absolute sense--as discussed in my objection (i) above; or she meant that an
individual life is an end-in-itself in a relative sense--i.e., for that individual. Assume she meant it in a relative sense. In
this case, Smith's life is an end-in-itself for Smith. But since Smith's life is not an end-in-itself for Jones, there
has been given no reason why Jones should not use Smith or sacrifice Smith's life for Jones' benefit. In fact, for
Jones, Smith's life can only have value as a means, if it has any value at all, since for Jones, only Jones' life is an end in itself. Now,
assume she meant it in an absolute sense. In that case, she contradicted her agent-relative conception of value.
Furthermore, she generated a general problem for ethical egoism. If the life of my neighbor, Jones, is an end-initself in an absolute sense, and not just relative to Jones, then why wouldn't it follow that I ought to promote the life
of my neighbor, for its own sake? But this is not what Rand wants--she claims that my own life is the only thing
I should promote for its own sake.
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AT: Objectivism- Western Exceptionalism
Objectivism is bad – promotes a Western exceptionalist mindset that entrenches racist principles. This
results in genocide and nuclear war.
Stambanis, politics and philosophy major at Monash University, Australia, 96
(Rebecca Stambanis, politics and philosophy major at Monash University, Australia, April 19, 1996, “Objectivists' hidden agenda a
Klan mentality,” http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/1996_jan-dec/04/04-19-96tdc/04-19-96d07-002.htm)
In contrast, I find the objectivist leaders to be very different. They are smart men who have risen to the top of a highly competitive
vocation. They are good with words and body language, are masters of rhetoric and they can act out the emotions in which their
followers revel -- especially righteous indignation and contempt. They draw pleasure from being able to affect and control a crowd
(even if it results in the unjust and "irrational" use of force). They are utterly cynical people. They have set the stage alight for new
discourses of racism and sexism and they preach the words of Western, white supremacy. They breed an intellectual and cultural
arrogance in an attempt to eliminate non-Western and non-Aryan people. Hence, the ideas that flow from their mouths are tainted with
savagery. They serve to silence the voices of the "other" and consign their histories and experiences to the margins and to subsume all
experience to the dominant Western outlook. They reject all specters of social fragmentation with the project of pursuing a rational,
scientific understanding of natural and social reality based on one single theoretical discourse; that of Western, white civilization. In
denying the complexity of everyday life, "objectivists" think that their singular belief system can hope to explain it all, and it is used as
a means of imposing Euro-American ideas of rationality and objectivity on other peoples. As Hull himself stated "there is a right way
and there is a wrong way" -- and the correct method is of course that of the Western, white man (which is hardly surprising
considering that Hull fits this totalizing description perfectly). Furthermore, they argue that multiculturalism and postmodernism, as
promotions of diversity, are evil diseases as they regard all cultures are morally equal when in fact they are not. After all, it was our
great Western civilization that put the baseball cap on our heads, asserts Hull, and all that non-Western thought has shown us is how
"not" to do it. Gee, three cheers for the West!! Have you ever heard a claim that is so intrinsically elitist, overtly discriminatory and
highly irrational (in true Ayn Rand style)? If Western civilization is the objectively superior culture, then why are so many Americans
engulfed in despair? The first time I heard this, I assumed that no one could take it seriously. But then I realized that I was asserting
too much rationality and decency toward these people. I found that they really believe that scientific progress, technology and
domination provides a legitimate endorsement for Western, white supremacy. As Herbert Marcuse stated, it is this kind of
unrepressed implementation of modern science, rationalism and supremacy that ends in concentration death camps, mass
exterminations and the atom bombs. But my most depressing finding of all was the degree to which ordinary people are perfectly
content to believe this "objectivist" nonsense, as long as it makes them feel good.
Rand’s style is one that portrays the West as superior; it is exactly this discourse that led to the
concentration camps and Hiroshima
Stambanis, politics and philosophy major at Monash University and Penn State, 96
(Rebecca Stambanis, Politics and Philosophy Major at Monash University and Penn State, April 19, 1996, Objectivists’ Hidden
Agenda a Klan Mentality, http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/1996_jan-dec/04/04-19-96tdc/04-19-96d07-002.htm)
Have you ever heard a claim that is so intrinsically elitist, overtly discriminatory and highly irrational (in true Ayn Rand
style)? If Western civilization is the objectively superior culture, then why are so many Americans engulfed in despair?
The first time I heard this, I assumed that no one could take it seriously. But then I realized that I was asserting too much
rationality and decency toward these people. I found that they really believe that scientific progress,
technology and domination provides a legitimate endorsement for Western, white supremacy. As Herbert
Marcuse stated, it is this kind of unrepressed implementation of modern science, rationalism and
supremacy that ends in concentration death camps, mass exterminations and the atom bombs. But my
most depressing finding of all was the degree to which ordinary people are perfectly content to believe
this "objectivist" nonsense, as long as it makes them feel good.
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AT: Objectivism- Environment
Short term incentives and market competition mean that an absolute free market makes environmental
destruction inevitable
Elkin, member of the Texas House of Representatives, 95
(Gary Elkin, member of the Texas House of Representatives, 1995, http://www.spunk.org/library/otherpol/critique/sp001282.txt)
libertarians have great difficulty in dealing with the problem of "externalities": that is, harmful
environmental effects (e.g. pollution, global warming, ozone depletion, destruction of wildlife habitat) not
counted as "costs of production" in standard methods of accounting. Such costs must be born by
everyone in the society who is affected by them, and not only by the capitalists who produce them; hence it is
possible for capitalist to ignore such effects when planning future production. But this means that such
effects *will* be ignored, since competition forces firms to cut as many costs as possible and
concentrate on short-term profits.
Right
Right libertarians typically address the problem of externalities by calling for public education which will raise people's
awareness of ecological problems to the point where there will be enough demand for environment-friendly technologies
and products that they will be profitable.
This argument, however, ignores two crucially important facts: (1) that environment-friendly technologies and products
*by themselves* are not enough to avert ecological disaster so long as capitalism retains its need for high growth
rates (which it will retain because this need is inherent in the system); and (2) that in a
right-libertarian world in which private property is protected by a "night-watchman State" or private security forces, a wealthy capitalist
elite will still control education, as it does now -- and this because education is an essential indoctrination tool of the capitalist elite,
needed to promote capitalist values and train a large population of future wage-slaves in proper habits of obedience to authority. For this
reason, capitalists cannot afford to lose control of the educational system, no matter how much it costs them to maintain competitive
schools. And this means that such schools will not teach students what is really necessary to avoid ecological disaster: namely, the
dismantling of capitalism itself.
Another ecological problem that right libertarians cannot deal with satisfactorily is that capitalist firms *must* be committed
to short-term profitability rather than long-term environmental responsibility in order to survive
economically in the competitive market. Here's an example: Suppose there are 3 automobile companies, X, Y, and Z, which are
competitive (not conspiring to fix prices) and which exist in a right-libertarian society where there is no democratic community control over the economy.
Then suppose that company X invests in the project of developing a non-polluting car within ten years. At the same time its competitors, Y and Z, will be
putting their resources into increasing profits and market share in the coming days and months and over the next year. During that period, company X will
be out of luck, for it will not be able to attract enough capital from investors to carry out its plans, since investment will flock to the companies that are
most immediately profitable.
libertarian may respond by arguing that business leaders are as able to see long-term negative
environmental effects as the rest of us. But this is to misunderstand the nature of the objection. It is not that
business leaders *as individuals* are any less able to see what's happening to the environment. It is that if they want to
keep their jobs they have to do what the system requires, which is to concentrate on what is most
profitable in the short term. Thus if the president of company X has a mystical experience of oneness with nature
and starts diverting profits into pollution control while the presidents of Y and Z continue with business as
usual, the stockholders of company X will get a new president who is willing to focus on short-term
profits like Y and Z.
In general, then, if one company tries to devote resources to develop products or processes that will save the
environment, they will simply be undercut by other companies which are not doing so, and hence they won't
be competitive in the market. In other words, capitalism has a built-in bias toward short-term gain, and this
bias -- along with a built-in need for rapid growth -- means the planet will continue its free-fall toward
ecological disaster so long as capitalism remains in place.
The right
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AT: Objectivism- Morality
Morality requires that communal good come before individual property rights
Browne and Kubasek, professor of economics and professor of legal studies, 99
(M. Neil Browne, Professor of Economics, Bowling Green State University, and Nancy K. Kubasek, Professor of Legal Studies,
Bowling Green State University, 1999 - 37 Am. Bus. L.J. 127)
These kinds of market critiques might cause listeners to think that communitarians are market opponents. That claim is true
only in a limited, but nevertheless significant, sense. Communitarians urge a political debate much broader than one
between market advocates and market foes. Communitarians view the world that such a debate presupposes -- a world
where there are individuals, the state, and markets -- as an inadequate picture of the world. 25 It is inadequate because it is
missing what the contemporary philosopher Jurgen Habermas calls the lifeworld, the place where we "communicate with
others, deliberate, come to agreements about standards and norms, pursue in common an effort to create a valuable form of
life -- in short, [*134] the lifeworld is the world of community." 26 A community is found where there is a group with a
shared concern about what will make the group a good group. Communitarians believe that both the market and the state
have a role to play in serving the good of the community. They believe that politics and morality cannot be
separated, because what is at the heart of the democratic community is searching for the common
good, and finding the best ways to use the state and the market to attain that good . 27 Communitarians tout
dialogue and social participation as methods for discovering the good. This search for the common good will stress certain
values, according to Robert Bellah, 28 one of the early members of the "new communitarians." 29 First, communitarians
value the sacredness of the individual, but it is not the same individual that individualism recognizes; rather, it is an
individual in a context, an individual who is embedded in a community. From a communitarian standpoint,
strong, healthy, vigorous individuals can develop only within the context of a strong, healthy, vigorous
community. 30 A related core value is that of solidarity, which recognizes that it is through our relationships that we
become who we are. 31 A third value to which communitarians are committed is that of "complementary association," which
has been defined as "commitment to varied social groupings: the family, the local community, the cultural or religious
group, the economic enterprise, the trade union or profession, the nation state." 32 Fourth is civic participation, both as a
right and as a duty. Communities must provide their members both the opportunity and the training to make use of
participatory opportunities. One of the champions of this more participatory community has been Britain's Prime Minister,
Tony Blair. He recently described his views as the "Third Way," the route to renewal and success for modern social
democracy. He described it as taking the values of the center and center-left and applying them to a world of fundamental
social and [*135] economic change in a manner free from outdated ideology. 33 The theme of his comments was the deep
need of the polity for human relationships that are both nurturing and sustaining. Some may fear that
communitarianism could become a tyrannical majoritarian rule at the expense of individuals' rights .
Communitarians, however, respond that the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, protects individual liberty.
Furthermore, the Constitution does not talk just about rights, but also speaks of the need to promote the
general
welfare
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in
order
to
form
a
more
perfect
union.
34
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AT: Objectivism – communitarian ethics
A communitarian ethic is key to the good of the community and valuing the individual – it is not an
affront to individualism
Browne and Kubasek, professor of economics and professor of legal studies, 99
(M. Neil Browne, Professor of Economics, Bowling Green State University, and Nancy K. Kubasek, Professor of Legal Studies,
Bowling Green State University, 1999 - 37 Am. Bus. L.J.)
These kinds of market critiques might cause listeners to think that communitarians are market opponents. That claim is true
only in a limited, but nevertheless significant, sense. Communitarians urge a political debate much broader than one
between market advocates and market foes. Communitarians view the world that such a debate presupposes -- a world
where there are individuals, the state, and markets -- as an inadequate picture of the world. 25 It is inadequate because it is
missing what the contemporary philosopher Jurgen Habermas calls the lifeworld, the place where we "communicate with
others, deliberate, come to agreements about standards and norms, pursue in common an effort to create a valuable form of
life -- in short, [*134] the lifeworld is the world of community." 26 A community is found where there is a group with a
shared
concern
about
what
will
make
the
group
a
good
group.
Communitarians believe that both the market and the state have a role to play in serving the good of the community. They
believe that politics and morality cannot be separated, because what is at the heart of the democratic
community is searching for the common good, and finding the best ways to use the state and the
market to attain that good. 27 Communitarians tout dialogue and social participation as methods for discovering the
good.
This search for the common good will stress certain values, according to Robert Bellah, 28 one of the early members of the
"new communitarians." 29 First, communitarians value the sacredness of the individual, but it is not the same individual that
individualism recognizes; rather, it is an individual in a context, an individual who is embedded in a community. From a
communitarian standpoint, strong, healthy, vigorous individuals can develop only within the context of a strong, healthy,
vigorous community. 30 A related core value is that of solidarity, which recognizes that it is through our relationships that
we become who we are. 31 A third value to which communitarians are committed is that of "complementary association,"
which has been defined as "commitment to varied social groupings: the family, the local community, the cultural or
religious group, the economic enterprise, the trade union or profession, the nation state." 32 Fourth is civic participation,
both as a right and as a duty. Communities must provide their members both the opportunity and the
training to make use of participatory opportunities.
One of the champions of this more participatory community has been Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He recently
described his views as the "Third Way," the route to renewal and success for modern social democracy. He described it as
taking the values of the center and center-left and applying them to a world of fundamental social and [*135] economic
change in a manner free from outdated ideology. 33 The theme of his comments was the deep need of the polity for human
relationships that are both nurturing and sustaining.
Some may fear that communitarianism could become a tyrannical majoritarian rule at the expense of individuals' rights.
Communitarians, however, respond that the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, protects individual liberty.
Furthermore, the Constitution does not talk just about rights, but also speaks of the need to promote the
general welfare in order to form a more perfect union.
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AT: Objectivism- Liberty
Turn- The free market destroys liberty and causes mass suffering
Partridge, University of California, 03
(Ernest Partridge, University of California, Riverside, 2002, http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/liberty.htm)
Absolute
rights
would
shut
down
industrial
civilization.
The libertarian remedy for environmental pollution, however attractive in the abstract, would accomplish too
much if put into practice. Consider, for example, Tibor Machan's statement of this remedy: " if operations of [private]
firms would be impossible without pollution [beyond their boundaries] - that is, without causing emissions that are
harmful to others who have not consented to suffer such harm - the operations would have to be shut down."
(Machan, 100) Can anyone doubt that the clear implication of this rule must be the abolition of the internal
combustion engine? Thus these champions of individual liberty, in order to spare our property and our
selves from the assault of pollution, would deprive us all of the freedom of movement afforded by our
automobiles. And there is worse ahead: "non-point" water pollution comes from agricultural run-off. Must
we abolish the use of chemical fertilizers and fossil fuels in agriculture? Radical environmentalists have urged as
much. But now that horse pastures have long-since been converted into shopping malls and subdivisions, the clear
consequence of the de-mechanization of agriculture must be mass starvation. (See "The Oil Trap," this site)
And finally, air pollution also comes from electric power plants. Do we shut off the electricity? What
then of the loss of freedom to communicate? In fact, the air that I exhale contains carbon dioxide, an air
pollutant. And try as I might, I can't seem to keep it all contained on my property. The implication, as Jeffrey
Friedman spells it out, is as clear as it is absurd:
Libertarianism seeks to make every human being the ruler of his or her own domain, as delimited by his or her property
rights... Since the atmosphere cannot be divided into parcels of private property as land can, strict
libertarianism would require that each person possess his or her own atmosphere, unpolluted by the
activities of anyone else. The libertarian ideal is in short, so sensitive to environmental externalities that it is
incompatible with human coexistence. Short of the ultimate in atomistic individualism - a planet for every
person - any pollution, and hence any human activity, is, in the libertarian view, a crime. (J. Friedman, 4312).
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against
property
invasion
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AT: Objectivism (Healthcare specific)
A communitarian ethic on public health is key to our responsibility to society and an ethic of care –
public health also has an important impact everyone
Solomon R. Benatar, Dept. of Medicine and Bioethics at Cape Town University, 2003
[“Bioethics: Power and Injustice: IAB Presidential Address,” Bioethics, Volume 17, Numbers 5-6, Blackwell Synergy] Rein
Achieving an improved balance between the needs and rights of individuals and the requirements for advancing public
health will require a shift in mind-set away from exclusive and often selfish individualism, towards respect for individuality
that is combined with a strong sense of duty, community, and civic citizenship. Essential steps will include: firstly,
acknowledging the need for a new balance; secondly, developing the political will to undertake ambitious projects (for
example seeking ways of reducing poverty and dependency); and finally, placing high value on the longer term economic
and social justice required for meaningful and sustainable progress. In a world in which individual health is increasingly linked to
population health, both within countries and between countries, there is a need to develop a coherent language of Public Health Ethics.
The language and scholarly discourse on public health ethics is as yet inadequately developed but a start has been made and eloquent
arguments have been offered in favour of a language of public health that 'speaks to the reciprocity and interdependence that characterise
community.'4 Considerations of justice, the 'social contract* and conflicts of interest will clearly impact on the physician/patient
relationship as the ethics discourse is broadened to encompass the ethics of public health and of professional responsibilities to society.
This raises the perennial problem of how to strike a balance between the rights (and needs) of individuals and the common good of
societies. While the focus on individual rights is vital and necessary for the well being of individual persons, such focus is not sufficient
for the achievement of improved public health. The dilemmas regarding public health ethics will be greatest for those societies
that are intolerant of any infringement of individual liberties in the name of the common good. The challenge for societies
more oriented towards the common good will be to avoid excessive infringements of individual rights in the pursuit of
public health goals. Realistically, a middle ground will have to be forged because the choice is not between polar extremes
but rather about achieving an optimal balance between competing goods. Today, many countries consider access to basic
healthcare an essential human right which nation states should be committed to honouring for their citizens. However, we
also need to go beyond advocacy for rights to include consideration of the duties necessary for rights to be widely satisfied.
Acknowledgement of such public duties has resulted in some form of socialised and equitable healthcare in all western
European nations and in Canada. Regrettably, the example set by the US - the wealthiest nation in the world - of medical
care as a marketable commodity is increasingly being imitated by many developing countries. Grotesquely widening disparities in
wealth and health and the implications of consumption patterns that damage the environment on which all are dependent suggest that we
live in an amoral world. We could perhaps even conclude that we live in a morally depraved world, one that promotes preference for
continuing economic growth and the acquisition of luxuries for a small proportion of the world's population over ensuring the production
of and access to essential subsistence requirements for the majority. Our modern system of values with emphasis on market values and on
bureaucratic processes promotes economic slavery, tolerates gross abuses of basic human rights, and even turns a blind eye to genocide.5
It also discounts the importance of a safe environment for future generations. Such a world, characterised by an unstable economic
system, the potential for political and other terrorism, the threat of infectious diseases and other biological hazards, as well as
environmental degradation, poses threats to the self-interest of us all globally.6 Extending the ethics discourse to include considerations
of global security and the environment would require conceiving of individuals as autonomous persons sharing equal rights with all other
citizens in the world, in a relationship of interdependence in which the rights of some should not be acquired at the expense of the rights
of even distant others. Modern communication, transport, methods of money exchange, the creation of nuclear and other potential
weapons of mass destruction and the emergence of new infectious diseases have shrunk distances and differences, and created common
global risks. In this context, and with a deeper understanding of the impact of adverse forces shaping the wealth and health of nations, we
need to appreciate how we are all deeply implicated in the lives of others, and cannot hide with moral credibility behind the barrier of
physical distance while billions of people live impoverished lives. Altruism and reparations aside, the importance of physical and
moral interdependence is so great that longer-term self-interest alone should be sufficient to drive policies toward sustainable
development. Some degree of humility, and empathy, are essential ingredients for progress. Jonathan Glover, in his book Humanity: A
Moral History of the 20th Century, has revealed how difficult this will be to achieve. However, it should be noted that unless such
progress is made, the prospects seem bleak for dealing adequately with such threats as the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the growing burden
of non-communicable diseases. Empathy and consequent 'justice without borders' is the challenge for the future. The level of complexity
here is much greater because of the way in which the foreign policies of some countries may covertly enhance the lives of their own
citizens through exploitation of unseen persons elsewhere. The commitment of physicians, scientists and all healthcare professionals
would need to be broadened to include universal professional ideals and concern for the health of whole populations as well as the health
of future generations. In summary, I am proposing that our moral perspective should be extended from 'interpersonal morality' to 'civic
morality* and to an 'ethics of international relations', that has dimensions intimately linked to political, military, cultural and economic
issues. These ideas are consistent with the identification of medical practice and health as social constructs and of bioethics
as an activity that falls within the realm of social philosophy.
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AT: Objectivism
Objectivism is flawed in its belief of absolute knowledge; according to followers anything Rand disagrees
with must be wrong.
Shermer, founder of skeptic magazine, 93
(Michael Shermer, Founder of Skeptic Magazine, PhD from Claremont University, 93, Skeptic Magazine, The Unlikeliest Cult in
History, p 74-81)
How, then, could such a philosophy become the basis of a cult, which is the antithesis of reason and
individualism? A cult, however it is defined, depends on faith and deindividuation--that is, remove the power of reason
in followers and make them dependent upon the group and/or the leader. The last thing a cult leader wants is for followers
to think for themselves and become individuals apart from the group.
The cultic flaw in Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is not in the use of reason, or in the emphasis
on individuality, or in the belief that humans are self motivated, or in the conviction that capitalism is
the ideal system. The fallacy in Objectivism is the belief that absolute knowledge and final Truths are
attainable through reason, and therefore there can be absolute right and wrong knowledge, and absolute
moral and immoral thought and action. For Objectivists, once a principle has been discovered through reason to be
True, that is the end of the discussion. If you disagree with the principle, then your reasoning is flawed. If your reasoning is
flawed it can be corrected, but if it is not, you remain flawed and do not belong in the group. Excommunication is the
final step for such unreformed heretics.
Objectivism is a cult; it forces believers to literally worship the belief of absolute morality.
Shermer, founder of skeptic magazine, 93
(Michael Shermer, Founder of Skeptic Magazine, PhD from Claremont University, 93, Skeptic Magazine, The Unlikeliest Cult in
History, p 74-81)
It is important to note that my critique of Rand and Objectivism as a cult is not original. Rand and her followers were, in
their time, accused of being a cult which, of course, they denied. "My following is not a cult. I am not a cult figure," Rand
once told an interviewer. Barbara Branden, in her biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand, recalls: "Although the Objectivist
movement clearly had many of the trappings of a cult--the aggrandizement of the person of Ayn Rand, the too ready
acceptance of her personal opinions on a host of subjects, the incessant moralizing--it is nevertheless significant that the
fundamental attraction of Objectivism . . . was the precise opposite of religious worship" (p. 371). And Nathaniel Branden
addressed the issue this way: "We were not a cult in the literal, dictionary sense of the word, but certainly there was a
cultish aspect to our world . . . . We were a group organized around a charismatic leader, whose members judged one
another's character chiefly by loyalty to that leader and to her ideas" (p. 256). But if you leave the "religious" component
out of the definition, thus broadening the word's usage, it becomes clear that Objectivism was (and is) a cult, as are many
other, non-religious groups. In this context, then, a cult may be characterized by: Veneration of the Leader: Excessive
glorification to the point of virtual sainthood or divinity. Inerrancy of the Leader: Belief that he or she cannot be wrong.
Omniscience of the Leader: Acceptance of beliefs and pronouncements on virtually all subjects, from the philosophical to
the trivial. Persuasive Techniques: Methods used to recruit new followers and reinforce current beliefs. Hidden Agendas:
Potential recruits and the public are not given a full disclosure of the true nature of the group's beliefs and plans. Deceit:
Recruits and followers are not told everything about the leader and the group's inner circle, particularly flaws or potentially
embarrassing events or circumstances. Financial and/or Sexual Exploitation: Recruits and followers are persuaded to invest
in the group, and the leader may develop sexual relations with one or more of the followers. Absolute Truth: Belief that the
leader and/or group has a method of discovering final knowledge on any number of subjects. Absolute Morality: Belief that
the leader and/or the group have developed a system of right and wrong thought and action applicable to members and
nonmembers alike. Those who strictly follow the moral code may become and remain members, those who do not are
dismissed or punished.
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AT: Objectivism- murder
Objectivism eliminates moral neutrality; either you’re moral or you’re not, this justifies murdering
anyone who’s “different.”
Shermer, founder of skeptic magazine, 93
(Michael Shermer, Founder of Skeptic Magazine, PhD from Claremont University, 93, Skeptic Magazine, The Unlikeliest Cult in
History, p 74-81)
The ultimate statement of Rand's absolute morality heads the title page of Nathaniel Brandon's book.
Says Rand: The precept: "Judge not, that ye be not judged" . . . is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral
blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself. There is no escape from the
fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as
moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory
to the torture and murder of his victims. The moral principle to adopt . . . is: "Judge, and be prepared to be judged." The
absurd lengths to which such thinking can go is demonstrated by Rand's pronounced judgments on her followers of even
the most trivial things. Rand had argued, for example, that musical taste could not be objectively defined, yet, as Barbara
Branden observed, "if one of her young friends responded as she did to Rachmaninoff . . . she attached deep significance to
their affinity." By contrast, if a friend did not respond as she did to a certain piece or composer, Rand "left no doubt that she
considered that person morally and psychologically reprehensible." Branden recalled an evening when a friend of Rand's
remarked that he enjoyed the music of Richard Strauss. "When he left at the end of the evening, Ayn said, in a reaction
becoming increasingly typical, 'Now I understand why he and I can never be real soul mates. The distance in our sense of
life is too great.' Often, she did not wait until a friend had left to make such remarks" (p. 268).
The fact that all actions are not necessarily morally equal and morals evolve over time proves Rand’s
philosophy as false; Objectivism justifies gendered violence and killing
Shermer, founder of skeptic magazine, 93
(Michael Shermer, Founder of Skeptic Magazine, PhD from Claremont University, 93, Skeptic Magazine, The Unlikeliest Cult in
History, p 74-81)
Does this mean that all human actions are morally equal? No. Not any more than all human music is equal. We create
standards of what we like and dislike, desire or not, and make judgments against these standards. But the standards are
themselves human creations and not discovered in nature. One group prefers classical music, and so judges Mozart to be
superior to the Moody Blues. Similarly, one group prefers patriarchal dominance, and so judges male privileges to be
morally honorable. Neither Mozart nor males are absolutely better, only so when compared to the group's standards. Thus,
male ownership of females was once moral and is now immoral, not because we have discovered it as such, but because our
society has realized that women also seek greater happiness and that they can achieve this more easily without being in
bondage to males. A society that seeks greater happiness for its members by giving them greater freedom, will judge a
Hitler or a Stalin as morally intolerable because his goal is the confiscation of human life, without which one can have no
happiness. As long as it is understood that morality is a human construction influenced by human cultures, one can become
more tolerant of other human belief systems, and thus other humans. But as soon as a group sets itself up to be the final
moral arbiter of other people's actions, especially when its members believe they have discovered absolute standards of
right and wrong, it is the beginning of the end of tolerance and thus, reason and rationality. It is this characteristic more
than any other that makes a cult, a religion, a nation, or any other group, dangerous to individual freedom. This was (and is)
the biggest flaw in Ayn Rand's Objectivism, the unlikeliest cult in history. The historical development and ultimate
destruction of her group and philosophy is the empirical evidence to support this logical analysis. What separates science
from all other human activities (and morality has never been successfully placed on a scientific basis), is its belief in the
tentative nature of all conclusions. There are no final absolutes in science, only varying degrees of probability. Even
scientific "facts" are just conclusions confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement, but
never final assent. Science is not the affirmation of a set of beliefs but a process of inquiry aimed at building a testable body
of knowledge constantly open to rejection or confirmation. In science, knowledge is fluid and certainty fleeting. That is the
heart of its limitation. It is also its greatest strength.
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AT: Objectivism- White Supremacy
The very discourse of Objectivism that justifies white supremacy and the elimination of the Other.
Stambanis, politics and philosophy major at Monash University and Penn State, 96
(Rebecca Stambanis, Politics and Philosophy Major at Monash University and Penn State, April 19, 1996, Objectivists’ Hidden
Agenda a Klan Mentality, http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/1996_jan-dec/04/04-19-96tdc/04-19-96d07-002.htm)
In contrast, I find the objectivist leaders to be very different. They are smart men who have risen to the top of a highly
competitive vocation. They are good with words and body language, are masters of rhetoric and they can act out the
emotions in which their followers revel -- especially righteous indignation and contempt. They draw pleasure from being
able to affect and control a crowd (even if it results in the unjust and "irrational" use of force). They are utterly cynical
people. They have set the stage alight for new discourses of racism and sexism and they preach the words of Western, white
supremacy. They breed an intellectual and cultural arrogance in an attempt to eliminate non-Western and non-Aryan
people. Hence, the ideas that flow from their mouths are tainted with savagery. They serve to silence the voices of the
"other" and consign their histories and experiences to the margins and to subsume all experience to the dominant Western
outlook. They reject all specters of social fragmentation with the project of pursuing a rational, scientific understanding of
natural and social reality based on one single theoretical discourse; that of Western, white civilization.
In denying the complexity of everyday life, "objectivists" think that their singular belief system can hope to explain it all,
and it is used as a means of imposing Euro-American ideas of rationality and objectivity on other peoples. As Hull himself
stated "there is a right way and there is a wrong way" -- and the correct method is of course that of the Western, white man
(which is hardly surprising considering that Hull fits this totalizing description perfectly). Furthermore, they argue that
multiculturalism and postmodernism, as promotions of diversity, are evil diseases as they regard all cultures are morally
equal when in fact they are not. After all, it was our great Western civilization that put the baseball cap on our heads, asserts
Hull, and all that non-Western thought has shown us is how "not" to do it.
A White Supremacist discourse suppresses the voice of the Other, that’s exactly what the Objectivist
rhetoric mandates, mirrored in the KKK
Stambanis, politics and philosophy major at Monash University and Penn State, 96
(Rebecca Stambanis, Politics and Philosophy Major at Monash University and Penn State, April 19, 1996, Objectivists’ Hidden
Agenda a Klan Mentality, http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/1996_jan-dec/04/04-19-96tdc/04-19-96d07-002.htm)
Facts, then, need to be interpreted, and different facts or episodes are important to different social groups in which we are
simply left with a plurality of histories, each "equally real" and none of which can be compared or declared supreme to the
others. Postmodernism and multiculturalism, then, can offer us useful ideas about method, particularly a wariness towards
generalization which transcends the boundaries of culture and location. Professors and university discourses are teaching us
the importance of avoiding narrowness in the academy which can only be made possible through ensuring the inclusion of a
multitude of points of view. This Klan of objectivists are disturbing people who want to suppress and undermine the values
and histories of those who do not fall into the category of a "Western, white male," and they are using our universities as a
means in which to achieve their racist and sexist ends.
Do not let them do this. I urge every one to speak out and let your words and experiences be heard. Many Western, white
men of today are angry -- do not allow them to use their discontent to silence the "other." These people should not be
empowered to speak the values and histories of us all. This is pure supremacy and exclusion at its worst. Tolerance, may
have been the appropriate term for the United Nations to celebrate a year in history, but tolerance of hatred cannot, and
should not, be upheld, no matter what.
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AT: poverty K
Poverty discourse is a good starting point for discussing life-possibilities—even if we can’t objectively
determine the good life.
Peter LEONARD School of Social Work @ McGill ’97 Postmodern Welfare p. 30
What is considered 'adequate' or 'necessary' in terms of material levels of existence will, of course, be subject to cultural variation.
These variations are rooted in the political and economic characteristics of different social orders and must take into account a range
of forms of social regulation and exploitation, both national and global, including, in late capitalist societies, the manufacture of
desire. Nevertheless. I believe it is possible to use the discourse on poverty as a starting point in constituting a second
universal upon which solidarity might be built. In Western countries, especially as the welfare state disintegrates and is restructured
on minimal residual lines, there lies beneath the politics of difference, of identity, amongst those embattled in issues of gender,
racism, age or disability, a common concern with poverty. The question is whether this common concern can be built upon as a
basis of solidarity. Does an emancipatory struggle over poverty. national and world-wide, imply a return to Marx's contention that
'all history is the history of class struggle'? By placing difference and material exploitation together as a focus of struggle, we are
acknowledging that there are many ways in which oppression can be experienced by the Other, but that there are many populations
whose conditions of material existence prevent their full expression as diverse moral agents. It is true however, that when we speak
of poverty, we are speaking predominantly of class; in the present conditions of late capitalism we we pointing to the class project
of exploitation through the economic and political forces of the global market. In other words, considerations of class enter into the
preconditions for the defence and celebration of diversity, an understanding of forms of exploi- tation and their impact on material
and social existence.
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AT: Poverty K
Empirically- avoiding the word “poverty” distracts from the true issues and causes inaction
Burchardt 8 (Tania, Researcher of Social Policy, “Does the Policy Response Change?” 4/30,
http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-925107-X.pdf)
All of this suggest that a focus on 'social exclusion' can, indeed, change the way in which we think about policy and hence the
responses to poverty, deprivation, and disadvantage. Whether it does so in practice, is another question. Here we do, however, have a practical example.
As we pointed out at the wart of the book, in the UK the Blair Government in its first term from 1997 to 2001 adopted the language of social
exclusion, set up a special Social Exclusion Unit, and decided to produce an annual report on poverty, and social exclusion. For some, this
was at best a meaningless change of language, at worst a potentially damaging one . One can identify three potential reasons for such
reservations: First, following the example of the European Commission in the 1980s when required to appease the Thatcher Government in Britain and the
Kohl Government in Germany, 'social exclusion' was simply being used to allow the development of anti-poverty policies without
actually using the word 'poverty'. Mom dangerously, the language was a way of diverting attention towards softer and fuzzier
issues and away from more difficult—and more expensive to tackle—issues of straightforward material deprivation, lack of
income, and redistribution. Alternatively, the word was simply a different kind of code, in this case for bringing in the
emphasis on personal responsibility and policy agenda of workfare implied by the US debate on the 'underclass'—what Ruth
Levitas (1998) refers to as the 'moral underclass debate' ('MUD'). Ac its extreme, this discourse condemns the victims of exclusion as deserving
of their fate.
Representations are irrelevant- action are key
Kleinman & Kleinman 96 (Arthur and Joan, Professors of Medical Anthropology and Anthropology at Harvard, “The appeal of
experience; the dismay of images: cultural appropriations of suffering in our times,” Daedalous, 125(1), pg 17-18,, AD: 6-21-09)
But what of the horrors experienced by the little Sudanese girl, who is given neither a name nor a local moral world? The tension of
uncertainty is unrelieved. Only now, with the story of Carter's suicide, the suffering of the representer and the represented interfuses.
Professional representation as well as popular interpretations would have us separate the two: one a powerless local victim, the other a powerful foreign
professional.15 Yet, the account of Carter's suicide creates a more complex reality. The disintegration of the subject/object dichotomy
implicates us all. The theories of a variety of academic professions may help explain how Carter got us into this situation of
bringing the global into the local, but they fail to explain how we will get ourselves out of the moral complexities he has
intensified for us by projecting the local into the global. 16 We are left only with the unsentimentalized limits of the human
condition silence seemingly without meaning, possibly without solace. And still the world calls for images: the mixture of
moral failures and global commerce is here to stay.17
Representations are key to spur action to alleviate suffering and to develop appropriate responses-the
alternative is complacency.
Kleinman & Kleinman 96 (Arthur and Joan, Professors of Medical Anthropology and Anthropology at Harvard, “The appeal
of experience; the dismay of images: cultural appropriations of suffering in our times,” Daedalous, 125(1), pg 17-18, , AD: 6-21-09)
Our critique of appropriations of suffering that do harm does not mean that no appropriations are valid. To conclude that would be
to undermine any attempt to respond to human misery. It would be much more destructive than the problem we have identified;
it would paralyze social action. We must draw upon the images of human suffering in order to identify human needs and to
craft humane responses. Yet, to do so, to develop valid appropriations, we must first make sure that the biases of commercial
emphasis on profit-mak ing, the partisan agendas of political ideologies, and the narrow technical interests that serve primarily
professional groups are understood and their influence controlled. The first action, then, is critical self-reflection on the purposes of
policies and the effects of programs. We take that to be a core component of programs of ethics in the professions. Perhaps a more difficult action is
to lift the veil on the taken-for-granted cultural processes within which those policies and programs, no matter how well intended, are inevitably, and usually
unintentionally, taken up and exploited. The idea that the first impulse of social and health-policy experts should be to historicize the issue before them and to
critique the cultural mechanisms of action at hand goes against the grain of current practice. Nonetheless, that is a chief implication of our analysis. The
starting point of policymakers and program builders needs to be the understanding that they can (and often unwillingly do) do harm.
Because that potential for harm lies latent in the institutional structures that have been authorized to respond to human problems, that work
behind even the best intentioned professionals, "experts" must be held responsible to define how those latent institutional effects can be
controlled.
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AT: Poverty K
Representations of poverty are key to motivate action
Stadler 7 (Dr. Jane, Film and Television Studies-University of Queensland, “Role of the Mass Media in Education and Poverty
Reduction,” Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, http://www.transformationaudit.org.za/research-database/academic-1/other/roleof-the-mass-media-in-education-and-poverty-reduction.pdf/view?searchterm=inequality, AD: 6-18-09)
The social and ethical implications arising from media and communication policies (including the development and dispersal of new
media technologies, the patterns of media ownership, control, and the production of media content emerging from a small range of sources) are of great
magnitude. On the positive side, the media has an important role to play in education, information sharing, democracy and
entertainment, and the responsibilities associated with this role only become greater as the global reach of information expands.
The media is capable of helping to build tolerance and understanding developed through cross-cultural sharing and through the
imagined communities and relationships facilitated by technologies that help to bridge space, time and cultural differences. The
media has the potential to expand the sphere of moral concern by fostering a sense of interconnectedness with people around
the world, and by informing us of the interlinked chains of responsibility to one another, alerting us to the issues faced by
distant others. John B. Thompson states that “In an increasingly interconnected world, the horizons of responsibility extend increasingly to others who are
distant in space and time as well as to a non-human world” (1995:263). Even more so in local media which represents members of our own community who
are not far distant from our own lives, mass communication brings the issues surrounding poverty reduction and education into our
homes and makes these problems a matter for our concern, triggering emotional responses, ethical deliberation and, potentially,
action.
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Reps Don’t shape reality
Focus on representation causes inaction
Taft Kaufman 95 (Jill, Professor, Department of Speech Communication And Dramatic Arts @ Central Michigan University,
“Other ways: Postmodernism and performance praxis,” The Southern Communication Journal, Vol.60, Iss. 3; pg. 222 AD: 6/26/09)
In its elevation of language to the primary analysis of social life and its relegation of the de-centered subject to a set of
language positions, postmodernism ignores the way real people make their way in the world. While the notion of decentering does
much to remedy the idea of an essential, unchanging self, it also presents problems. According to Clarke (1991): Having established the material
quality of ideology, everything else we had hitherto thought of as material has disappeared. There is nothing outside of
ideology (or discourse). Where Althusser was concerned with ideology as the imaginary relations of subjects to the real relations
of their existence, the connective quality of this view of ideology has been dissolved because it lays claim to an outside, a real,
an extra-discursive for which there exists no epistemological warrant without lapsing back into the bad old ways of empiricism
or metaphysics. (pp. 25-26) Clarke explains how the same disconnection between the discursive and the extra-discursive has been
performed in semiological analysis: Where it used to contain a relation between the signifier (the representation) and the
signified (the referent), antiempiricism has taken the formal arbitrariness of the connection between the signifier and signified
and replaced it with the abolition of the signified (there can be no real objects out there, because there is no out there for real objects to be). (p. 26)
To the postmodernist, then, real objects have vanished. So, too, have real people. Smith (1988) suggests that postmodernism has canonized doubt
about the availability of the referent to the point that "the real often disappears from consideration" (p. 159). Real individuals become abstractions. Subject
positions rather than subjects are the focus. The emphasis on subject positions or construction of the discursive self engenders an accompanying critical sense
of irony which recognizes that "all conceptualizations are limited" (Fischer, 1986, p. 224). This postmodern position evokes what Connor (1989) calls
"an absolute weightlessness in which anything is imaginatively possible because nothing really matters " (p. 227). Clarke (1991) dubs
it a "playfulness that produces emotional and/or political disinvestment: a refusal to be engaged" (p. 103). The luxury of being
able to muse about what constitutes the self is a posture in keeping with a critical venue that divorces language from material
objects and bodily subjects.
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Reps Don’t shape reality
Rep focus causes inaction. Reps describe action, they don’t cause it
Taft-Kaufman 95 (Jill, Professor, Department of Speech Communication And Dramatic Arts @ Central Michigan University,
“Other ways: Postmodernism and performance praxis,” The Southern Communication Journal, Vol.60, Iss. 3; pg. 222 AD: 6/26/09)
The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of the
concrete contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible concern
for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial posture and talk of
opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions that have
produced leftist politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern emphasis on new subjects
conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and transportation, as well as to the media that depict them.
Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the
oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this
problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or
activism and as much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has
become a lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial
minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua
non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against the trend . Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in
which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm
of terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke repli I can think of few more striking indicators of the political and intellectual
impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not
to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's
conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous es:....(pp. 2-27)
The realm of the discursive is derived from the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of
ideas or symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the
(Merod,
1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of marginality escape the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are
not overlooked by scholars from marginalized groups. Robinson (1990) for example, argues that "the justice that working people deserve is
economic, not just textual" (p. 571). Lopez (1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content of education or
political action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p. 299). West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist
discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow
(1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power and the realities of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized groups are clear about
how discourse interweaves with the concrete circumstances that create lived experience. People whose lives form the material for postmodern
discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working towards concrete social goals
counter-hegemonic discourse do not share the optimism over the new recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because
such an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective historical and current struggles against racism, sexism,
homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told they are living in a world in which there are no more
real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing the discursive self when a person is hungry and homeless represents both
a cultural and humane failure.
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AT: Reps Ks
Placing representations and discourse first trades off with concrete political change and makes no
difference to those engaged in political struggles.
Taft-Kaufman,
95 Jill Speech prof @ CMU, Southern Comm. Journal, Spring, v. 60, Iss. 3, “Other Ways”, p pq
The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of the concrete
contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible
concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial
posture and talk of opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the
conditions that have produced leftist politics--conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts,
postmodern emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health
care, and transportation, as well as to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries b situation as one which leaves no vision,
will, or commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused
collective or politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo
(1990) echoes Merod and laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or activism and as
much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy
academic substitute for actual engagement with the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial minorities,
white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the "sine
qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern
Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that
threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few
more striking indicators of the political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the discursive.
If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate
contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its projection onto the
rest of the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of b.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their
fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working towards
concrete social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of marginality escape the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are not overlooked by scholars
"the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just textual" (p. 571). Lopez
(1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present
existential, concrete situation" (p. 299). West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist discourses about "Otherness"
blinds us to realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow
(1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power and the realities of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from
marginalized groups are clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete circumstances that create lived experience.
People whose lives form the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse do not share the optimism over the new
recognition of their discursive subjectivities, because such an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective
historical and current struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told
they are living in a world in which there are no more real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing the discursive self when
a person is hungry and homeless represents both a cultural and humane failure.
from marginalized groups. Robinson (1990) for example, argues that
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