***negative***
***politics da
politics – plan popular
(more cards in other file—not-K travel restrictions neg)
The plan is supported by key members of congress like Lugar
The Hill, 9 – (“Skepticism greets bill to lift 50-year-old Cuba travel restrictions” http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/68769-skepticism-greetsbill-to-lift-50-year-old-cuba-travel-ban#ixzz2Yb0vNk47)//ah
It may not quite be time to start planning that trip to Havana. Although President Barack Obama
voiced support during his campaign
for easing travel restrictions to Cuba, a number of House members from his own party on Thursday expressed concern with a bill that
would allow all Americans to visit the island for the first time in 50 years. Proponents remain hopeful that the bill, sponsored by Reps. Bill
Delahunt (D-Mass.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), will pass Congress, given Obama’s stated support for loosening restrictions. Key
members of Congress, like Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, also support lifting the ban. Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, also backs lifting the restriction. He said the ban had done little to effect change in Cuba and noted that the island nation is
the only country Americans are banned from visiting. “Letting U.S. citizens travel to Cuba is not a gift to the Castros — it is in our national interest.
Waiting for a concession from Havana before we do something on behalf of our own citizens perversely puts the Cuban government in charge of that
decision,” Berman said. But several Democrats on the committee on Thursday indicated they were not yet on board. Congress has already eased the
restriction somewhat, allowing Cuban-Americans to travel to Cuba to see relatives. Lawmakers said the United States should hold out lifting all
restrictions to push the Castro regime to make concessions of its own, like releasing all political prisoners. Easing travel restrictions would likely provide
a boost in tourism revenue for Cuba. “Now that we’ve extended the olive branch, it’s time for the Castro regime to respond,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.)
said. Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.)
expressed support for the ban, and Rep. Mike McMahon (DN.Y.) read out the State Department’s travel advisory for his opening statement. The advisory warned to be wary of
traveling to the communist country because of its repression of its own people. Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) said allowing more Americans to visit Cuba
would help encourage democracy to take root there. But he too said the United States should use the ban as a negotiating tool to force more changes from
the island’s government. “Why not use this opportunity to get something out of it?” Scott said. “We need to go to the Castro brothers and say, ‘Let’s make
a deal.’ ” Flake defended his bill, saying the ban was a sanction on Americans, not Cubans. He joked he was elected to be a member of Congress, not “a
travel agent.” The Arizona Republican
said the travel restriction was tamping down on Americans’ freedom and
amounted to an unnecessary intrusion of government into their lives.
politics – plan unpopular
Plans unpopular – embargo lobby and congress ideology
CNN, 13 – (“Jay-Z and Beyoncé's trip to Cuba isn't the problem, the embargo is”, http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/07/opinion/guzman-beyonce-jayz-cuba)//ah
(CNN) -- When does a romantic anniversary trip with your hubby to celebrate five years of marital bliss become an international kerfuffle, complete with
calls for you to be prosecuted for treason? Well, when it's Cuba, where Americans are banned from traveling to for tourism, thanks to
one of the most enduring embargoes in the history of mankind. Yesterday, Beyoncé stopped by ABC's "Good Morning America" and confessed the outcry
over her and Jay Z's trip to Havana was "quite shocking." Welcome to the land of cray cray, Bey. Emotions
run deep, high, and very
bizarre when it comes to the subject of Cuba. When photos of the celebrity couple strolling Havana were released, a political
tumult of epic proportions erupted in Florida. Sen. Marco Rubio and a small band of conservative Cuban-American
politicos released a statement vociferously demanding an investigation of the trip by the president and the Treasury
Department. Sandra Guzman Sandra Guzman One anti-Castro activist went as far as to threaten to file a petition against the celebrity couple to be
formally prosecuted. Hova and Beyoncé's crime? Chilling in Havana. There's little doubt the collateral damage and suffering on both sides of the Florida
Straits -- families divided, innocents killed, fortunes lost -- has been profound. But it's high time we stop the madness and bring sanity to this debate. For
a long time, I've been of the opinion that the Cuban embargo policy in general is for Cubans on the island and the Diaspora to resolve. Those of us who
have not suffered directly should stay out of it and let cubanos figure their way out of this mess. But, what happens when political
views of a few
trample on an entire nation? And, what are the ramifications when these opinions border on the irrational? Beyonce: Cuba was a 'beautiful
trip' Marco Rubio: Jay-Z's Cuba trip 'hypocritical' More Americans are visiting Cuba Should sanctions against Cuba be lifted? The few but very
influential pro-embargo lobby have put a stranglehold on a lucid discussion surrounding Cuba. Five decades of failed
policy later, our nation is being held hostage unable to have a cogent discussion on anything Cuba-related. The U.S.
embargo has not and will not work. Put in place in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, the policy is stuck in a time warp that has nothing to do with
modern-day reality. The most enduring embargo in modern day history is a remnant of a Cold War past when the Soviet Union was the enemy and the
world was on the brink of nuclear war. The thinking was that financial sanctions, which included a ban on travel by American citizens, would collapse the
island economy and force people to revolt against Fidel Castro. Over the years, these sanctions
have been eased or toughened
depending on political winds. In 1992, disgraced New Jersey Rep. Robert Torricelli was behind one the cruelest acts which banned, among
many things, food and medicine sales to Cuba and prevented Cuban-American families from sending cash to their relatives. These were tough times and
seeing many friends and families suffer because they couldn't visit their elderly mothers more than once every three years, or being prevented from
sending them needed supplies, was very painful. Restrictions have eased under President Barack Obama but there is still a major ban. Enter Jay Z and
Beyoncé. It's 2013 and we need to debate Cuban policy earnestly. Members of Congress
must stop the cowardice around the issue
and stop humoring the delusions of passionate folks stuck in the 1960s for political votes and favor. The proembargo folks are ignoring the policy's epic failure and fail to recognize that U.S. policy has played into the hands of the Castro brothers, who have
sinisterly used it to make the case to their people that if Cuba is starving and the island economy can't grow, it's because of this U.S. policy. In 1995, I won
an Emmy for producing a show that explored the Cuban embargo. What was special about the program, "Embargo Contra Cuba," was that it gave an
opportunity for the many different opinions in the Cuban debate to be heard. The voices of everyday Cuban families caught in the quagmire of policies
that make their family members the "enemy" were allowed to surface. These are the folks -- cubanos to the core -- who will tell you, if they had a mic and
a safe forum, that the current U.S. policy is stupid. We hardly hear from these normal cubanos and for that matter, other average Americans on this
issue. That void is tragic. Cuba policy is steeped in dysfunction on both sides. Last week, the State Department denied Fidel Castro's
niece Mariela Castro a visa to travel to Philadelphia to receive an award for her gay activism, no reason given. A State Department official said visa
applications are confidential. Fifty-one years into the policy, another Castro is in power and the island is still communist. The U.S. still trades with
The U.S. still trades with communist Vietnam. We, the hip-hop generation, see right
through the political hypocrisy and we want change. There are some bright lights in Congress giving hope. U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor
communist China despite its human rights violations.
held a news conference after visiting Cuba on a three-day fact-finding trip recently. The Tampa Democrat announced that she found the island has made
economic reforms and called for the United States to promote these positive changes. Castor is part of a new group of audacious politicians, some from
Florida, who are pushing to normalize relations and bring constructive dialogue with Cuba. Obama stands to make history by using his pulpit to
encourage a more sensible dialogue around a Cuba policy that has been futile. I doubt that he'll step into this issue willingly. It
will take gigantic
political cojones to do so and on Cuba, sadly, the president hasn't expressed a willingness to "go there." The best hope for sanity rests on
the voices of reasonable Americans and Cuban-Americans to demand change.
politics – at: link turn
The pro-travel community lacks constituency and support
USCubaPolitics News, 11 – news blog that reports on US Cuba news (“United States Cuba Policy: Cuba Travel? You Are Not Serious”,
JUNE 24, 2011 http://www.uscubapolitics.com/2011/06/united-states-cuba-policy-cuba-travel.html)//ah
Oh really? How will the
pro-travel community ever demonstrate that when it does not organize itself and express itself
politically through the only thing that matters in politics and in Washington DC – votes and money? The Congressmen who voted for that measure in
Committee know two things about U.S. Cuba policy. First, there is a real constituency who wants to strengthen the travel
restrictions and keep the embargo. Second and most importantly, they vote AND they make contributions to candidates
who think just like they do. Kudos go to the embargo PAC. Now how does this operate in the mind of a Congressman? Let’s consider for a
moment that you are Congressman X. On one side you have a constituency that approaches you and tells you “hey, we want to keep the embargo in place
and we do not want travel restrictions to Cuba lifted. We vote and by the way here is a check to your campaign because we want Congressmen who will
stand with us. Be part of freedom and democracy, blah blah blah. We have also helped elect six pro-embargo Cuban American members of Congress and
we have the Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee with us too. “ On the other side you hear from people who call, email, and visit your
office and tell you how positive it will be to open travel to Cuba for all Americans, that we need to end a foreign policy failure, and that we need to unite
Cubans and their families. And after that presentation you hear “Thanks Congressman X”. Now which side of the issue is more serious? Which side is
more committed to their position on the issue? This is how Washington DC works folks. To
make the proposition of supporting travel
restrictions no sweat for the misguided Congressmen who support these insane restrictions, there is no
political downside for them. There is no competition in their districts who will organize against him/her or raise money for his/her opponent
next November. Being for travel restrictions and the embargo is actually safe political bet to play if you are a member of Congress right now. Money
creates perception. Then disaster strikes like this past Thursday and pro-travel supporters go into reactive panic mode. The grassroots
pro-travel side says, “what are we going to do?”, “We don’t have money. “ “I don’t have even $25 to put up and contribute to a political
action committee that will support candidates who will support changing our insane Cuba policies once and for
all.” “I will not support this or that group.” “I don’t like this person or that person, so I won’t get involved.” “I want to do things differently.” “Nonprofits
cannot get political.” – Which is true. But every each and every individual who works for a think tank or a nonprofit who is a U.S. citizen or legal resident
can make a political contribution and can be political. “What good will my $25 do?” Ask President Obama from the 2008 campaign or Michele
Bachmann now (see today’s AP Newstory “Small Checks Drive Michele Bachmann's Big Bucks”) , what the power and the difference lots of little
contributions can make over a few fat ones. You see the pro-embargo side relies on a small group of wealthy hardline Cuban Americans for their political
money. We have thousands more than they do. We are just not organized, yet. What will happen when lets say the 29,000 plus people who say they “like”
the End the Cuba Travel Ban on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/endthetravelban actually backed that up with a contribution of $25 to a political
action committee like the U.S. Cuba Now Political Action Committee, www.uscubanowpac.com ? Or the 400,000 Americans and residents traveling to
Cuba legally actually donated $5 to a political action committee that supports ending the travel ban? Now we’re talking serious political money. Everyone
in Congress or running for Congress will know about this issue and who is really committed. “Who is going to get this money?” Candidates like Jeff Flake
(R-Az) running for the U.S. Senate, who is needed there to stand up to Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez. Jim McGovern (D-Mass) so he can stand up to
Mario Diaz-Balart, David Rivera and Ileana Ros Lehtinen. And others who stand for this issue because they believe in it. They need our help or they
won’t be more of them in the next Congress. There will be more like Diaz Balart and Ros Lehtinen. A political message needs to be sent to these embargo
stalwarts by contributing to the candidates running against them. The
arena where this issue really matters now, in
order to change U.S. Cuba policy.
pro-travel side got slapped in the face on Thursday in the only
the Congress. You see it is going to take more than just phone calls, emails and just being reactive in
***ableism k
ableism – 1nc
The affirmatives conception of movement presupposes the movement of individuals as critical
to freedom –this metaphor incites the norm of ‘able-bodiesness’ and excludes those who do not
fit their ableist paradigm
May and Ferri, 5 - * Vivian M., Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies. Research and Teaching Interests at Syracuse University
**Beth A. Ph.D. Associate Professor School of Education at Syracuse University (“FIXATED ON ABILITY Questioning Ableist Metaphors in Feminist
Theories of Resistance, Prose Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1&2, April-August 2005, pp. 120-140)//ah
In addition to the use of explicitly ableist metaphors, it is equally important to think about how ableism plays out in more implicit ways. In this vein, we
wonder about many of the metaphors
of movement being used in contemporary discourse. Consider this query posed to incite
innovative action toward a more positive future: “What ... if we were to tap into the lifeforce that confers upon us the right to live and
work toward possibility as opposed to remaining paralyzed and dissatisfied...?” (Cervenak et al. 354). A life of possibility, and even the lifeforce
itself, is constructed here in opposition to “paralysis” and dissatisfaction: in other words, being moved to act and live
in fulfilling ways requires a form of movement that is understood in ableist terms. This example is not unique, however.
References to roving subjects, boundary crossers, and migrating subjects abound: is the movement invoked to signal
freedom conceptualized in ways that account for or include disability? Our suspicion is that it is not. Are contemporary
theorists imagining rolling down the road to freedom—or is there an assumption of marching as the authoritative sign of
collective group action? What notions of motility are at use in the idea of crossing borders, leaving home, or exile? What of the ideas of
unrestrained movement at work in the many references to untethered subjectivities or “figures of hybridity and excess [such as the
cyborg]” (Thomson, Integrating 9)? Just as whiteness frequently operates as an unstated/unmarked racial norm (in, for example, analogies between
able-bodiedness continues to operate as the unstated/unnoticed bodily norm both
in analogies to disability and in metaphors for freedom and agency. This dynamic obscures the fact that able-bodied
people are, in fact, embodied and that disabled persons are disenabled by systems of power. Additionally, it denies
the myriad forms of unearned able-bodied privilege accorded to non-disabled persons. The able-bodied or “ambulist” (Keith)
notions of mobility and movement used to define and imagine liberation, resistance, and transformation require
an unstated, but understood, notion of stasis as their figurative, disabled doppelganger. Here, we turn again to our own writing to further illustrate
homophobia and racism (Carbado 291)),
our point. In our discussion of the character Nichole in Atom Egoyan’s film adaption of the novel, The Sweet Hereafter, we analyze Nichole’s newfound
agency, which rests on her astute uses of ableism to refuse sexual exploitation by her father. Yet in our article, we problematically celebrate the scene at
the close of the film when she wheels herself away from the deposition table. Ironically, in analyzing the interdependent nature of ableism and sexism, we
privileged autonomy and a narrow notion of motility as signifiers of freedom and agency (May and Ferri, 145). The
motility that is imagined, in our example and in many others, as signaling freedom, political action or movement, or agency often (directly
or indirectly) constructs disability as a state of being that is dependent, relational, “stuck,” broken, and/or in
need of a cure— in contrast, of course, to the critical or postmodern subject who seems unfettered, on the move, independent, and whole. Such a
framework replicates a troubling figure/ground dichotomy and stymies our ability to rethink diverse modes of
motility, movement, agency, freedom, and subjectivity. Our insights here build on Biddy Martin’s critique of theories that imagine
queer subjectivity and liberation in opposition to the duped and stuck femme character/body. 132 PROSE STUDIESMartin warns against projecting
fixity as a means of imagining liberation (79). She is interested in questioning the binaries of mobility versus stagnation, fluidity versus entrapment, and
we think that these concerns are equally relevant to a feminist disability politics. In addition, she worries about the lure of an existence without limit,
without bodies, and without psyches and asks if this imagined and seemingly seductive existence is politically, ethically, and socially desirable (70). We,
too, would like to ask if feminist scholars really want to be seduced into a future without bodies or a future that continues to malign the body, or
particular bodies, as a “drag” on agency or freedom. After all, should feminist scholars swallow wholesale “the
liberal ideology of autonomy
and independence” (Thomson, Extraordinary 26)? As Iris Marion Young states, “normatively privileging independence ...and
making it a primary virtue of citizenship, implies judging a huge number of people in liberal societies as
less than full citizens.” Moreover, “Holding independence as a norm not only renders dependent people and their caretakers second-class
citizens, but it also tends to make them invisible .... [,] defined outside public social relations, marginalized to a private realm
beyond the interaction of free and full citizens with one another” (125). Finally, this set of norms characterizes only certain kinds
of relations as dependent and prevents us from starting from holding interdependence as a norm and virtue of citizenship.
These corporeal divisions are the foundation of eugenic mass extermination of the Other
Wilson 06 (Daniel J. Wilson, “Cultural Locations of Disability,” October 8, 2006)
In two chapters on the eugenics movement, Snyder and Mitchell ‘analyze eugenics is the hegemonic formation of exclusionary
practices based on scientific formulas of deviancy’ (p. 73). Eugenics, they contend, used the new quantitative studies of
normality to enforce ‘an aesthetic ideology’ (p. 77). This so-called science stigmatized certain bodily differences and
those whose bodies differed from some norm. They point out that eugenicists were guilty of asserting thatit was individuals who needed
fixing rather than the social and cultural environments. The authors also criticize eugenics for using
disabled bodies to learn more about
human biology, for pathologizing difference, and for excluding disabled persons from full membership in the human
community. The authors apply a Foucauldian analysis to the ways in which recent cinema has both contributed to the oppression of the
disabled and challenged the cultural acceptance of disability as deviant and in need of normalization. Recent
documentaries by Fred Wiseman, they write, have properly focused on the ‘lethal and brutal social context’ in which people with disabilities have had to
live (p. 180). Finally, Snyder and Mitchell charge scholars in disability studies with some of the oppressive behaviors they associate with the eugenicists.
In particular, they assert that scholars
oppress people with disabilities through "people-based research practices" where
disabled individuals' time, liberty, and energies are expended without concern or adequate caution' (p. 193). They
conclude with the ‘heretical claim that textually based analysis is the only absolute remedy to the exhaustion of people-based research practices’ (p. 201).
Snyder and Mitchell also analyze selected historical episodes, or ‘cultural
locations’, of the oppression of people with disabilities.
They identify the ways in which disability has been represented as deviant and stigmatized in order
tomarginalize, incarcerate, and eliminate individuals with disabilities. There is no doubt that some normalizing tendencies of
modernizing science and medicine have considered disability as abnormal and in need of repair or elimination.
And thus the alternative is to reject the aff in order to analyze their epistemological
assumptions
Campbell 2003 (Fiona Anne, , 2003, “The Great Divide: Ableism and Technologies of Disability Production”, Dissertation,
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/15889/1/Fiona_Campbell_Thesis.pdf, accessed 6/29/12, JK)
The danger otherwise is to continue to reproduce dominant discourses that represent people with disabilities as
passive victims lacking agency. As such, this doctorate is one way of asserting resistance; it is a ‘transgressive’ piece of
writing (research), which seeks to “interrupt existing ideologies and exploitations of disability”1 (Fine cited in Zarb, 1992: 133). Discourse analysis
is a primary method of epistemological ‘interruption’. As Foucault (1980a: 52) explains, “the exercise of power
perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power”. Foucault once
suggested that his work should be used as “little tool boxes” and this doctorate takes up that offer (Morris, 1979: 115). Amongst other things,
Foucault’s
method of discourse analysis enables an examination into the way ‘disability’ is put into discourse,
acknowledging that the terrain of discourse is itself a site of struggle and competition (Foucault, 1976: 11; Foucault,
1984a: 110). Throughout this doctorate the use of discourse analysis makes transparent the sometimes bloody (but
often hidden and little alluded to) battles of over meaning (and limitations) of the neologism ‘disability’. Foucaultian
discourse analysis can assist in revealing ways ‘disability’ and ‘ableism’ comes to be produced, encoded and
exhibited. Discourse analysis can be undertaken in a threefold manner. Firstly, by examining at the textual
level the way ‘disability’ is put into specific narratives – be they historical or theoretical; secondly, at a discursive level, it
is possible to reveal patterns (uneven as they may be) related to the representation of ‘normative’ corporeal ontologies
and inquire into what has been excluded, minimised, been disqualified or has been considered marginal (Foucault,
1980b: 82); Thirdly, at the level of the social, such analysis enables the operation of sovereign power in the form of
ideology and hegemonic technologies to be revealed exposing liberalism’s figuring of the sovereign ‘individual’
as a fabrication2. In order to name the violence – epistemic, psychic, ontological and physical, experienced by
people whose bodies have been marked as corporeally intolerable or ambiguous, the extrication of discursive
formations can reveal the concealed ‘gaze’ of the ‘underlying subject’ of discourse: the pursuit/conformation of the
phantomological body of the liberal self. I want to show that there is an intrinsic link between the productions of
sovereign selves, ways relationality and embodiment are understood, the figuring of ‘disabled’ bodies, as Othered
and the production of practices of ableism. The task of poststructuralist methodologies is not to look for coherent patterns that can
contribute towards a broad universalist explanatory narrative of disablement, rather the challenge of this doctorate (and poststructuralist
methodologies) is to log, to document, to discern “… the innumerable accidents and myriad twists and turns of human practice …” that continue to
produce and mediate conceptualisations of ableness and disablement (Prior, 2002, 66). In chapter 3, section 3.2.4, a re-reading of the Hebrew Bible call
of Moses and in chapter 6, section 6.3 on the case of Clint Hallam I have departed from a specifically Foucaultian form of discourse analysis. In these
sections, I have adapted methods better suited to the subjects’ disciplinary base, e.g. biblical exegetical analysis (see Brenner, 1997; Brenner and van Dijk
Hemmes, 1993) and media content analysis (see Berelson, 1952; Holsti, 1969; Kellehear, 1993). Of
particular interest is Foucault’s
analytics of power that employs the analysis of ‘dividing practices’4 that facilitate techniques of surveillance
that “function ceaselessly …[wherein]… the gaze is alert everywhere” (Foucault, 1977a: 195). It is the role of
technician’s ‘gaze’ operating within the context of biomedical realism that classifies, monitors, modifies and
documents the ‘unruly’, transforming us into “subjected and practiced … ‘docile’ bodies” (Foucault, 1977a: 138). Taking on
board the conceptual tool of the gaze, this doctorate inverts the usual gaze employed in the study of disability,
namely empirical observations via ableist prisms of those bodies considered as aberrant or pathological.
Instead, my methodological engagements aim to shift the gaze, to invert it, to examine the ways disability is
known by continually returning to and thus focusing our attention on the practices and formations of ableism.
ableism – link – mobility
Connecting mobility and ‘travel’ to cultural values of ‘agency’ and ‘freedom’ reinforces
hegemonic notions of ablebodiness
Imrie, 2k - Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London (Rob, “Disability and discourses of mobility and movement”
Environment and Planning”, 2000, volume 32, pages 1641-1656)/ah
The inequities of mobility
and movement are connected to sociocultural values and practices which prioritise mobile
bodies or those characterised by societally defined norms of health, fitness, and independence of bodily movements. Such bodies are, as Ellis
(2000, page 5) notes, ``naturalised as a biological given'' and projected as ``the legitimate basis of order in a
humanist world''. Illustrative of this are the plethora of metaphors of mobility and movement which are infused with
conceptions of bodily completeness and independence, of the (normal) body far removed from those with physical and mental impairments.
Such representations counterpoise the mobile body to the immobile, the capacitated to the incapacitated, the
abled to the disabled, and the normal to the abnormal. These binary divides reinforce what Oliver (1990) refers to as a
``legacy of negativism'', or values which mark out disabled people as ``problems because they are seen to deviate from the dominant culture's
view of what is desirable, normal, socially acceptable, and safe'' (Corker, 1999, page 20; in addition, see Abberley, 1987; Paterson and Hughes, 1999). In
this paper, I argue that assumptions
of unrestricted movement and mobility in contemporary Western societies are hegemonic
in prioritising specific bodies and modes of mobility and movement.(2) In particular, mobility and movement are defined
through discourses which serve to alienate impaired bodies and to prioritise the movement of what one might term `the mobile body'. In exploring such
ideas, the paper is divided into three parts. The first part is a discussion of the hegemonic discourses of the body in relation to mobility and movement.
This is followed by an empirical exploration, through self-testimonies, of disabled people's e.xperiences of movement and mobility. I conclude by
exploring some of the practical and political possibilities for challenging the hegemonic discourses of the body, mobility, and movement. Most of us
expect to be able to move around the built environment with ease of access and entry into buildings. For Blomley (1994, page 413), ``rights
and
entitlement attached to mobility have long had a hallowed place within the liberal pantheon
and, as such, mobility is part of the democratic revolution''. For instance, in the United States and Canada,
mobility rights are formally enshrined in legislation and mobility is considered as fundamental to the liberty of the human
body. As Hobbes (1996, page 57) has argued, ``liberty or freedom, signifieth, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external
impediments of motion''. This, then, suggests that movement and mobility are intrinsically `good things'; practices which
ought to be propagated as ends in themselves. Others see mobility as a means to an end and a mechanism for opening up opportunities.
For instance, Maat and Louw (1999, page 160) assume that ``mobility gives people the opportunity to develop themselves socially and economically'' and
Marshall (1999, page 4), who says that ``to
be going places is to be getting on'', clearly considers mobility to be a valued
commodity.(3)
Mobility discourse reinforces the hegemonic control of the mobile body
Imrie, 2k - Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London (Rob, “Disability and discourses of mobility and movement”
Environment and Planning”, 2000, volume 32, pages 1641-1656)/ah
Such discourses see disability as a social burden which is a private, not public, responsibility. The impairment
is the focus of concern, and biological intervention and care are seen as the appropriate responses. The
problem of immobility is seen as personal and specific to the impairment; that it is this that needs to be
eradicated, rather than transformations in sociocultural attitudes and practices, if mobility is to be restored. In particular,
political and policy assumptions about mobility and movement are premised on a universal, disembodied subject
which is conceived of as neutered, that is without sex, gender, or any other attributed social or biological characteristic (see Hall, 1996;
Imrie, 1994; Law, 1999; Whitelegg, 1997). The hegemony of what one might term the mobile body is decontextualised from
the messy world of multiple and everchanging embodiments; where there is little or no recognition of bodily differences or
capabilities. The mobile body, then, is conceived of in terms of independence of movement and bodily functions; a
body without physical and mental impairments.
ableism – impact – eugenics
The ideology behind Ableism is the similar to the ideology used by the Nazi's. Ableism will cause
the mass extermination of whoever is considered "abnormal"
Levi and Sherry, 5 (Sandra, Associate Professor at Midwestern University, and mark, dept of sociology at university of Toledo, definitions of
ableism http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/9671_022850_Albrecht_EntriesBeginningWithA.pdf)
Eugenics may be defined as development and improvement of the human race. Eugenic methods include
preventing persons deemed deviant and defective from being born, preventing persons born deviant or
defective from reproducing, and isolating persons deemed deviant and defective through institutionalization or
murder. The systematic killing of disabled children by the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II
illustrates an extreme form of ableist behavior. The identification of the human genome (entire genetic makeup of
human beings) facilitates selective abortion based on ableism. Selective abortion is a contemporary form of eugenics. Societies that
permit abortion for fetuses likely to be born disabled, but do not permit abortion for those likely to be born abled, invalidate the lives of disabled persons.
ableism – impact – oppression
Ableism operates as foundational tactic of oppression that must be resisted
Siebers, 9 - University of Michigan, Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism (Tobin, “The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification”,
Oct 28, Lecture)
Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That oppression involves
“groups,” and not “individuals,” means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always focuses on how the
body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances. Oppression is justified
most often by the attribution of natural inferiority—what some call “in-built” or “biological” inferiority. Natural inferiority is always
somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of
biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the
body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics—not
only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art,
where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed.
One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic examples from the historical record. First, despite
my statement that
disability now serves as the master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other
minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in
oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially
constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the
present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I
want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same
process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. “Racism” disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for
the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. “Sexism” disqualifies on the basis of
sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. “Classism” disqualifies on the basis of
family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. “Ableism” disqualifies on the
basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them as disabilities . The
oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere
convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature.
As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority—and the critiques of
these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression—the prejudice against disability remains
in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will
continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of
disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability
represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority.
ableism – impact – dehumanization
Ablist Language is an act of dehumanization
Anna, 10 (Feminists With Disabilities for a Way Forward, “The Disabled,” June 18, 2010, http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/06/18/awp-thedisabled/, Accessed:7/6/12)
Doug S, it’s
almost like people treat having a disability like it’s this horrible thing, and that people with
disabilities aren’t human. That’s the subtext I see in comments about how all words that describe intellectual disabilities are going to turn
into insults. Of course they are – people treat people with disabilities, mental or physical, like they’re subhuman.
Part of asking people to consider their language (and really – it’s a request. No one can make you not use these words) is asking
them to consider that people with disabilities exist. When I see comment after comment elsewhere saying “I hadn’t even
HEARD of Ablism!”, I wonder where the heck they’ve been hanging out that there are NO progressive people in their circles talking about people with
disabilities. (Then I remember the confusion people look at me at when I go to progressive-focused meetings and ask for things like “wheelchair
accessible” locations, and transcripts of videos for the Deaf. *sigh*) Part of bringing
up the ablist nature of language is
reminding people I would expect to be our natural allies that we exist, we’re not your pity cases, we’re not
here to make you feel better or support whatever notion of “Good Charity” you want. Most of us our living our lives. All we want is
some respect for those lives. Maybe we don’t want to be turned away from voting. Maybe we don’t want to be told that our doctorprescribed medication is banned from our graduation. Maybe we don’t want to be told that if we get a job, we’ll lose all of our benefits that pay for the
care we need to live. Maybe we don’t want to be unable to leave our home because the elevator has been shut down for the next three hours, and no one
thought to warn us. Maybe we want some bloody curb cuts. Maybe
we don’t want to be your go-to insult. Pointing out
ablist language is part of the advocacy of pointing out we exist.
ableism – impact – violence
Ableist conceptions legitimize violence
Goodley, 11 Psychology and Disability professor and Runswick-Cole, Psychology Research Associate; Manchester Metropolitan
University,
[Dan Goodley, and Katherine Runswick-Cole, 2011, Sociology of Health & Illness, “The violence of disablism,” volume: 33,
http://s3.amazonaws.com/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-0713/GqxdylmeDalzCndgChbxDDcxwyiuwnrwbamIgnyileElnygJjxsGoxovmCby/goodley_and_runswick_cole_violence.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJFZA
E65UYRT34AOQ&Expires=1341100909&Signature=n5u9enn1d%2FUFUCp0ipKdk8RJXM8%3D, pg. 8, accessed 7/1/12, JTF]
In the formalised routine of professional assessment this mother is incited to articulate an abnormal version of her child. Parents
have reported
to us many times that often it is less effort and more convenient to explain their children’s health, demeanour,
comportment or behaviour in terms of culturally acceptable disability discourses than to offer more enabling
alternatives. While parents do resist – as we can see in this account above – it is often easy to explain away the ontological
make-up of their children in terms of sticky labels such as ‘oh, he’s being autistic’ or ‘forgive him, he’s ADHD’
or ‘it’s his impairment’, because these are culturally acceptable and expected ways of describing the ontologies of disabled
children. Indeed, as Reeve (2002, 2008) and Thomas (1997, 2007) have noted, these cultural discourses (‘out there’ in the social world)
inform internalised conversations about disability (‘in there’ of the psychological worlds of disabled children and their families).
These cultural expectations threaten to promote ontological attacks on disabled people: viciously othering and
marking the beings of disabled children and their families. The responses of non-disabled others to disabled children
and their families described in the accounts above are not responses of demonic, violent, bad nor evil others. They are responses perfectly
compatible with a culture of disablism that pathologises difference, individualises impairment and maintains
ableism. This culture appears to equate proper care for disabled children with that of full time mothering. This culture places educational, health and
social care professionals who work with disabled children in often low paid, high pressured and exacting conditions of employment. This culture has
clear sight of what makes for normal childhood and what constitutes abnormality. Our view, then, is that these
accounts of psychoemotional
violence take place in cultures and systems. We follow Zizek’s (2008: 53) point that attending only to subjective violence – enacted by
social agents or evil individuals – ignores the more systemic roots of violence. We move our analysis up a notch to systemic violence.
Violence against people with disabilities reflects the violent culture of society as a whole.
Goodley, Psychology and Disability professor and Runswick-Cole, Psychology Research
Associate; Manchester Metropolitan University, 11
[Dan Goodley, and Katherine Runswick-Cole, 2011, Sociology of Health & Illness, “The violence of disablism,” volume: 33,
http://s3.amazonaws.com/files.posterous.com/temp-2011-0713/GqxdylmeDalzCndgChbxDDcxwyiuwnrwbamIgnyileElnygJjxsGoxovmCby/goodley_and_runswick_cole_violence.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJFZA
E65UYRT34AOQ&Expires=1341100909&Signature=n5u9enn1d%2FUFUCp0ipKdk8RJXM8%3D, pg. 3, accessed 6/30/12, JTF]
Shakespeare’s reflexive account captures the multi-faceted nature of the violence of disablism. He asks, when does hate crime begin and bullying stop?
How can we separate ignorance and hatred? Is
violence against disabled people deeply ingrained in the psyches, social
relationships and cultural practices of members of contemporary society? In this article we consider the ways in which
violence against disabled people – specifically children and their families – reflects a trenchant dimension of culture; in this case disablist culture.
Drawing, in part, on Zizek’s (2008) book Violence, we come to the conclusion that violence
experienced by disabled children and their
families says more about the dominant culture of disablism, and its effects upon the subjectivities of people,
than it does of the acts of a few seemingly irrational, mad, bad or mean violent individuals. Those that enact
violence against disabled children should be understood in ways that recognise that the being of people is a
sociosymbolic or culturally formed being (Zizek 2008: 62). Disabled people experience violence because of
contemporary society’s deeply held contradictory discourses about disability. While Shakespeare (2010), did not want to
think that the protagonists of hate crime could be so vile, we did not want to think that acts against disabled children reflected common circulating
practices of a contemporary culture of disablism. Sadly, accounts from our research suggest that we were wrong
ableism – alt – discourse analysis
Discourse analysis resolves ableism
Oliver, 12 -Professor of Disability Studies University of Greenwich, London (Mike, “Politics and Language: Understanding the Disability Discourse”
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/Oliver/politics%20and%20lang%20oliver.pdf)//ah
In order to fully understand this in respect of policy and practice, it is necessary to further develop the concept
of 'discourse'. The French philosopher Foucault (1973) suggests that the way we talk about the world and the way we
experience it are inextricably linked -the names we give to things shapes our experience of them and our
experience of things in the world influences the names we give to them. This concept and its relationship to language has been
described as follows; "Discourse is about more than language. Discourse is about the interplay between language and
social relationships, in which some groups are able to achieve dominance for their interests in the way in which
the world is defined and acted upon. Such groups include not only dominant economic classes, but also men within patriarchy, and white
people within the racism of colonial and post-colonial societies, as well as professionals in relation to service users. Language is a central aspect of
discourse through which power is reproduced and communicated". (Hugman 1991.37) A good example of this in respect of policy is the way the
discourse of caring has been central to recent attempts to close down long-stay institutions of all kinds. In linking
language to politics through the notion of discourse, Ignatieff argues that the discourse of welfare provision which emphasises compassion, caring and
altruism, is inappropriate when applied to a second discourse, that of citizenship "The
language of citizenship is not properly about
compassion at all, since compassion is a private virtue which cannot be legislated or enforced. The practice of
citizenship is about ensuring everyone the entitlements necessary to the exercise of their liberty. As a political question, welfare is about rights, not
caring, and the history of citizenship has been the struggle to make freedom real, not to tie us all in the leading strings of therapeutic good intentions".
(Ignatieff 1989.72) Hence the
linking of caring to welfare has unfortunate consequences because it has served to deny
people their entitlements as citizens. "The pell-mell retreat from the language of justice to the language of caring is perhaps the most
worrying sign of the contemporary decadence of the language of citizenship...Put another way, the history of citizenship of entitlement is
a history of freedom, not primarily a history of compassion". (Ignatieff 1989.72) Thus the very language of welfare provision serves
to deny disabled people the right to be treated as fully competent, autonomous individuals, as active citizens. Care in the community, caring for people,
providing services through care managers and care workers all structure the welfare discourse in particular ways and imply a particular view of disabled
people. As early as 1986, disabled people in response to the Audit Commission’s critical review of community care, were arguing for an abandonment of
such patronizing and dependency creating language (BCODP 1986). Organisations controlled and run by disabled people including the BCODP, the
Spinal Injuries Association and the newly formed European Network on Independent Living have already begun to move to a language of entitlement
emphasizing independent living, social support and the use of personal assistants. One could provide a similar analysis of the emergence of the term
‘special’ in education. Arising from the concern of the Warnock Committee (DES 1978) to de-medicalise the education of ‘handicapped children’, as they
were then called, special was the label chosen to refer to the kinds of provision these children (who were themselves re-defined as having learning
difficulties) would need. There were three reasons for this change in language; firstly to try to replace negative labels (‘delicate’, ‘sub-normal’ etc) with
more positive ones; secondly to switch the focus from the child’s medical to their educational needs; and thirdly, to provide a linguistic basis to enable
both the provision and practice of special education to continue. In the terms used earlier, it could be said that the Warnock Report tried to change the
discourse of special education from a medical to an educational one. It tried and failed for exactly the same reason that the discourse of care in the
community failed; there are fundamentally incompatibilities between care and entitlements, between special and ordinary which make both provision
and practice contemporaneously difficult and ultimately impossible. Testament to this are the personal experiences of 'special people' "All my life I have
known that I was 'different' -special even -because that 'fact' has been brought home to me by the reactions of people around me. They either go out of
their way to be nice to me, ignore me, or go out of their way to be awful to me, and it took me a long, long time to realise that these reactions were not
necessarily to do with the kind of person I was, rather with what people assumed I was". (Gradwell 1992.17) Further, it has been argued that this
change to a discourse of the special has also failed at the policy level because "The phrase 'special educational
needs', for example, frequently justifies the separation of disabled children from non-disabled children into
segregated special schools". (Barnes 1993.8) Before going on to talk about the political implications of this, there is
one further point needs to be made explicitly to be against the discourse of caring in welfare or special needs in
educational provision is not to be against caring or against welfare or against education. It is to argue that such
discourses are an inappropriate basis to develop a proper discourse of welfare provision and professional
practice and that the language of the special is an inappropriate basis to develop a proper discourse about
schools and teaching. 5. Politics and the power of language Politics is not just about voting, every so often but at the micro-level it is about the
exercise of power in a range of personal and social relationships. As far as I am aware there have been no empirical studies of the micro-politics of the
discourse of the special in education, but there has been an important study of discourse in probation practice. It asserts that "Language is fundamental
to the work of probation officers, whose task is to extract the 'truth' surrounding criminal behaviour from a number of sources including the defendant,
other social workers, official records, reports, the medical profession and the police.
From this variety of different and competing
discourses, an official explanation of offending is assembled and a 'treatment' plan produced, which will have
legitimacy in court. The linguistic rules of engagement require the probation officer to collate and translate
explanations of unlawful behaviour into codes recognisable to official judicial bodies". (Denney 1992.135) In this Unit I
have been asked not to set you any exercises but a few minutes rewriting the above quote as a special education rather than a probation discourse will
illustrate the role that language can play in maintaining particulate sets of power relationships between professionals and their … The reason for the gap
is to emphasise that we do not have a language which enables us to talk about such relationships in ways that are not structured by hierarchies and
power: for example, doctor-patient; teacher-pupil; social worker-client; lecturer-student; and most recently provider-user. Denney, following postmodernist theorists, suggests that part of the solution to this problem is deconstruction. "The
deconstruction of official discourse could
provide the beginnings of a process that penetrates dominant and discriminatory conventions ". (Denney 1992.135)
But deconstruction may make the problem disappear altogether. Hart (1994), in an as yet unpublished study of special needs practice, draws attention to
the position taken by the National Commission on Education (1993) that 'flexibility to respond to individual pupils' difficulties may in future prove more
successful than maintaining a separate category of "special" need. While coming to the conclusion that maintaining the term 'special' is untenable, she
warns "... that simply to dispense with a concept of 'special' education, now that the distinction has been acknowledged to be untenable, would not serve
the best interests of children. The former distinction needs to be replaced by a new distinction of quite a different order, which will help to establish and
articulate a convincing alternative to individual-deficit ways of conceptualising and pursuing concerns about children's learning" . (Hart 1994.270) What
this is drawing attention to is the inescapable fact that language and its use is not just a semantic issue; as has already been argued, it is a political issue
as well. And a political issue at the macro-level. Probably the best example of the macropolitics of language is the struggle of deaf people over the
centuries to keep their own (sign) language alive. Ladd (1990.10) refers to this as 'a battle between cultures that has parallel in those battles with
aboriginal and other native cultures'. In a recent contribution to the debate between the World Health Organisation and organisations of disabled people
over their international classification scheme (Wood 1980), I make a similar point about the macro-politics of language, trying to draw parallels between
the struggles of disabled people to control the language that is used to describe and classify us, with similar struggles by other oppressed groups. "The
imposition of colonial languages on the natives, Oxford English on the regions, sexist language on women, racist language on black people, spoken
language on deaf people, and so on, are all forms of cultural domination. Pidgin, dialects, slang, anti- sexist and anti-racist language and sign language
are not, therefore, quaint and archaic forms of language use but forms of cultural resistance". (Oliver 1989) One final point needs to be made about the
political function of language. It
is not enough to realise that language is a political issue simply in an overt sense of the
word. Politics as the exercise of power is sometimes as much about keeping things off the political agenda as it
is about ensuring that they are debated (Lukes 1974). Thus the point about language is that it may sometimes serve to obscure or mystify
issues - even the language rights as Hall graphically reminds us "... the language of rights is frequently deployed to obscure and mystify this fundamental
basis which rights have in the struggle between contending social forces. It constantly abstracts rights from their real historical and social context,
ascribes them a timeless universality, speaks of them as if they were 'given' rather than won and as if they were given once-and-for-all, rather than having
to be constantly secured". (Hall 1979.8) Hall is also making the important point that rights are never one for all time; women and gay men and lesbians
have seen some of their legal rights disappear in recent years and many women would argue that their social rights to use public transport after dark no
longer exist. The discourse of rights, both human and civil, has played a major role in disability politics in recent years and this requires us to broaden
our understanding of the issues in fundamental ways. To begin with, our current segregative practices and segregated provision, which continue to
dominate the education of disabled children, have to be seen for what they are; the denial of rights to disabled people in just the same way as others are
denied their rights in other parts of the world. As I wrote in a review of a recent re-appraisal of special education. "The lessons of history through the
segregation of black people in the United States and current struggles to end segregation in South Africa have shown this to be so. To write as if
segregation in schools, or from public transport systems or from public spaces or inter-personal interactions in our own society is somehow different, is
to de- politicise the whole issue ". (Oliver 1991) What is both interesting and unfortunate about the integration/segregation discourse in the area of
education however, has been its narrowness, both in terms of its failure to see integration as anything other than a technical debate about the quality of
educational provision. Its failure to explicitly develop any connections with other debates about segregation of, for example, disabled from public
transportation systems, of black people in South Africa, of blind people from public information, or of the poor from major parts of our cities, has been a
major omission. An important reason for this is that legislation, as a concept, has been taken over by politicians, policy makers, professionals and
academics, who have discussed and debated it, divorced from the views of disabled people themselves. Even
my own discipline of sociology,
which has a justifiable reputation for criticising everything in sight including itself, has focused little on the
exclusion of disabled people from society and its institutions (Oliver 1990).
ableism – alt – rhetoric
reject their speech act - Ableism must be challenged at the level of rhetoric
Cherney, 11 Wayne State University, Department of Communications, Assistant Professor (James L, 2011, Disability Studies
Quarterly, “The Rhetoric of Ableism”,Vol 31, No 3, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1665/1606, accessed 7-4-12 FFF)
I analyze ableism as a rhetorical problem for three reasons. First, ableist culture sustains and
perpetuates itself via rhetoric; the ways of interpreting disability and assumptions about bodies that produce
ableism are learned. The previous generation teaches it to the next and cultures spread it to each other through modes of intercultural exchange.
Adopting a rhetorical perspective to the problem of ableism thus exposes the social systems that keep it alive. This informs my second reason for
viewing ableism as rhetoric, as revealing how it thrives suggests ways of curtailing its growth and promoting its demise. Many
In this essay
of the strategies already adopted by disability rights activists to confront ableism explicitly or implicitly address it as rhetoric. Public demonstrations,
countercultural performances, autobiography, transformative histories of disability and disabling practices, and critiques of ableist films and novels all
apply rhetorical solutions to the problem. Identifying
ableism as rhetoric and exploring its systems dynamic reveals how
these corrective practices work. We can use such information to refine the successful techniques, reinvent those that fail, and
realize new tactics. Third, I contend that any means of challenging ableism must eventually encounter its rhetorical
power. As I explain below, ableism is that most insidious form of rhetoric that has become reified and so widely
accepted as common sense that it denies its own rhetoricity—it "goes without saying." To fully address it we must
name its presence, for cultural assumptions accepted uncritically adopt the mantle of "simple truth" and
become extremely difficult to rebut. As the neologism "ableism" itself testifies, we need new words to reveal the places it resides and new
language to describe how it feeds. Without doing so, ableist ways of thinking and interpreting will operate as the context
for making sense of any acts challenging discrimination, which undermines their impact, reduces their
symbolic potential, and can even transform them into superficial measures that give the appearance of change
yet elide a recalcitrant ableist system.
ableism – alt – solvency
Ableism requires a shift in orientation, to realize ones everyday ableist ways
Cherney, Wayne State University, Department of Communications, Assistant Professor 11(James L,
2011, Disability Studies Quarterly, “The Rhetoric of Ableism”,Vol 31, No 3, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1665/1606, accessed 7-4-12 FFF)
Recognizing ableism requires a shift in orientation, a perceptual gestalt framed by the filter of the term
"ableism" itself. The same texts that broadcast "Ableism!" to those oriented to perceive it are usually read innocently even when viewed from a
liberal, humanitarian, or progressive perspective. Ableism is so pervasive that it is difficult to identify until one begins to
interrogate the governing assumptions of well-intentioned society. Within the space allowed by these rhetorical
premises, ableism appears natural, necessary, and ultimately moral discrimination required for the normal
functioning of civilization. Consider a set of stairs. An ableist culture thinks little of stairs, or even sees them as elegant architectural
devices—especially those grand marble masterpieces that elevate buildings of state. But disability rights activists see stairs as a
discriminatory apparatus—a "no crips allowed" sign that only those aware of ableism can read—that makes
their inevitable presence around government buildings a not-so-subtle statement about who belongs in our
most important public spaces. But the device has become so accepted in our culture that the idea of stairs as
oppressive technology will strike many as ludicrous. Several years ago when I began to study ableism, a professor—unconvinced of the
value of the project—questioned my developing arguments by pointing to a set of steps and exclaiming, "Next you'll be telling me that those stairs
discriminate!" He was right.
The professor's surprise suggests that commonplace cultural assumptions support themselves because the very arguments available against them seem
unwarranted and invalid. Interrogating stairs was such an outrageous idea that a simple reductio ad absurdum argument depicted the critique of ableism
As an ingrained part of the interpretive frameworks sanctioned by culture, ableism gets reinforced by
the everyday practice of interpreting and making sense of the world. Using this idea of what ableism does at the intersection of
as a fallacy.
rhetoric and ideology, I next develop a way of understanding how it operates. I argue that this way of conceiving ableist thinking as rhetorical practice
identifies potential approaches for challenging ableism.
ableism – at: framework
As students participating in policy debates we have an obligation to put disability at the center
of our discussion because what we debate about here says a lot about human conduct on a
larger scale – this is not a meta-theoretical quibble but central to change the way that disability
is represented and conceived
Bérubé, 2003 (Michael, Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, “Citizenship and Disability”, Spring,
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=506)
It is striking, nonetheless, that so few leftists have understood disability in these terms. Disability is not the
only area of social life in which the politics of recognition are inseparable from the politics of redistribution;
other matters central to citizenship, such as immigration, reproductive rights, and criminal justice, are every
bit as complex. Nonetheless, our society's representations of disability are intricately tied to, and sometimes
the very basis for, our public policies for "administering" disability. And when we contemplate, in these terms,
the history of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities, we find a history in which "representation"
takes on a double valence: first, in that people who were deemed incapable of representing themselves were
therefore represented by a socio-medical apparatus that defined—or, in a social-constructionist sense,created—
the category of "feeblemindedness"; and second, in the sense that the visual and rhetorical representations of
"feebleminded" persons then set the terms for public policy. One cannot plausibly narrate a comprehensive
history of ideas and practices of national citizenship in the post-Civil War United States without examining
public policy regarding disability, especially mental disability, all the more especially when mental disability
was then mapped onto certain immigrant populations who scored poorly on intelligence tests and were thereby
pseudo-scientifically linked to criminality. And what of reproductive rights? By 1927, the spurious but powerful linkages among
disability, immigration, poverty, and criminality provided the Supreme Court with sufficient justification for declaring involuntary sterilization legal
under the Constitution. THERE IS AN obvious reason why disability rights are so rarely thought of in terms of civil rights: disability was not covered in
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And as Anita Silvers points out, over the next twenty-five years, groups covered by civil rights law sometimes saw disability
rights as a dilution of civil rights, on the grounds that people with disabilities were constitutively incompetent, whereas women and minorities faced
discrimination merely on the basis of social prejudice. Silvers writes, "[t]o make disability a category that activates a heightened legal shield against
exclusion, it was objected, would alter the purpose of legal protection for civil rights by transforming the goal from protecting opportunity for socially
exploited people to providing assistance for naturally unfit people." The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 did add disability
to the list of stigmatized identities covered by antidiscrimination law, but thus far the ADA has been interpreted so narrowly, and by such a businessfriendly judiciary, that employers have won over 95 percent of the suits brought under the act. Perhaps if plaintiffs with disabilities had won a greater
number of cases over the past thirteen years, the conservative backlash against the ADA-currently confined to a few cranks complaining about
handicapped parking spaces and a wheelchair ramp at a Florida nude beach-would be sufficiently strong as to spark a movement to repeal the law
altogether. But then again, perhaps
if the law were read more broadly, more Americans would realize their potential
stake in it. In 1999, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled on three lower-court cases in which people with "easily correctable" disabilities—high
blood pressure, nearsightedness—were denied employment. In three identical 7-2 decisions, the Court found that the plaintiffs had no basis for a suit
under the ADA precisely because their disabilities were easily correctable. As disability activists and legal analysts quickly pointed out, this decision left
these plaintiffs in the ridiculous situation of being too disabled to be hired but somehow not disabled enough to be covered by the ADA; or, to put this
another way, plaintiffs' "easily correctable" disabilities were not so easily correctable as to allow them access to employment. One case involved twin
sisters who were denied the opportunity to test as pilots for United Airlines on the grounds that their eyesight did not meet United's minimum vision
requirement (uncorrected visual acuity of 20/100 or better without glasses or contacts) even though each sister had 20/20 vision with corrective lenses
(Sutton v. United Airlines, Inc.); another involved a driver/mechanic with high blood pressure (Murphy v. United Parcel Service); the third involved a
truck driver with monocular vision (20/200 in one eye) who in 1992 had received a Department of Transportation waiver of the requirement that truck
drivers have distant visual acuity of 20/40 in each eye as well as distant binocular acuity of 20/40 (Albertson's, Inc. v. Kirkingburg). Because, as Silvers
argues, "litigation under the ADA commonly turns on questions of classification rather than access," all three plaintiffs were determined to have no
standing under the law. The question of whether any of them was justly denied employment was simply not addressed by the Court. Indeed, in writing
her opinion for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor explicitly refused to consider the wider question of "access," noting that 160 million
Americans would be covered by the ADA if it were construed to include people with "easily correctible" disabilities (under a "health conditions
approach"), and since Congress had cited the number 43 million in enacting the law, Congress clearly could not have intended the law to be applied more
widely. "Had Congress intended to include all persons with corrected physical limitations among those covered by the Act, it undoubtedly would have
cited a much higher number of disabled persons in the findings," wrote O'Connor. "That it did not is evidence that the ADA's coverage is restricted to
only those whose impairments are not mitigated by corrective measures." It is possible to object that O'Connor's decision was excessively literalist, and
that the potential number of Americans covered by the ADA is, in any case, quite irrelevant to the question of whether a woman can fly a plane when
she's got her glasses on. But I've since come to believe that the literalism of the decision is an indirect acknowledgment of how broad the issues at stake
here really are. If the ADA were understood as a broad civil rights law, and if it were understood as a law that potentially pertains to the entire population
of the country, then maybe disability law would be understood not as a fringe addition to civil rights law but as its very fulfillment. Rights
created, reinterpreted, extended, and revoked. The passage of the ADA should therefore be seen as an
extension of the promise of democracy, but only as a promise: any realization of the potential of the
can be
law depends on its continual reinterpretation. For the meaning of the word, just as Wittgenstein wanted us to believe (in order that we
might be undeceived about how our words work), lies in its use in the language. Similarly, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975
(originally the Education for All Handicapped Children Act) was not some kind of breakthrough discovery whereby children with disabilities were found
to be rights-bearing citizens of the United States after all, and who knew that we'd had it all wrong for 199 years? On the contrary, the IDEA invented a
new right for children with disabilities, the right to a "free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment." And yet the IDEA did
not wish that right into being overnight; the key terms "appropriate" and "least restrictive" had to be interpreted time and again, over the course of
fifteen years, before they were understood to authorize "full inclusion" of children with disabilities in "regular" classrooms. Nothing
about the
law is set in stone. The only philosophical "foundation" underlying the IDEA and its various realizations is our
own collective political will, a will that is tested and tested again every time the Act comes up for
reauthorization. Jamie Bérubé currently has a right to an inclusive public education, but that right is neither
intrinsic nor innate. Rather, Jamie's rights were invented, and implemented slowly and with great difficulty.
The recognition of his human dignity, enshrined in those rights, was invented. And by the same token, those
rights, and that recognition, can be taken away. While I live, I promise myself that I will not let that happen,
but I live with the knowledge that it may: to live any other way, to live as if Jamie's rights were somehow
intrinsic, would be irresponsible. Of course, many of us would prefer to believe that our children have intrinsic
human rights and human dignity no matter what; irrespective of any form of human social organization;
regardless of whether they were born in twentieth-century Illinois or second-century Rome or seventh-century
central Asia. But this is just a parent's—or a philosophical foundationalist's-wishful thinking. For what would it
mean for Jamie to "possess" rights that no one on earth recognized? A fat lot of good it would do him. My
argument may sound either monstrous or all too obvious: if, in fact, no one on earth recognized Jamie's human
dignity, then there would in fact be no human perspective from which he would be understood to possess
"intrinsic" human dignity. And then he wouldn't have it, and so much the worse for the human race. In one respect,
the promise of the IDEA, like the promise of the ADA, is clear: greater inclusion of people with disabilities in the social worlds of school and work. But in
another sense the promise is unspecifiable; its content is something we actually cannot know in advance. For the IDEA does not merely guarantee all
children with disabilities a free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. Even more than this, it grants the right to education in
order that persons with disabilities might make the greatest possible use of their other rights-the ones having to do with voting, or employment
discrimination, or with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. IDEA is thus designed to enhance the capabilities of all American children with
disabilities regardless of their actual abilities-and this is why it is so profound a democratic idea. Here again I'm drawing on Nancy Fraser, whose theory
of democracy involves the idea of "participatory parity," and the imperative that
a democratic state should actively foster the
abilities of its citizens to participate in the life of the polity as equals. Fraser's work to date has not addressed disability, but as I
noted above, it should be easy to see how disability is relevant to Fraser's account of the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution. This
time, however, I want to press the point a bit harder. Fraser writes as if the promise of democracy entails the promise to enhance participatory parity
among citizens, which it does, and she writes as if we knew what "participatory parity" itself means, which we don't. (This is why the promise of disability
rights is unspecifiable.) LET ME EXPLAIN. First, the idea of participatory parity does double duty in Fraser's work, in the sense that it names both the
state we would like to achieve and the device by which we can gauge whether we're getting there. For in order to maintain a meaningful democracy in
which all citizens participate as legal and moral equals, the state needs to judge whether its policies enhance equal participation in democratic processes.
Yet at the same time, the
state needs to enhance equal participation among its citizens simply in order to determine
what its democratic processes will be. This is not a meta-theoretical quibble. On the contrary, the point is
central to the practical workings of any democratic polity. One of the tasks required of democrats is precisely
this: to extend the promise of democracy to previously excluded individuals and groups some of whom might
have a substantially different understanding of "participatory parity" than that held by previously dominant
groups and individuals. Could anything make this clearer than the politics of disability? Imagine a building in
which political philosophers aredebating, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the value and the
purpose of participatory parityover against forms of authoritarianism or theocracy. Now imagine that this
building has no access ramps, no Braille or large-print publications, no American Sign Language interpreters,
no elevators, no special-needs paraprofessionals, no in-class aides. Contradictory as such a state of affairs may
sound, it's a reasonably accurate picture of what contemporary debate over the meaning of democracy actually
looks like. How can we remedy this? Only when we have fostered equal participation in debates over the ends
and means of democracy can we have a truly participatory debate over what "participatory parity" itself
means. That debate will be interminable in principle, since our understandings of democracy and parity are
infinitely revisable, butlest we think of deliberative democracy as a forensic society dedicated to empyreal
reaches of abstraction, we should remember that debates over the meaning of participatory parity set the terms
for more specific debates about the varieties of human embodiment. These include debates about prenatal
screening, genetic discrimination, stem-cell research, euthanasia, and, with regard to physical access, ramps,
curb cuts, kneeling buses, and buildings employing what is now known as universal design. Leftists and
liberals, particularly those associated with university humanities departments, are commonly charged with
being moral relativists, unable or unwilling to say (even after September 11) why one society might be "better"
than another. So let me be especially clear on this final point. I think there's a very good reason to extend the
franchise, to widen the conversation, to democratize our debates, and to make disability central to our
theories of egalitarian social justice. The reason is this: a capacious and supple sense of what it is to be human
is better than a narrow and partial sense of what it is to be human, and the more participants we as a society
can incorporate into the deliberation of what it means to be human, the greater the chances that that
deliberation will in fact be transformative in such a way as to enhance our collective capacities to recognize
each other as humans entitled to human dignity. As Jamie reminds me daily, both deliberately and unwittingly,
most Americans had no idea what people with Down syndrome could achieve until we'd passed and
implemented and interpreted and reinterpreted a law entitling them all to a free appropriate public education
in the least restrictive environment. I can say all this without appealing to any innate justification for human
dignity and human rights, and I can also say this: Without a sufficient theoretical and practical account of
disability, we can have no account of democracy worthy of the name. Perhaps some of our fellow citizens with
developmental disabilities would not put the argument quite this way; even though Jamie has led me to think
this way, he doesn't talk the way I do. But those of us who do participate in political debates,whether about
school funding in a specific district or about the theory and practice of democracy at its most abstract, have the
obligation to enhance the abilities of our children and our fellow citizens with disabilities to participate
in the life of the United States as political and moral equals with their nondisabled peers-both for their own
good, and for the good of democracy, which is to say, for the good of all of us.
Because Debate is a scholastic activity grounded in public discourse and critical thinking, this
must be a Voting Issue
Ben-Moshe, 5 Ph.D. student in Sociology, Disability Studies and Women Studies at Syracuse University 5 (Liat,, “Lame Idea”: Disabling
Language in the Classroom,” in Building Pedagogical Curb Cuts: Incorporating Disability into the University Classroom and Curriculum,
Http://www.syr.edu/gradschool/pdf/resourcebooksvideos/Pedagogical%20Curb%20Cuts.pdf)
When we use terms like “retarded,” “lame” or “blind”— even if we are referring to acts or ideas and not to people at all—
we perpetuate the stigma associated with disability. By using a label which is commonly associated with
disabled people to denote a deficiency, a lack or an ill-conceived notion, we reproduce the oppression of people
with disabilities. As educators, we must be aware of the oppressive power of “everyday” language and try to
change it. False Beliefs Contained in Disabling Phrases We learn about disability through everyday use of language. In the
same way that racist or sexist attitudes, whether implicit or explicit, are acquired through the “normal”
learning process, so too are negative assumptions about disabilities and the people who are labeled as having
them. Our notions of people who are blind, deaf or labeled as mentally retarded come into play when we use disabling phrases, and these notions are
usually far from accurate. They do not convey the complexity of living in a society that regards people with disabilities as the Other on the basis of
perceived mentally or bodily difference. The
use of disability as a metaphor perpetuates false beliefs about the nature of
impairment and disability. People who are blind, for example, do not lack in knowledge; they simply have different ways of obtaining it.
Paralysis does not necessarily imply lack of mobility, stagnancy or dependence since there are augmentative instruments, such as wheelchairs and
personal aids, that secure independence and mobility. The
continued use of disabling language in the classroom perpetuates
ignorance and misconceptions in regards to the lived experience of people with disabilities. Power Relations in the
Classroom As Marxists, feminists and anti-racist activists and scholars have claimed for decades, the world is viewed
mostly from the perspective of the rulers, and language is created in their image as well. Therefore, we must
not be surprised that the use of disabling language not only persists, but is neither contested nor
acknowledged. Disabling language is language that accepts the assumption that disabilities are bad,
unfortunate or denote lack/deficiency; that they are invisible and insignificant to society as a whole; and that
disabilities belong to the Other and are distinct from what we would term as normal. What this language hides is that
there is a power struggle of definitions, that normalcy is culturally determined and ever-changing, and that there are more people who are defined as
having disabilities than we acknowledge. The question that disability activists and scholars are asking is not who is disabled, but who gets to be defined
as blind, mentally retarded or crippled and under what power relations? Using
an oppressive abelist language to denote deficiency
reproduces the same hierarchy and power relations in the classroom, and renders these phrases
unproblematic. Disability is not a metaphor. It is an identity. Using disability as a metaphor to represent only
negative aspects of a situation is problematic. It is made worse by the fact that blindness, deafness, paralysis, etc., are not floating
signifiers, but have real referents behind them—people with disabilities. When using disabling language, we do not only de-value
the lived experience of people with disabilities, but we also appropriate these lived experiences for our own use .
Traditional Policy making essentializes the diverse states of the “disabled”
Imrie University of London Geography Professor 2000
(Rob Imrie, January 6, 2000 Environment and Planning A 2000, volume 32, Disability and discourses of
mobility and movement http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=a331 pg. 1645-1646 accessed 7-6-12 BC)
Such observations are apt in relation to the ways in which disabled people's mobility needs are conceived of by
policymakers, where there is a tendency to categorise disabled people's corporeality in essentialist terms. As
previous research suggests, it is commonplace for disabled people to be defined as having walking difficulties or an
impairment that confines them to a wheelchair (Imrie, 1996). These definitions are problematical because they
fail to recognise the diversity of physical and mental impairments and the often conflicting and different
mobility needs of different categories of (disabled) people (Imrie, 1996).They also have the potential to reduce the
provision of modes of mobility to particular types which might, as a consequence, be inattentive to the corporeal diversity of
disabled people. Thus, although it is common for public buildings to provide ramps to facilitate wheelchair access, it is less so to
see signage, texture, or colour coding of a type which provides ease of sight, direction, and communication to vision-impaired
people and those with learning difficulties (see Imrie, 1996; Royal National Institute for the Blind, 1995).
ableism – at: perm
The permutation is the exact footnoting of the disabled that we criticize --- questions of the
disabled Other must precedetheir advocacy or it’s doomed to fail
Campbell 09 (Dr. Fiona Kumari Campbell, Griffith University, Law School Faculty, “Disability Advocacy & Ableism: Towards a Re-Discovery of
the Disability Imagination,” November 2009,http://www.academia.edu/196555/Disability_Advocacy_and_Ableism_Towards_a_rediscovery_of_the_disability_Imagination)
Working models (often called conceptual frameworks) are
very important as they help us work out which questions to ask,
help us interpret and process things and events. We all have conceptual frameworks that shape our beliefs as to why thing happen –
even if we do not use that language. In a keynote speech I made at a DPI conference in Adelaide 1984 I said it was important for disabled
people to understand the nature of social change “so that we will not be fooled by any token one off gestures or
initiatives handed out by government and disability agencies” (1984, 91). I still hold to that idea and add that we always need
to test new ideas by asking “what is this proposal or idea saying about disability, does it assume that disability
is terrible, or that diversity and difference are terrible or is the idea on about celebrating and bringing out
difference”? From the perspective of political activism, the necessity to have a theory of disability before deciding strategies
of political action was well understood as early as 1975 by the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation UPAIS in the UK whose
minutes of a debate between 2 advocacy groups produced a document called The Fundamental Principles of Disability.
They decided that disability should not be understood medically as a broken down body, mind or heart, rather
society and the way that it is organised had something to do with us becoming disabled ….
***anthro k
anthro – link – freedom
Radical freedom promotion reinforces anthropocentric values
Bell and Russell 2k (anne and constance, Canadian journal of education, http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-3bell.pdf)JFS
Take, for example, Freire’s (1990) statements about the differences between “Man” and animals. To set up his discussion of praxis and the
importance of “naming” the world, he outlines what he assumes to be shared, commonsensical beliefs about humans and other animals. He
defines the boundaries of human membership according to a sharp, hierarchical dichotomy that establishes human
superiority. Humans alone, he reminds us, are aware and self-conscious beings who can act to fulfill the objectives they set for
themselves. Humans alone are able to infuse the world with their creative presence, to overcome situations that limit
them, and thus to demonstrate a “decisive attitude towards the world” (p. 90). Freire (1990, pp. 87–91) represents other
animals in terms of their lack of such traits. They are doomed to passively accept the given, their lives “totally
determined” because their decisions belong not to themselves but to their species. Thus whereas humans inhabit a “world” which
they create and transform and from which they can separate themselves, for animals there is only habitat, a mere
physical space to which they are “organically bound.” To accept Freire’s assumptions is to believe that humans are animals only
in a nominal sense. We are different not in degree but in kind, and though we might recognize that other animals have distinct qualities, we as
humans are somehow more unique. We
have the edge over other creatures because we are able to rise above
monotonous, species-determined biological existence. Change in the service of human freedom is seen to be our
primary agenda. Humans are thus cast as active agents whose very essence is to transform the world – as if
somehow acceptance, appreciation, wonder, and reverence were beyond the pale. This discursive frame of reference is characteristic of critical
pedagogy. The
human/animal opposition upon which it rests is taken for granted, its cultural and historical specificity not
acknowledged. And therein lies the problem. Like other social constructions, this one derives its persuasiveness
from its “seeming facticity and from the deep investments individuals and communities have in setting themselves off from others”
(Britzman et al., 1991, p. 91). This becomes the normal way of seeing the world, and like other discourses of normalcy, it limits
possibilities of taking up and confronting inequities (see Britzman, 1995). The primacy of the human enterprise is simply not
questioned. Precisely how an anthropocentric pedagogy might exacerbate the environmental crisis has not received much consideration in the
literature of critical pedagogy, especially in North America. Although there may be passing reference to planetary
destruction, there is seldom mention of the relationship between education and the domination of nature, let alone any sustained
exploration of the links between the domination of nature and other social injustices. Concerns about the nonhuman are
relegated to environmental education. And since environmental education, in turn, remains peripheral to the core curriculum (A. Gough, 1997;
Russell, Bell, & Fawcett, 2000), anthropocentrism
passes unchallenged.1
anthro – link – mobility
Systems of mobility propagate human chauvinism by reducing surrounding land to human
utility
Khisty and Zeitler ‘1 (C. Jotin Khisty and Ulli Zeitler. October 2001. Professor of engineering at Illinois Institute ofTechnology. “Is
Hypermobility a Challenge for Transport ethics and systemicity?” Systemic Practice and Action Research. Vol. 14. No. 5. Pages 599-602.)
In the last two or three decades, however, people
have been confronted with the darker side of the expansion of transport systems and
the hypermobility (excessive and imbalanced mobility for the most part) associated with it. For example, this extensive system, with the lofty
objective of providing higher mobility
coupled with increased accessibility, has endangered the quality of life and the
ecological sustainability of modern society. Furthermore (and ironically), this very expansion, designed for providing high speeds, has
resulted in traffic congestion that has drastically reduced mobility and decreased accessibility, thereby lowering business
productivity, increasing fuel consumption, increasing pollution, and adversely affecting safety, raising taxes for infrastructure expansion and
maintenance, and depriving the public of open space. In the United States alone, traffic congestion has increased 30% in the past 10 years, with
the number of cars on the road projected to increase by 50% in the next decade. Stress-causing congestion on our urban highway system robs Americans
of 2 billion hr a year of wasted time (equivalent to 84 million days or 228,000 years) that could be used in much more economically valuable, productive,
and enjoyable ways. This wasted time is equivalent to at least $20 billion. If this is not enough, the traffic gridlock affects the movement of goods,
imposing $40 billion in cost and business. The conventional style of dealing with this problem would have been to construct additional lanes to the
existing road network, thus increasing highway capacity by 34%, just to stay even with the anticipated growth in vehicle-miles traveled, at a staggering
cost of over $150 billion. But the government does not have the money to keep up with these “improvements,” and so the congestion crisis continues
unabated, getting worse day by day, with no end in sight [Downs, 1992; Freund and Martin, Transportation Research Board 1993; (TRB), 1997a, b]. 3.
THE CONSUMPTION INTENSITY OF TRANSPORT MODES It has been observed that technology has provided people the ability to travel at higher and
higher speeds, despite the fact that higher speed means higher cost. Subconsciously, distance
is connected with time, resulting, for example,
in three principal modes dominating the overall hierarchy of transport available to people in North America: walking for
very short distances; the automobile for medium distances, ranging anywhere from 0.25 to 500 mi; and the airplane for long distances. Following up on
people’s subconscious ability to connect distance and time, irrespective of cost, one notices that when the distance covered increases 10-fold, the time
spent on travel is doubled, while the speed increases 5-fold. This phenomenon accounts for the three dominant modes referred to and is demonstrated in
the transport function distribution shown in Table I (Kolbuszewski, 1979). Bruun and Vuchic (1995) have studied the space–time consumption of
different modes per unit and found that an automobile consumes eight times more space–time than a 30-seater bus. The space–time concept (the
product of the land area occupied by a vehicle and the time of occupation) is a powerful one that has not yet been fully investigated and developed.
Automobiles not only consume large quantities of nonrenewable energy and other natural resources, but also
consume vast amounts of land. For example, two-thirds of land space in Los Angeles is devoted to automobile use (Freund and Martin, 1993). 4.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS In the developed world, the decades of the sixties and seventies appeared to be a turning point in the evolution of
public opinion and transport policies. An extensive literature on transport problems was churned out by a host of political scientists, engineers, planners,
sociologists, economists, and environmentalists. Taebel and Cornelhs (1977) wrote a cogent paper on the chaos that resulted from the scores of
perspectives contributed by the “automobile
monopolists,” who spoke on behalf of the auto lobby; the “automobile
apologists,” who supported the use of the automobile because it offered free choice; the “social engineers,”
mostly academics who emphasized social equity; the “trust busters,” demanding the dismantling the highway
trust fund; the “transit technicians,” in pursuit of making public transport the dominant mode; the “balancers,”
searching for an optimum mix of modes; and the ecologists, who pointed out the damaging effects of transport
modes. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of transport issues, the viewpoints expressed did not make a dent in
governmental policies. However, a few issues, such as the one expressed by Garrett Hardin (1968) in his essay on “The Tragedy of the
Commons,” did cause people to sit up and think hard about what was happening to the planet. The “commons” parable is powerful because it drives right
to the heart of environmentalism—the moral relationship between short-term selfishness and enlightened longer-term community interest. For tragedy
to occur, we must have (a) a finite “commons,” (b) a consumption pattern that removes more than it puts in, and (c) selfishly motivated users who feel no
community spirit. The tragedy thesis is challenging because it forces us to seek beyond these premises for an answer (O’Riordan, 1981). If we extend
Hardin’s hypothesis to the transport scene, it is evident that the automobile mode provides a modern-day example of the “tragedy of the commons,”
because the
benefits of accessibility and mobility to each individual car owner far exceed the personal costs of
automobile use. In other words, the extra personal cost of increasing travel for economic, social, and recreational purposes are small in comparison
with the gains (Khisty and Kaftanski, 1988). Yet collectively we bear many of the costs of automobile transport, such as the
expansion of the highway network, deterioration of air quality, depletion of our fossil fuel reserves, loss of time
due to congestion, and a list that goes on and on (Wachs, 1977). A rejuvenated interest in the economics of road pricing was seen in the 1990s.
Recent analysis by Hau (1992) and Small (1992) indicates the utilization of a road network as a collective resource and the utilization of road capacity as
collective consumption. The use of road pricing, as an instrument of traffic management, has been investigated by many researchers (e.g., Button, 1995;
Khisty, 1997) and is being extensively used in practice, but with limited success (Vuchic, 1999). 5. TRANSPORT SYSTEMS AND ETHICS The transport of
people and goods is achieved through a highly complex system that has not yet been completely understood. It was only in the mid-1950s that some of
the early pioneers of traffic science began studying the relationship between the speed and the flow of a moving stream of vehicles. In more recent years,
attempts have been made to come to grips with the entities comprising transport systems. These attempts were matched by policy makers to try to move
people and goods by the right mode, in the right quantity, to the right place, and at the right time. If anything, most of the policy-making was and
still is, driven by such interest groups as the construction industry and the automobile manufacturers. Indeed, the automobile–industrial complex,
through advertising, lobbying, and other influences on public
discourse, helps to sustain an “auto culture,” cleverly
masking its problematic and costly features. While the transport of goods and people is achieved through the use of at least a dozen
modes, ranging from the pedestrian using his /her own motive power to the sophisticated high-speed train, the story of everyday transportation in the
Western world is centered about the automobile. Considering the widespread impact of the automobile on contemporary societies, it is surprising how
little the owners of these vehicles know about the major contribution to environmental deterioration, social
disintegration, and global polarization. Politically, this is reflected in the worldwide claim for sustainable mobility,
and economically, in the growing literature on the externalities of automobile use.
anthro – link – omission
Their silence is loaded – ensures replication
Bell and Russell 2K (Anne C. by graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University and Constance L. a graduate
student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy,
and the Poststructuralist Turn, http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-3-bell.pdf)
For this reason, the various movements against oppression need to be aware of and supportive of each other. In critical pedagogy, however, the
exploration of questions of race, gender, class, and sexuality has proceeded so far with little acknowledgement
of the systemic links between human oppressions and the domination of nature. The more-than-human world
and human relationships to it have been ignored, as if the suffering and exploitation of other beings and the
global ecological crisis were somehow irrelevant. Despite the call for attention to voices historically absent from traditional canons and
narratives (Sadovnik, 1995, p. 316), nonhuman beings are shrouded in silence. This silence characterizes even the work of writers who
call for a rethinking of all culturally positioned essentialisms. Like other educators influenced by poststructuralism, we agree that there is a need to
scrutinize the language we use, the meanings we deploy, and the epistemological frameworks of past eras (Luke &
Luke, 1995, p. 378). To treat social categories as stable and unchanging is to reproduce the prevailing relations of
power (Britzman et al., 1991, p. 89). What would it mean, then, for critical pedagogy to extend this investigation and critique to include taken-forgranted understandings of “human,” “animal,” and “nature”? This question is difficult to raise precisely because these understandings are taken for
granted. The
anthropocentric bias in critical pedagogy manifests itself in silence and in the asides of texts. Since it is not a
topic of discussion, it can be difficult to situate a critique of it. Following feminist analyses, we find that examples of anthropocentrism, like
examples of gender symbolization, occur “in those places where speakers reveal the assumptions they think they do not
need to defend, beliefs they expect to share with their audiences” (Harding, 1986, p. 112). Take, for example, Freire’s (1990)
statements about the differences between “Man” and animals. To set up his discussion of praxis and the importance of “naming” the world, he outlines
what he assumes to be shared, commonsensical beliefs about humans and other animals. He defines the boundaries of human membership according to
a sharp, hierarchical dichotomy that establishes human superiority. Humans alone, he reminds us, are aware and self-conscious beings who can act to
fulfill the objectives they set for themselves. Humans alone are able to infuse the world with their creative presence, to overcome situations that limit
them, and thus to demonstrate a “decisive attitude towards the world” (p. 90). Freire (1990, pp. 87–91) represents other animals in terms of their lack
of such traits. They are
doomed to passively accept the given, their lives “totally determined” because their decisions
belong not to themselves but to their species. Thus whereas humans inhabit a “world” which they create and
transform and from which they can separate themselves, for animals there is only habitat, a mere physical
space to which they are “organically bound.” To accept Freire’s assumptions is to believe that humans are animals only in a nominal
sense. We are different not in degree but in kind, and though we might recognize that other animals have distinct qualities, we as humans are somehow
moreunique. We have the edge over other creatures because we are able to rise above monotonous, species-determined biological existence. Change in
the service of human freedom is seen to be our primary agenda. Humans
are thus cast as active agents whose very essence is to
transform the world – as if somehow acceptance, appreciation, wonder, and reverence were beyond the pale.
This discursive frame of reference is characteristic of critical pedagogy. The human/animal opposition upon
which it rests is taken for granted, its cultural and historical specificity not acknowledged. And therein lies the
problem. Like other social constructions, this one derives its persuasiveness from its “seeming facticity and
from the deep investments individuals and communities have in setting themselves off from others” (Britzman et
al., 1991, p. 91). This becomes the normal way of seeing the world, and like other discourses of normalcy, it limits
possibilities of taking up and confronting inequities (see Britzman, 1995). The primacy of the human enterprise is
simply not questioned. Precisely how an anthropocentric pedagogy might exacerbate the environmental crisis has not received much
consideration in the literature of critical pedagogy, especially in North America. Although there may be passing reference to planetary destruction, there
is seldom mention of the relationship between education and the domination of nature, let alone any sustained exploration of the links between the
domination of nature and other social injustices. Concerns about the nonhuman are relegated to environmental education. And since environmental
education, in turn, remains peripheral to the core curriculum (A. Gough, 1997; Russell, Bell, & Fawcett, 2000), anthropocentrism passes unchallenged.
They view nature as an object to be calculated and utilized. This causes nature be view
as standing reserve and makes it expedable- turns the case
Introna 10
(LUCAS, PROFESSOR OF ORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND ETHICS @ LANCASTER UNIVERSITY, AI & SOC, 2010, VOL. 25, “THE ‘MEASURE
OF A MAN’ AND THE ETHOS OF HOSPITALITY: TOWARDS AN ETHICAL DWELLING WITH TECHNOLOGY,” PG. 93-102)
In the first, more traditional sense, I mean the values and interests built into the very materiality of the technologies we draw upon—inscribed in their
‘flesh’ as it were (Winner 1980).
In drawing upon the possibilities presented by these technologies, we become wittingly or
into particular scripts and programmes of action (in the actor network theory sense of the word). These
scripts and programmes make certain things possible and others not, include certain interests and others not (for example the
unwittingly enrolled
increased use of ATM may have lead to the closure of bank branches which exactly excludes those that can not use ATM’s, such as physically disabled
people). In this sense of use, the ethics of machines is very important and is in desperate need of our attention (an example of this type of work is the
paper by Introna and Nissenbaum (2000) on search engines and the work of Brey (2000) as proposed in his disclosive ethics). However, this paper is not
primarily concerned with this sense of technological ethics. It is rather concerned with the question of the moral and ethical significance of technological
artefacts in their technological being, i.e. the question of the weight of our moral responsibility towards technological artefacts as artificial beings. In
order to develop and structure the discussion, I will draw on a particular episode of Star Trek (2003) titled: ‘‘The measure of a man’’.1 In this episode, the
ethical significance, and therefore subsequent rights, of the android Data becomes contested. This ‘case study’—if I may call it that—will give us some
indication of how the problem of ethical significance of the artificial can become apparent and considered. In discussing this case, I will argue that its
approach to the issue, as well as the work of Levinas, is essentially anthropocentric—ultimately the measure of ethical significance is ‘the measure of a
man’. I will argue, with Heidegger (1977a), that it will ultimately fail to provide us with an adequate way to consider the ethical significance of the
artificial. I will then proceed to suggest, with the help of Derrida, a more radical interpretation of Levinas as a possible way forward towards an ethics (or
rather ethos) of hospitality—an ethical dwelling with the artificial other that so pervade our everyday being in the world. […]Such a suggestion points the
intimate link between ethics and politics. I will return to this matter in the next section. The final step in his defence, which draws on the first two, is that
ultimately we
are going to be judged as a species about how we treat these creations of ours; and if 97 they are
‘‘expendable, disposable, aren’t we?’’ This is an interesting step and captures the essence of Heidegger’s argument against western metaphysics
which is humanistic and in which everything is valued in human terms and subsequently everything (also humanity) is robbed of its worth: [I]t is
important finally to realise that
precisely through the characterisation of something as ‘a value’ what is so
valued is robbed of its worth.
That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for
man’s estimation. But what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value.
Every
valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does no let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be
valid—solely as the objects of its doing (Heidegger 1977a, p. 228, emphasis mine). In this regard, neither Riker nor Picard escape this
anthropocentric valuing. Riker argues that machines are instruments of man, at its disposal. They should be valued in terms of their value ‘for us.’
However, in the sociotechnical assemblages of contemporary world, it
is increasingly difficult to draw a clear boundary between
‘them’ and ‘us.’ If they are merely ‘for us’, then we all are a ‘for us’. As Heidegger (1977b) argues in his essay The Question
Concerning Technology, in such a world we all become ‘standing reserve’ (at the disposal of the network). Picard’s humanistic defence invokes a
hierarchy of values in which Data becomes valued because he is ‘like us’ (sentient beings). However, if Heidegger is right then even where valuing is
positive it is always subjectivising. Thus, neither of these positions escape the ‘technological’ world view in which the world is rendered present as a ‘for
us’ (Gestell/enframed in Heidegger’s terminology). As enframed beings not only the artificial but also man becomes mere ‘standing reserve’ within which
other possibilities for being are concealed. Not only this. In framing beings (and itself) in its own terms the very concealing of other possibilities for being
itself becomes concealed.
anthro – impact – extinction
Absent a shift towards a more fundamental understanding of the universe extinction is
inevitable
Henning 09 (Brian; Associate Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University; “Trusting in the 'Efficacy of
Beauty: A Kalocentric Approach to Moral Philosophy”; Ethics & the Environment- Volume 14, Number
1)//RSW
In the opening decade of this new millennium, long-simmering conflicts have exploded into a rolling boil of fear, hostility,
and violence. Whether we are talking about the rise of religious fundamentalism, the so-called "war on terror" or the much
touted culture wars that define the [End Page 101] contemporary American political landscape, there is a move away from
tolerance and appreciation of diversity toward the ever more strident formulation of absolutist positions.
Dogmatism in its various forms seems to be on the rise as the rhetoric and reality of compromise and
consensus building is replaced with the vitriol of moral superiority and righteousness. As the psychologist and
philosopher William James noted more than a century ago, the problem is that we are in a world where "every one of hundreds of ideals has its special
champion already provided in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it, and to fight to death in its behalf" (James 1956 [1891], 207–08). The
force of this point was made brutally clear by the events of and following September 11, 2001. Given
a world fraught with such conflict
and tension, what is needed is not a moral philosophy that dogmatically advances absolute moral codes. More
than ever, what is needed is an ethic that is dynamic, fallible, and situated, yet not grossly
relativistic. This project takes on added urgency when we consider the environmental and social crises that threaten not
only human civilization, but all forms of life on this planet. Unhealthy air and water, species extinction,
overpopulation, soaring food prices, fresh water shortages, stronger storms, prolonged droughts, the spread of
deserts, deforestation, melting ice caps and glaciers, the submersion of low-lying lands—there are no shortage
of challenges facing us in this young century. Complex and multifaceted, these issues are at once technological, scientific,
economic, social, and political. Yet we will have no hope of successfully addressing the root cause of
these crises until we also squarely confront fundamental issues concerning epistemology,
axiology, aesthetics, and metaphysics. Although debates over carbon taxes and trading schemes, over
carbon offsets and compact fluorescents are important, our efforts will ultimately fail unless and until we also
set about the difficult work of reconceiving who we are and how we are related to our processive cosmos. What
is needed, I believe, are new ways of thinking and acting grounded in new ways of understanding ourselves and
our relationship to the world, ways of understanding that recognize our fundamental interdependence and
interconnection with everyone and everything in the cosmos, ways of understanding that recognize the
intrinsic beauty and value of every form of existence. What is needed, I suggest, is a moral philosophy grounded in Alfred North
Whitehead's philosophy of organism. Recognizing this [End Page 102] need, it is the primary aim of this essay to present the key elements and defend
the value of a moral philosophy inspired by, though not dogmatically committed to, Whitehead's organic, beauty-centered conception of reality.
Anthropocentrism makes human extinction inevitable
Linda Destefano 1990
[http://www.peacecouncil.net/history/PNLs1981-90/PNL570-1990.pdf.]
It is the human species which has brought the entire ecosystem to the brink of disaster- whether by poison- ing
the biosphere with out deadly chemicals and radioactive garbage or by using up all earth's resource s through
overpopulation and extravagant, wasteful lifestyles, or by nuclear holocaust because of the ultimate ego-trip
(that is, being will- ing to destroy everything rather tha n give up the childish fascination with human
cleverness as manifested i n the latest "advance" in weapons tech- nology) Human oppression of other
species is a flaw which turns back on u s because everything in the environ- ment is related; the attitude
and behavior of one species influences the others, and eventually the result returns to initiator. For
instance, there is the willingness of many per - sons to drive other species to extinc- tion. Example: many
plants are endangered. Research is being con - ducted on the potential treatment of cancer by plant extracts.
Will we extinguish a plant species which could have treated cancer? Example: whales, dolphins, gorillas an
d elephants are among the many endangered animals . If they are decimated, we may lose more than the
beauty and wonder of these earth companions. We may lose the pos- sibility to learn from them a wiser way to
treat the earth and each other. Dr. John Lilly (a medical doctor and scientist) has worked thought his HumanDolphin Institute to develop a better means of com- munication between humans and dolphins, who he regards
as probabl y more intelligent and ethical than humans.(l) If we drive them to extinction, we will never
learn whether Lilly is right or wrong . In many ways, people are very intelligent, adaptable, empathetic an
d loving. If we love ourselves an d Mother Earth, let's use those traits to eradicate lethal ways of looking at
the world, such as a speciesist view, and acquire an earth nurturing outlook . The survival of all of us depends
on it
anthro – impact – genocide
The impact is an unending political genocide which captures the apparatus of life and death
Kochi and Ordan 8 (Tarik, lecturer in the School of Law, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and
Noam, linguist and translator, conducts research in Translation Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel, 'An
argument for the global suicide of humanity', Borderlands, December)//RSW
Within the picture many paint of humanity, events such as the Holocaust are considered as an exception, an aberration. The Holocaust is often portrayed
as an example of 'evil', a moment of hatred, madness and cruelty (cf. the differing accounts of 'evil' given in Neiman, 2004). The event is also treated as
one through which humanity might comprehend its own weakness and draw strength, via the resolve that such actions will never happen again.
However, if
we take seriously the differing ways in which the Holocaust was 'evil', then one must surely include
along side it the almost uncountable numbers of genocides that have occurred throughout human history . Hence,
if we are to think of the content of the 'human heritage', then this must include the annihilation of indigenous peoples and their
cultures across the globe and the manner in which their beliefs, behaviours and social practices have been
erased from what the people of the 'West' generally consider to be the content of a human heritage. Again the history of colonialism is
telling here. It reminds us exactly how normal, regular and mundane acts of annihilation of different forms of human life and culture have been
throughout human history. Indeed the history of colonialism, in its various guises, points to the fact that so many of our legal
institutions and forms of ethical life (i.e. nation-states which pride themselves on protecting human rights through the rule of law) have
been founded upon colonial violence, war and the appropriation of other peoples' land (Schmitt, 2003; Benjamin, 1986).
Further, the history of colonialism highlights the central function of 'race war' that often underlies human social organisation and many of its legal and
events such as the
Holocaust are not an aberration and exception but are closer to the norm, and sadly, lie at the
heart of any heritage of humanity. After all, all too often the European colonisation of the globe was justified by
arguments that indigenous inhabitants were racially 'inferior' and in some instances that they were closer to
'apes' than to humans (Diamond, 2006). Such violence justified by an erroneous view of 'race' is in many ways
merely an extension of an underlying attitude of speciesism involving a long history of killing and enslavement
of non-human species by humans. Such a connection between the two histories of inter-human violence (via the mythical notion of differing
ethical systems of thought (Foucault, 2003). This history of modern colonialism thus presents a key to understanding that
human 'races') and interspecies violence, is well expressed in Isaac Bashevis Singer's comment that whereas humans consider themselves "the crown of
creation",
for animals "all people are Nazis" and animal life is "an eternal Treblinka" (Singer, 1968, p.750).
anthro – impact – root cause
Species is the root cause of all impacts – rejection is a pre-requisite to an analysis of race
Steven Best, Chair of Philosophy at UT-EP, 2007 [JCAS 5.2]
While a welcome advance over the anthropocentric conceit that only humans shape human actions, the
environmental determinism approach typically fails to emphasize the crucial role that animals play in human
history, as well as how the human exploitation of animals is a key cause of hierarchy, social conflict, and
environmental breakdown. A core thesis of what I call “animal standpoint theory” is that animals have
been key driving and shaping forces of human thought, psychology, moral and social life, and
history overall. More specifically, animal standpoint theory argues that the oppression of human over
human has deep roots in the oppression of human over animal. In this context, Charles Patterson’s
recent book, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, articulates the animal
standpoint in a powerful form with revolutionary implications. The main argument of Eternal Treblinka is that
the human domination of animals, such as it emerged some ten thousand years ago with the rise of agricultural
society, was the first hierarchical domination and laid the groundwork for patriarchy, slavery,
warfare, genocide, and other systems of violence and power. A key implication of Patterson’s theory is
that human liberation is implausible if disconnected from animal liberation, and thus humanism -a speciesist philosophy that constructs a hierarchal relationship privileging superior humans over inferior
animals and reduces animals to resources for human use -- collapses under the weight of its logical
contradictions. Patterson lays out his complex holistic argument in three parts. In Part I, he demonstrates that
animal exploitation and speciesism have direct and profound connections to slavery, colonialism, racism, and antiSemitism. In Part II, he shows how these connections exist not only in the realm of ideology – as conceptual
systems of justifying and underpinning domination and hierarchy – but also in systems of technology, such that
the tools and techniques humans devised for the rationalized mass confinement and slaughter of
animals were mobilized against human groups for the same ends. Finally, in the fascinating interviews
and narratives of Part III, Patterson describes how personal experience with German Nazism prompted Jewish to
take antithetical paths: whereas most retreated to an insular identity and dogmatic emphasis on the singularity of
Nazi evil and its tragic experience, others recognized the profound similarities between how Nazis treated their
human captives and how humanity as a whole treats other animals, an epiphany that led them to adopt
vegetarianism, to become advocates for the animals, and develop a far broader and more inclusive ethic informed
by universal compassion for all suffering and oppressed beings. The Origins of Hierarchy "As long as men
massacre animals, they will kill each other" –Pythagoras It is little understood that the first form of
oppression, domination, and hierarchy involves human domination over animals Patterson’s thesis
stands in bold contrast to the Marxist theory that the domination over nature is fundamental to the domination
over other humans. It differs as well from the social ecology position of Murray Bookchin that domination over
humans brings about alienation from the natural world, provokes hierarchical mindsets and institutions, and is
the root of the long-standing western goal to “dominate” nature. In the case of Marxists, anarchists, and so many
others, theorists typically don’t even mention human domination of animals, let alone assign it causal primacy or
significance. In Patterson’s model, however, the human subjugation of animals is the first form of hierarchy and it
paves the way for all other systems of domination such as include patriarchy, racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism,
and the Holocaust. As he puts it, “the exploitation of animals was the model and inspiration for the atrocities people
committed against each other, slavery and the Holocaust being but two of the more dramatic examples.” Hierarchy
emerged with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In the shift from nomadic hunting and
gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans began to establish their dominance over animals through
“domestication.” In animal domestication (often a euphemism disguising coercion and cruelty), humans began to
exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk, clothing, plowing, and transportation. As they gained
increasing control over the lives and labor power of animals, humans bred them for desired traits
and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to make them more docile. To
conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed numerous
technologies, such as pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons. The domination of
animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson
suggests, was modeled after the domestication of animals, such that men began to control women’s
reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual norms, and to rape them as they forced
breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues, slavery emerged in the same region of
the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an extension of animal
domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and males were castrated and
forced to work along with females. In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization of Africa
and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, the metaphors, models, and technologies
used to exploit animal slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force to human slaves. Stealing
Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families who scream in
anguish, wrapping chains around slaves’ bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across
continents for weeks or months with no regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin
with a hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them as servants, breeding them for service
and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in
vast numbers – all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves were developed and
perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation. As the domestication of animals developed in
agricultural society, humans lost the intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle,
certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,
western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview – that came to be known as the “Great Chain
of Being” – used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means.
Patterson
underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare,
and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. But the means and methods of dehumanization are
derivative, for speciesism provided the conceptual paradigm that encouraged, sustained, and
justified western brutality toward other peoples. “Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the
master species,” Patterson writes, “our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation
for our victimization of each other. The study of human history reveals the pattern: first, humans
exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animals and do the same to them.”
Whether the conquerors are European imperialists, American colonialists, or German Nazis, western aggressors
engaged in wordplay before swordplay, vilifying their victims – Africans, Native Americans, Filipinos,
Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and other unfortunates – with opprobrious terms such as “rats,” “pigs,” “swine,”
“monkeys,” “beasts,” and “filthy animals.” Once perceived as brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a lower
evolutionary rung than white westerners, subjugated peoples were treated accordingly; once characterized as
animals, they could be hunted down like animals. The first exiles from the moral community, animals
provided a convenient discard bin for oppressors to dispose the oppressed. The connections are clear:
“For a civilization built on the exploitation and slaughter of animals, the `lower’ and more degraded the human
victims are, the easier it is to kill them.” Thus, colonialism, as Patterson describes, was a “natural extension of
human supremacy over the animal kingdom. For just as humans had subdued animals with their superior
intelligence and technologies, so many Europeans believed that the white race had proven its superiority by
bringing the “lower races” under its command. There are important parallels between speciesism and sexism and
racism in the elevation of white male rationality to the touchstone of moral worth. The arguments European
colonialists used to legitimate exploiting Africans – that they were less than human and inferior to white Europeans
in ability to reason – are the very same justifications humans use to trap, hunt, confine, and kill animals. Once
western norms of rationality were defined as the essence of humanity and social normality, by first using nonhuman animals as the measure of alterity, it was a short step to begin viewing odd, different, exotic, and eccentric
peoples and types as non- or sub-human. Thus, the same criterion created to exclude animals from humans was
also used to ostracize blacks, women, and numerous other groups from “humanity.” The oppression of blacks,
women, and animals alike was grounded in an argument that biological inferiority predestined
them for servitude. In the major strain of western thought, alleged rational beings (i.e., elite, white,
western males) pronounce that the Other (i.e., women, people of color, animals) is deficient in rationality
in ways crucial to their nature and status, and therefore are deemed and treated as inferior,
subhuman, or nonhuman. Whereas the racist mindset creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior on
the basis of skin color, and the sexist mentality splits men and women into greater and lower classes of beings,
the speciesist outlook demeans and objectifies animals by dichotomizing the biological continuum
into the antipodes of humans and animals. As racism stems from a hateful white supremacism, and
sexism is the product of a bigoted male supremacism, so speciesism stems from and informs a
violent human supremacism -- namely, the arrogant belief that humans have a natural or God-given right to
use animals for any purpose they devise or, more generously, within the moral boundaries of welfarism and
stewardship, which however was Judaic moral baggage official Chistianithy left behind.
anthro – impact – enviro/poverty
A human-centered ontology makes environmental destruction and global poverty
inevitable - the environment has no value until it has achieved its potentiality through
human ends.
Seed 11 - Australian Environmentalist, director of the Rainforest Information Centre (John, 2011, http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deepeco/Economics-as-Religion-EF-2100.pdf, chapter within Western Sydney's new book, Social Ecology)
How is it that proposals to protect nature are inevitably ―uneconomic ‖? The economic cost-benefit
analysis invariably decrees that the benefits of laying Nature to waste trump the costs because , in an
extraordinary feat of transubstantiationviii, the only things of real value (such as air, water, soil and life itself) are
deemed to be worthless while social fictions such as money are pronounced to be real. This is a religious miracle of
breathtaking power which makes the parting of waters, or turning water to wine pale into insignificance. Harvey Cox (op cit) points out that the
market religion has maintained the sacrament while reversing it: sacred things (like land, water, air, and even the human
body) are transformed into profane ones so that they can be commodified and put up for sale – ie transubstantiation
―The willed-but-not-yet-achieved omnipotence of The Market means that there is no conceivable limit to its inexorable ability to convert creation into
commodities. …. In the mass of The Market a reverse process occurs. Things that have been held sacred transmute into interchangeable items for sale.‖
Land is transformed from the sacred into mere real estate.
******************************************************************************************* We laugh at the cargo cultists – ignorant islanders,
savages who stand in straight lines at attention and salute the sky waiting for the airplanes and the ―cargo‖ they carried in World War Two to return. We
are shocked at the ancient Easter Islanders who cut down every last tree to build and transport their lifeless Gods of stone. Yet in our blind devotion to
the god of economy we repeat their insanity on a truly planetary scale. Only a deeply religious faith allows us to ignore the absurdity of perpetual growth
on a finite planet. Back in 1961, in Life Against Death, Norman O Brown pointed out that , "we no longer give our surplus to God; the process of
producing an ever-expanding surplus is in itself our God" ix Most students of the religious phenomenon of economics see neo-classical economics as a
false theology and I will provide more excerpts from some of their analyses below. But first I will introduce the curious case of economist Robert Nelson
of the University of Maryland, who celebrates the religious aspect of his disciplinex. (Hazel Henderson became an economist to find out "where the
bodies were buried". Who better to lead our excavation than an economics professor?) Nelson disagrees with his profession‘s wish to think of itself as
science, claiming rather that economists are really ―more like theologians,‖ – which gives them a much more important role in society. ―Economic
efficiency has been the greatest source of social legitimacy in the United States for the past century,‖ he writes,
―and economists have been the priesthood defending this core social value of our era‖. Nelson acknowledges many flaws
in classical economic thinking and concludes that ―Whatever one might say today of the genuine "truth value" of economics as a body of scientific
understanding, the practical reality is that the economics profession for many years was successful in asserting its scientific status. The economic
priesthood could effectively police the theological territory of America.‖ While, as we shall see below, many scholars agree wholeheartedly with his claim
(p65) that ―without certain theological assumptions, some of the most important conclusions of economic theory could not sustained.‖, unlike Nelson,
most of these scholars use this conclusion to debunk economics rather than exalt it. David R Loyxi, gives us the most compelling of the many critiques of
economic religion in his ―Religion of the Market‖ (1997). He sensibly warns us that ―Nelson … could be said to have overlooked the market religion‘s
sacrificial aspects of worsening global poverty and environmental degradationand points out that ―In 1960 countries of the North were about twenty
times richer than those of the South. In 1990—after vast amounts of aid, trade, loans, and catch-up industrialization by the South—North countries had
become fifty times richer. The richest twenty percent of the world's population now have an income about 150 times that of the poorest twenty percent, a
gap that continues to grow (Körten: 107-108)xii. According to the UN Development Report for 1996, the world's then 358 billionaires were wealthier
than the combined annual income of countries with 45% of the world's people.
As a result, a quarter million children die of
malnutrition or infection every week , while hundreds of millions more survive in a limbo of hunger and
deteriorating health. ― ―Why do we acquiesce in this social injustice?‖ He asks. ―What rationalization allows us
to sleep peacefully at night?‖‖ ―The market religion‘s sacrificial aspects‖ ? We might imagine that this situation arises somehow accidentally, an
unanticipated, contingent effect of the economic-religious structures that rule the world. A closer inspection however, reveals a much more sinister
picture.
It turns out that in order to generate obscene profits, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, and others
– have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world. In 2007, staple food prices started inexplicably rising
and another 200 million people – mostly children – couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in
more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. It wasn't through a fall in supply - wheat production actually rose
globally that year. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. In April 2008, Jean Ziegler, the UN Special
Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."xiii . " And we have a herd of market traders,
speculators and financial bandits who have turned wild and constructed a world of inequality and horror." The god of the market‘s hunger for sacrifice
would puts the gods of the Aztecs to shame. Here's how it works. Throughout the twentieth century, farmers have had mechanisms, "futures markets"
whereby they could insure themselves against crop failure or the collapse of prices. Throughout the '90's Wall St traders lobbied for the abolition of the
regulations that had hitherto restricted these mechanisms so that only those directly involved in food production could use them and suddenly these
contracts were transformed into food speculation "derivatives" that could be traded without reference to the foodstuffs themselves. Previously the
economic system of supply and demand ensured that "only" a billion people went to bed hungry. After this deregulation, the cost of food was determined
by the value of speculative food contracts not by the availability of the food itself Jayati Ghosh is a professor of economics at the JNU in New Delhi.
Asked if this another bubble that's being deliberately created by finance, she replied "Yes, absolutely. There is no other way to put it. You have a massive
expansion. It sounds incredible, but world rice prices increased by 320 percent between January 2007 and June 2008. So in just 18 months you have
tripling of world rice prices. World wheat prices go up by 240 percent, maize prices by 218 percent. Crazy increases in these trade prices of these
commodities.‖xivProfessor Ghosh points out that the price of other worldwide crops which are not traded on the futures markets like millet and cassava
rose very little in 2007. Her research shows that speculation was "the main cause" of the rise. As John Lanchester points out in "Whoops! Why
Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay"xv,: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift
equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts – a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that
couldn't be explained in workaday English." John Hari explains it thus: "In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real
estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked, so they switched their funds there. Suddenly,
the world's frightened investors stampeded on to this ground.... So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and
demand for derivatives based on food massively rose – which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began. The bubble only
burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home." "The
world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing
starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually
inflict so much pain?"xvi Perhaps this is the kind of thing that Loy was pointing to when he cautioned in his understated way that , ―Nelson … could be
said to have overlooked the market religion‘s sacrificial aspects‖ In 2009, in order to prevent recession (the failure of deity to grow), some governments
initiated a ―stimulus‖, a sacrifice propitiating the god. In Australia this was done by giving every tax payer $900 in the hope that if enough people spent
this mollifying the god, then the god would be merciful and begin growing again. When the god gets wrathful, He stops growing, we get depressed, people
lose their jobs (which provides them with the wherewithal to shop, to participate in the religion). One is reminded of John Steinbeck‗s The Grapes of
Wrath - the conversation between the agents for "the bank" and the poor shit-kicker dustbowl tenant farmers whose land they were repossessing on the
bank's behalf. ―... as though the Bank ... were a monster ... because those creatures don't breathe air ... They breathe profits; they eat the interest on
money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air ... the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die ....When the monster
stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size." "We‘re sorry. It‘s not us. It‘s the monster. The bank isn‘t like a man." "Yes, but the bank is only made of
men." "No, you‘re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does,
and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It‘s the monster. Men made it, but they can‘t control it." The tenants cried,
"Grampa killed Indians, Pa killed snakes for the land. Maybe we can kill banks—they're worse than Indians and snakes. Maybe we got to fight to keep our
land, like Pa and Granpa did." Its not just the professors of economics who see the religious nature of the ―discipline‖, some professors of religion come
to the same conclusion. Jay McDaniel, a professor of religion from Arkansas, suggested that the dominant faith system of our times contains the
complete ecclesiastical apparatus: a priesthood—the economists—whose formulaic mumbo-jumbo nobody really understands but almost everyone trusts
to be effective, a missionary organization in the form of the advertising industry, preaching the gospel of salvation through consumption, and a church—
the shopping mall—where the rituals of the faith are carried out. The ethics of this faith system are summed up by the belief that the highest virtue is to
shop.xvii The contamination of soul, society and soil by the corruption that is economic thinking are so pernicious, possibly terminal, what
are we
to do? Its not much use pointing fingers or being holier than thou: nary a modern person is exempt from this religion for even if we are
not active in the congregation, still all of us are members of the sect as we drive our cars towards oblivion with their attendant inevitable emissions and
paving over of the land. ALL of us are fouling the Earth.
Yes, some have their hands on bigger triggers but we are all
in this psychotic trance together . I would like to conclude this chapter by briefly exploring some possible avenues whereby we might
respond and fight back: I believe that we need a philosophical or religious movement to unmask these insidious powers, a
―hearts and minds‖ campaign to which we apply the same fervour that we bring to bear in our campaigns to protect a special place or an endangered
species. For no place or species is safe from the scorched earth policies of this god. Bringing all the force of metaphor and poetry to this struggle, we will
throw the money lenders out of the Temple of the Immaculate Biosphere.
We must defrock economics, strip it of plausibility,
rescind its Nobel Prize, publicly humiliate it and provoke laughter at the posturings of both the naked emperor
and his servile obsequious courtiers. Writing this, I realize that I have actually been engaged in this campaign for more than 20 years.
Listen for example to ―The World Bank Song‖ which I wrote in 1991. People bow to the ideological reign of economics today in the same pious sort of
way as they bowed to the reign of inquisitorial Christianity in the Middle Ages – it permeated all aspects of life, and individuals tried to out-do one
another in their demonstrations of piety. That fervour looks so bizarre and stupid and sinister to us today, as one day our own bowing to the hegemony of
economics will look just as bizarre and stupid and sinister. When we see economics as a religion, then advertising becomes religious education and I
believe that a critique of advertising is a strategic place to begin a campaign to undermine the religion. Ellulxviii in "The New Demons" calls advertising
―the liturgy and the psalmody of the consumer religion.‖ P3 In her essay ―Small Wonder‖xix Barbara Kingsolver informs us that ―puppeteers of
globalized commerce … fund their advertising each year with more than 100 dollars spent for this planet‘s every man, woman and child.‖ One often hears
the argument that there‘s nothing we can do about greed, about the constant desire to purchase more and more ―stuff‖ to fill the gaping hole in our
souls, because this is only ―human nature‖. But if this is so, why the need to spend more money worldwide on the hypnotic deluge of religious
indoctrination to reinforce this sickness than on all other education combined? More than $650,000,000,000 a year to reinforce greed and placate the
economic god? No wonder a child in the developed countries has an environmental impact as much as thirty times that of a child in the third world. To
this we must add the free advertising which sustains this paradigm, the hypnotic litanies in every news broadcast telling us endlessly of the vagaries of
the stock markets, of the minute rises and falls in the relative values of various world currencies. What are we to make of this? How come no-one
complains of the stupefying boredom and uselessness of this information? We are like force-fed geese, consumed by consumption, living matrix batteries
whose life purpose is to ensure that that the god of economics remain fed and warm. The work of exposing and deconstructing the calamitous role of
advertising is well underway – Adbusters magazinexx has been doing a great job of stripping the emperor of the veils of illusion behind which he hides;
the Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard xxi provides a very popular online analysis while Reverend Billy of the ―Church of Life After Shopping‖xxii wittily
thumbs his nose at the false god. But … these are tiny beginnings and the hour is getting late. We need to build these beginnings into a movement that
redefines what it means to be successful, what it means to be abundant. What needs to be emphasized is the value of respect which stems from a deep
understanding of the the profound connection of humans and nature and between humans themselves. Respect is subscribed in laws as rights – the
requirement that the rights of others are respected. This is almost universally about human rights, both individual and collective, but also includes the
rights of future generations – ‗sustainable development‘ and is starting to include laws on respect for the rights of other life forms. Human rights are
inalienable and are not granted by a state: they are rights that we hold against the interests and actions of a government/state. The same goes for rights
in nature. The issue of respect for other and others and for their rights is outside of the usual theory/theology of economics, which is only about
efficiency and expansion. Fueled by advertising, we dig the Earth up and chop it down to make the ―goods‖ which we can stuff into that great big hole
where our soul used to be, each item promising that this time its going to work, ―buy me and you‘ll finally feel alright‖. But do we know anyone who has
ever reached the end of this particular path, has finally bought the one last thing that finally resolved for them the utter catastrophe of the human
condition? Far from it. What we find is that the more that you feed this addiction, the more addicted you become. We need a kind of social therapy, and a
change in the programming. Perhaps this is the same as the community therapy that Arne Naess called for to ―heal our relations with the widest
communities, that of all living beings‖xxiii It has long been recognized that that GNP is a distorted measure of value – the more motor accidents we have
the more GNP goes up, the more anti-pollution equipment we are forced to manufacture, the stronger the economy etc. As far back as 1992 Alan Durning
(op cit) wrote that ―Comparisons that have been made over time and between societies show that there is little difference in self-reported happiness. The
fact that we in the developed world are now consuming so much more does not seem to be having much effect on our happiness.‖ P40 Paul Gildingxxiv
points out that ―this is now well established with solid global data. What this data shows, in comprehensive global studies, is that happiness and life
satisfaction go up sharply when you go from poverty to an income of between $10K and $20K per person per year. Then it stops. It levels out and stays
there no matter how much more income you get. (Though some studies suggest if you get really, really stinking rich, it then goes down again!) If you
want to understand the numbers check out the excellent report ―Prosperity Without Growth‖xxv .‖ An interesting article in the Guardian in April
2010xxvi was titled ―Beyond Green Growth: Why we Need a World Without Economic Growth‖ and explored the idea that ―Beyond
concepts of
green growth or sustainable growth there is also that of 'no growth'.‖ The New Economics Foundation has come up with a
―Happy Planet Index‖xxvii which shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert natural resources into long and happy lives for their
citizens. The nations at the top of the index are those achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet‘s resources. Costa Rica comes first,
nine of the top 10 nations are in Latin America. China is 20th, India 35th. Not a single European country made it into the top 50, I‘m proud to announce
that Australia (102) beat both the USA (114) and Nigeria (115) Its no use sacrificing our desire for ever more material junk, we
have to stop
wanting these things, stop finding them pleasurable rather than bravely forgoing their pleasures. Like with any
addiction we must ask: ―What is the real underlying problem? What is it we‘re not facing up to and avoiding by our consumption habits?‖ And for this
we need a spiritual movement which replaces the false promises of the church of greed with something which really does feed us. That is, alongside the
demolition of the false religion of economics, at the same time the true religion of the sacred cosmos needs evolving.
A return to a mystique of
the Earth is a primary requirement for establishing a viable rapport between humans and the Earth. Only in
this context will we overcome the arrogance that sets us apart from all other components of the planet and
establishes a mood of conquest rather than of admiration. To assume that conquest and use is our primary relation with the natural
world is ultimate disaster.Here we may find guidance in the work of Thomas Berry.xxviii11 Father Thomas Berry (1914 – 2009) was a Catholic priest who
found in the middle of his life that he had turned from being a theologian to being a geologian – that is his source of spiritual inspiration and
nourishment turned from a god in the sky to the very Earth itself. He both influenced and was influenced by the deep ecology movement. A student of
Teilhard de Chardin, he proposed that a deep understanding of the history and functioning of the evolving universe is a necessary inspiration and guide
for our own effective functioning as individuals and as a species. He gives us confidence that in spite of the vast momentum of the anthropocentric
project and the collosal success of the economic god, sanity may yet prevail: He writes: ―If the dynamics of the universe from the beginning shaped the
course of the heavens, lighted the sun and formed the Earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it
awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us
safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present
understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the
universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.
Reducing nature to a source of utility destroys the environment making extinction
inevitable
Michael
Zimmerman [Biologist and Vice President for Academic Affairs / Provost at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
Former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University in Indianapolis and Dean of the College of Letters and Science at the
University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh for 14 years. Spent 12 years at Oberlin College as a professor of biology and associate dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences. Prior to that he worked at The College of William and Mary as well as Hampshire College. Zimmerman holds an A.B. degree in Geography from
the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Ecology from Washington University in St. Louis.]
1994 (Contesting Earth's Future, p. 119-120)
Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the
eclipse of being, threatens the relation
between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a
nuclear war that might "bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the
earth." This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose one's soul
by losing one's relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it
is possible that after a nuclear war,
life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur an
ontological clearing through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernity's onedimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any "being" at all, the loss of humanity's openness for being is already
occurring. Modernity's background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with
the aim of providing
material "happiness" for everyone by reducing nature to pure energy . The unleashing of vast
quantities of energy in nuclear war would be equivalent to modernity's slow-motion
destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal limitless consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear
war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed we would exist in a state of
ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise. Deep ecologists might agree
that a world of material human comfort purchased at the price of everything wild would not be a world worth living in, for in
killing wild nature, people would be as good as dead. But most of them could not agree that the loss of
humanity's relation to being would be worse than nuclear omnicide, for it is wrong to suppose that the lives of millions of extinct
and unknown species are somehow lessened because they were never "disclosed" by humanity.
anthro – alt – binary
Our alternative is to ELIMINATE the human/non human binary
Maneesha Deckha is Associate Professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law in Victoria, 12/13/ 10, “It’s time
to abandon the idea of ‘human’ rights”, http://www.thescavenger.net/animals/its-time-to-abandon-the-idea-ofhuman-rights-77234-536.html; hhs-ab
While the intersection of race and gender is often acknowledged in understanding the etiology of
justificatory narratives for war, the presence of species distinctions and the importance of the
subhuman are less appreciated. Yet, the race (and gender) thinking that animates Razack’s argument in
normalizing violence for detainees (and others) is also centrally sustained by the subhuman figure. As
Charles Patterson notes with respect to multiple forms of exploitation: Throughout the history of our ascent
to dominance as the master species, our victimization of animals has served as the model and
foundation for our victimization of each other. The study of human history reveals the pattern: first,
humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animals and do the same to
them. Patterson emphasizes how the human/animal hierarchy and our ideas about animals and animality
are foundational for intra-human hierarchies and the violence they promote. The routine violence
against beings designated subhuman serves as both a justification and blueprint for violence
against humans. For example, in discussing the specific dynamics of the Nazi camps, Patterson further notes
how techniques to make the killing of detainees resemble the slaughter of animals were deliberately implemented in
order to make the killing seem more palatable and benign. That the detainees were made naked and kept crowded
in the gas chambers facilitated their animalization and, in turn, their death at the hands of other humans who were
already culturally familiar and comfortable with killing animals in this way. Returning to Razack’s exposition of
race thinking in contemporary camps, one can see how subhuman thinking is foundational to race
thinking. One of her primary arguments is that race thinking, which she defines as “the denial of a
common bond of humanity between people of European descent and those who are not”, is “a
defining feature of the world order” today as in the past. In other words, it is the “species thinking”
that helps to create the racial demarcation. As Razack notes with respect to the specific logic infusing the
camps, they “are not simply contemporary excesses born of the west’s current quest for security, but
instead represent a more ominous, permanent arrangement of who is and is not a part of the
human community”. Once placed outside the “human” zone by race thinking, the detainees may be
handled lawlessly and thus with violence that is legitimated at all times. Racialization is not enough
and does not complete their Othering experience. Rather, they must be dehumanized for the larger
public to accept the violence against them and the increasing “culture of exception” which sustains
these human bodily exclusions. Although nonhumans are not the focus of Razack’s work, the centrality of the
subhuman to the logic of the camps and racial and sexual violence contained therein is also clearly illustrated in her
specific examples. In the course of her analysis, to determine the import of race thinking in enabling violence,
Razack quotes a newspaper story that describes the background mentality of Private Lynndie England, the white
female soldier made notorious by images of her holding onto imprisoned and naked Iraqi men with a leash around
their necks. The story itself quotes a resident from England’s hometown who says the following about the
sensibilities of individuals from their town: To the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a
different race, you’re sub-human. That’s the way that girls like Lynndie England are raised. Tormenting
Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you’re hunting
something. Over there they’re hunting Iraqis. Razack extracts this quote to illustrate how “race
overdetermined what went on”, but it may also be observed that species “overdetermined what went on”. Race
has a formative function, to be sure, but it works in conjunction with species difference to enable the
violence at Abu Ghraib and other camps. Dehumanization promotes racialization, which further
entrenches both identities. It is an intertwined logic of race, sex, culture and species that lays the
foundation for the violence. b) Present-day slavery and/or slavery-like practices While humans may not
legally be property of other humans in any country, many human rights scholars and activists largely argue that
non-legal slavery and its trappings still exist in a wide variety of industries where children and adults are kept
imprisoned to perform labour of some sort against their will and for little or no remuneration. Kevin Bales is at the
foreground of this area of activism and scholarship. He is President of the American-based Free the Slaves
organization, a sister organization of the Anti-Slavery International based in the United Kingdom. In his book,
Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves, Bales identifies three core components of slavery today: “control
through violence, economic exploitation, and the loss of free will”. Again, it is the denial of humanity that is
identified as the dynamic that exposes individuals to being perceived and treated violently as slaves. This is not to
deny, of course, that the causes of slavery are multiple; poverty, extreme capitalism, international debt policies,
greed, state corruption and apathy, and armed conflict are just some of the causes Bales identifies. Yet, the
subhuman figure highlights the conceptual vehicle, a denial of equal humanity, which facilitates violence against
humans to compel their labour. c) Laws of war The resonance of the subhuman figure may also be found in
western jurisprudence relating to the conduct of war. As the title of his recent article, ‘Species War: Law, Violence
and Animals’, intimates, law lecturer Tarik Kochi argues that a species war is at the root of war and violence
generally. He notes that the “laws of war” that describe how nations may engage each other in
combat differentiate between two categories of violence: legitimate and non-legitimate violence. He
insists that the human-nonhuman distinction is the primary political distinction organizing the laws
on war and not, as many would believe, the notion of friend-enemy as Carl Schmidt espoused. Kochi locates
the war of humans against nonhumans as lying at the crux of race war and western political and
legal theory. In making this claim, Kochi’s argument joins posthumanist, postcolonial and feminist theory by
locating species difference as intricately connected to the axes of gender, race, and cultural
difference. He adds to Razack’s “race thinking”, which incorporates gender and religious/cultural difference, but
misses adverting to species difference. From our treatment of nonhumans we learn that only certain
deaths are valued in our cultural and legal order as “genocide” or “murder” while others are
comparatively diminished through their representations as “slaughter”, “culling” or “harvest”.
Kochi’s emphasis on legitimate violence and life value explains this approach to the human/animal distinction, a
binary which goes on to inform what humans may do to other humans in executing war. Whether it is the laws of
war on what counts as legitimate violence, the logic of the camps as to which bodies may be subject to violence
without legal rights and protection, or the flourishing of contemporary slavery and/or slavery-like practices, the
subhuman figure is critical to producing violence against humans. Doing away with the subhuman If this role of
contributing to contemporary manifestations of violence played by subhumanization is accurate, a pressing
question presents itself: should we continue to rely on anti-violence discourses (i.e., human rights or
other “human” justice campaigns) that entrench the subhuman category? In other words, human rights
discourses do not instruct us to purge the subhuman category or the human/nonhuman divide
from our critical repertoire. Instead, they seek to convince us that we should see all human beings as
definitely human and not subhumanize them. This approach does not effectively achieve its aims of
protecting vulnerable human groups from violence because it leaves the subhuman category intact, a category that
humanized humans can always assert should convictions sway about the relative moral worth of a particular human
group. The subhuman category is then poised to “animalize” or dehumanize the targeted group and
generate corresponding justifications as to why the human group does not deserve better than
subhuman treatment. A better strategy would be to eliminate the subhuman category from the outset
by impugning the human/nonhuman boundary itself and thus the claim to human superiority. Time
for a new discourse That the human/subhuman binary continues to inhabit so much of western
experience raises the question of the continuing relevance of anthropocentric concepts (such as
“human rights” and “human dignity”) for effective theories of justice, policy and social movements.
Instead of fighting dehumanization with humanization, a better strategy may be to minimize the
human/nonhuman boundary altogether. The human specialness claim is a hierarchical one and relies on the
figure of an Other – the subhuman and nonhuman – to be intelligible. The latter groups are beings, by
definition, who do not qualify as “human” and thus are denied the benefits that being “human” is
meant to compel. More to the point, however, a dignity claim staked on species difference, and reliant
on dehumanizing Others to establish the moral worth of human beings, will always be vulnerable to
the subhuman figure it creates. This figure is easily deployed in inter-human violent conflict
implicating race, gender and cultural identities as we have seen in the context of military and police
camps, contemporary slavery and slavery-like practices, and the laws of war – used in these situations
to promote violence against marginalized human groups. A new discourse of cultural and legal
protections is required to address violence against vulnerable humans in a manner that does not privilege humanity
or humans, nor permit a subhuman figure to circulate as the mark of inferior beings on whom the perpetration of
violence is legitimate. We need to find an alternative discourse to theorize and mobilize around
vulnerabilities for “subhuman” humans. This move, in addressing violence and vulnerabilities, should be
productive not only for humans made vulnerable by their dehumanization, but nonhumans as well.
anthro – alt – suicide
Our alternative is to approach the affirmative’s so called extinction scenarios as a thought
experiment. Doing so is the only way to reconceptualize our role in the universe.
Kochi and Ordan 8 (Tarik, lecturer in the School of Law, Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and
Noam, linguist and translator, conducts research in Translation Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel, 'An
argument for the global suicide of humanity', Borderlands, December)//RSW
The version of progress enunciated in Hawking's story of cosmic colonisation presents a view whereby the solution
to the negative consequences of technological action is to create new forms of technology, new forms of action.
New action and innovation solve the dilemmas and consequences of previous action. Indeed, the very act of moving away, or rather evacuating, an
ecologically devastated Earth is an example at hand. Such an approach involves a moment of reflection--previous errors and consequences are examined
and taken into account and efforts are made to make things better. The idea of a better future informs reflection, technological innovation and action.
However, is the form of reflection offered by Hawking broad or critical enough? Does
his mode of reflection pay enough attention to
the irredeemable moments of destruction, harm, pain and suffering inflicted historically by human action upon
the non-human world? There are, after all, a variety of negative consequences of human action, moments of
destruction, moments of suffering, which may not be redeemable or ever made better. Conversely there are a number of
conceptions of the good in which humans do not take centre stage at the expense of others. What we try to do in this paper is to draw out
some of the consequences of reflecting more broadly upon the negative costs of human activity in the context of
environmental catastrophe. This involves re-thinking a general idea of progress through the historical and
conceptual lenses of speciesism, colonialism, survival and complicity. Our proposed conclusion is that the only appropriate moral
response to a history of human destructive action is to give up our claims to biological supremacy and to
sacrifice our form of life so as to give an eternal gift to others. From the outset it is important to make clear that the
argument for the global suicide of humanity is presented as a thought experiment. The purpose of such a
proposal in response to Hawking is to help show how a certain conception of modernity, of which his approach is
representative, is problematic. Taking seriously the idea of global suicide is one way of throwing into question
an ideology or dominant discourse of modernist-humanist action. [3] By imagining an alternative to the existing
state of affairs, absurd as it may seem to some readers by its nihilistic and radical 'solution', we wish to open up
a ground for a critical discussion of modernity and its negative impacts on both human and non-human
animals, as well as on the environment. [4] In this respect, by giving voice to the idea of a human-free world, we
attempt to draw attention to some of the asymmetries of environmental reality and to give cause to question
why attempts to build bridges from the human to the non-human have, so far, been unavailing. Subjects of ethical
discourse One dominant presumption that underlies many modern scientific and political attitudes towards technology and creative human action is that
of 'speciesism', which can itself be called a 'human-centric' view or attitude. The term 'speciesism', coined by psychologist Richard D. Ryder and later
elaborated into a comprehensive ethics by Peter Singer (1975), refers to the attitude by which humans value their species above both non-human animals
and plant life. Quite typically humans conceive non-human animals and plant life as something which might simply be used for their benefit. Indeed, this
conception can be traced back to, among others, Augustine (1998, p.33). While many modern, 'enlightened' humans generally abhor racism, believe in
the equality of all humans, condemn slavery and find cannibalism and human sacrifice repugnant, many still think and act in ways that are profoundly
'speciesist'. Most individuals may not even be conscious that they hold such an attitude, or many would simply assume that their attitude falls within the
'natural order of things'. Such an attitude thus resides deeply within modern human ethical customs and rationales and plays a profound role in the way
in which humans interact with their environment. The possibility of the destruction of our habitable environment on earth through global warming and
Hawking's suggestion that we respond by colonising other planets forces us to ask a serious question about how we value human life in relation to our
environment. The use of the term 'colonisation' is significant here as it draws to mind the recent history of the colonisation of much of the globe by white,
European peoples. Such actions were often justified by valuing European civilisation higher than civilisations of non-white peoples, especially that of
indigenous peoples. For scholars such as Edward Said (1978), however, the practice of colonialism is intimately bound up with racism. That is,
colonisation is often justified, legitimated and driven by a view in which the right to possess territory and govern human life is grounded upon an
assumption of racial superiority. If
we were to colonise other planets, what form of 'racism' would underlie our actions? What higher
value would we place upon human life, upon the human race, at the expense of other forms of life which would
justify our taking over a new habitat and altering it to suit our prosperity and desired living conditions? Generally, the animal rights movement responds
to the ongoing colonisation of animal habitats by humans by asking whether the modern Western subject should indeed be the central focus of its ethical
discourse. In saying 'x harms y', animal rights philosophers wish to incorporate in 'y' non-human animals. That is, they enlarge the group of subjects to
which ethical relations apply. In this sense such thinking does not greatly depart from any school of modern ethics, but simply extends ethical duties and
obligations to non-human animals. In eco-ethics, on the other hand, the role of the subject and its relation to ethics is treated a little differently. The less
radical environmentalists talk about future human generations so, according to this approach, 'y' includes a projection into the future to encompass the
welfare of hitherto non-existent beings. Such an approach is prevalent in the Green Party in Germany, whose slogan is "Now. For tomorrow". For others,
such as the 'deep ecology' movement, the subject is expanded so that it may include the environment as a whole. In this instance, according to Naess,
'life' is not to be understood in "a biologically narrow sense". Rather he argues that the term 'life' should be used in a
comprehensive non-technical way such that it refers also to things biologists may classify as non-living. This would
include rivers, landscapes, cultures, and ecosystems, all understood as "the living earth" (Naess, 1989, p.29). From this perspective the statement 'x
harms y' renders 'y' somewhat vague. What occurs is not so much a conflict over the degree of ethical commitment, between "shallow" and "deep
ecology" or between "light" and "dark greens" per se, but rather a broader re-drawing of the content of the subject of Western philosophical discourse
and its re-definition as 'life'. Such a position involves differing metaphysical commitments to the notions of being, intelligence and moral activity. This
blurring and re-defining of the subject of moral discourse can be found in other ecocentric writings (e.g. Lovelock, 1979; Eckersley, 1992) and in other
philosophical approaches. [5] In part our approach bears some similarity with these 'holistic' approaches in that we share dissatisfaction with the
modern, Western view of the 'subject' as purely human-centric. Further, we share some of their criticism of bourgeois green lifestyles. However, our
approach is to stay partly within the position of the modern, Western human-centric view of the subject and to question what happens to it in the field of
moral action when environmental catastrophe demands the radical extension of ethical obligations to non-human beings. That is, if we stick with the
modern humanist subject of moral action, and follow seriously the extension of ethical obligations to non-human beings, then we would suggest that
what we find is that the utopian demand of modern humanism turns over into a utopian anti-humanism, with suicide as its outcome. One way of
attempting to re-think the modern subject is thus to throw the issue of suicide right in at the beginning and acknowledge its position in modern ethical
thought. This would be to recognise that the question of suicide resides at the center of moral thought, already. What survives when humans no longer
exist? There continues to be a debate over the extent to which humans have caused environmental problems such as global warming (as opposed to
natural, cyclical theories of the earth's temperature change) and over whether phenomena such as global warming can be halted or reversed. Our
position is that regardless of where one stands within these debates it is clear that humans have inflicted degrees of harm upon non-human animals and
the natural environment. And from this point we suggest that it is the operation of speciesism as colonialism which must be addressed. One approach is
of course to adopt the approach taken by Singer and many within the animal rights movement and remove our species, homo sapiens, from the centre of
all moral discourse. Such an approach would thereby take into account not only human life, but also the lives of other species, to the extent that the living
environment as a whole can come to be considered the proper subject of morality. We would suggest, however, that this philosophical approach can be
taken a number of steps further. If the standpoint that we have a moral responsibility towards the environment in which all sentient creatures live is to
be taken seriously, then we perhaps have reason to question whether there remains any strong ethical grounds to justify the further existence of
humanity. For example, if one considers the modern scientific practice of experimenting on animals, both the notions of progress and speciesism are
implicitly drawn upon within the moral reasoning of scientists in their justification of committing violence against nonhuman animals. The typical line of
thinking here is that because animals are valued less than humans they can be sacrificed for the purpose of expanding scientific knowledge focussed
upon improving human life. Certainly some within the scientific community, such as physiologist Colin Blakemore, contest aspects of this claim and
argue that experimentation on animals is beneficial to both human and nonhuman animals (e.g. Grasson, 2000, p.30). Such claims are 'disingenuous',
however, in that they hide the relative distinctions of value that underlie a moral justification for sacrifice within the practice of experimentation (cf.
LaFollette & Shanks, 1997, p.255). If there is a benefit to non-human animals this is only incidental, what remains central is a practice of sacrificing the
lives of other species for the benefit of humans. Rather
than reject this common reasoning of modern science we argue that
it should be reconsidered upon the basis of species equality. That is, modern science needs to ask the question of:
'Who' is the best candidate for 'sacrifice' for the good of the environment and all species concerned ? The moral
response to the violence, suffering and damage humans have inflicted upon this earth and its inhabitants might
then be to argue for the sacrifice of the human species. The moral act would be the global suicide of humanity.
anthro – alt – prereq
Alt is a prerequisite to the aff- all forms of exclusion are patterned off the human/non-human
divide- de-normalizing the anthropocentric order is critical to challenging the endless war on
difference
Kochi, 2K9 (Tarik, Sussex law school, Species war: Law, Violence and Animals, Law Culture and Humanities
Oct 5.3)//RSW
This reflection need not be seen as carried out by every individual on a daily basis but rather as that which is drawn upon from time to time within public
the
violence and killing of species war is not simply a question of survival or bare life, instead, it is
bound up with a consideration of the good. For most modern humans in the West the “good life” involves the daily killing of
animals for dietary need and for pleasure. At the heart of the question of species war, and all war for that matter, resides a
question about the legitimacy of violence linked to a philosophy of value. 22 The question of war-law sits within a wider
history of decision making about the relative values of different forms of life. “Legitimate” violence is under-laid by cultural,
religious, moral, political and philosophical conceptions about the relative values of forms of life. Playing out
through history are distinctions and hierarchies of life-value that are extensions of the original human-animal
distinction. Distinctions that can be thought to follow from the human-animal distinction are those, for example,
drawn between: Hellenes and barbarians; Europeans and Orientals; whites and blacks; the “civilized”
and the “uncivilized”; Nazis and Jews; Israeli’s and Arabs; colonizers and the colonized.
Historically these practices and regimes of violence have been culturally, politically and legally normal-ized in a
manner that replicates the normalization of the violence carried out against non-human animals. Unpacking,
criticizing and challenging the forms of violence, which in different historical moments appear as “normal,” is
one of the ongoing tasks of any critic who is concerned with the question of what war does to law and of what
law does to war? The critic of war is thus a critic of war’s norm-alization.
life as humans inter-subjectively coordinate their actions in accordance with particular enunciated ends and plan for the future. 21 In this respect,
anthro – at: framework
The 1ac failure to attend to our relationship as debaters, judges and coaches beyond the human
sphere makes them a part of an educational practice that sustains anthropocentric ordering of
world despite the “empowerment” offered by the affirmative
Bell and Russell 2K (Anne C. by graduate students in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University and Constance L. a graduate
student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy,
and the Poststructuralist Turn, http://www.csse-scee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-3-bell.pdf)//RSW
So far, however, such queries
in critical pedagogy have been limited by their neglect of the ecological contexts of
which students are a part and of relationships extending beyond the human sphere. The gravity of this oversight is
brought sharply into focus by writers interested in environ-mental thought, particularly in the cultural and historical dimensions of the environmental
crisis. For example, Nelson (1993) contends that our
inability to acknowledge our human embeddedness in nature results in
our failure to understand what sustains us. We become inattentive to our very real dependence on others and
to the ways our actions affect them. Educators, therefore, would do well to draw on the literature of environ-mental thought in order to
come to grips with the misguided sense of independence, premised on freedom from nature, that informs such no-tions as “empowerment.” Further,
calls for educational practices situated in the life-worlds of students go hand in hand with critiques of
disembodied approaches to education. In both cases, critical pedagogy challenges the liberal notion of
education whose sole aim is the development of the individual, rational mind (Giroux, 1991, p. 24;
McKenna, 1991, p. 121; Shapiro, 1994). Theorists draw attention to the importance of nonverbal discourse (e.g., Lewis & Simon, 1986, p. 465) and to the
somatic character of learning (e.g., Shapiro, 1994, p. 67), both overshadowed by the intellectual authority long granted to rationality and science (Giroux,
1995; Peters, 1995; S. Taylor, 1991). Describing an “emerging discourse of the body” that looks at how bodies are represented and inserted into the social
order, S. Taylor (1991) cites as examples the work of Peter McLaren, Michelle Fine, and Philip Corrigan. A complementary vein of enquiry is being
pursued by environmental researchers and educators critical of the privileging of science and abstract thinking in education. They understand learning to
be mediated not only through our minds but also through our bodies. Seeking
to acknowledge and create space for sensual,
emotional, tacit, and communal knowledge, they advocate approaches to education grounded in, for example,
nature experience and environmental practice (Bell, 1997; Brody, 1997; Weston, 1996). Thus, whereas both critical pedagogy
and environmental education offer a critique of disembodied thought, one draws attention to the ways in which
the body is situated in culture (Shapiro, 1994) and to “the social construction of bodies as they are constituted
within discourses of race, class, gender, age and other forms of oppression” (S. Taylor, 1991, p. 61). The other
emphasizes and celebrates our embodied relatedness to the more-than-human world and to the myriad life
forms of which it is comprised (Payne, 1997; Russell & Bell, 1996). Given their different foci, each stream of enquiry
stands to be enriched by a sharing of insights. Finally, with regard to the poststructuralist turn in educational theory, ongoing
investigations stand to greatly enhance a revisioning of environ-mental education. A growing number of environmental educators question the
empirical-analytical tradition and its focus on technical and behavioural aspects of curriculum (A. Gough, 1997; Robottom, 1991). Advocating
more interpretive, critical approaches, these educators contest the discursive frameworks (e.g.,
positivism, empiricism, rationalism) that mask the values, beliefs, and assumptions underlying information,
and thus the cultural and political dimensions of the problems being considered (A. Gough, 1997;
Huckle, 1999; Lousley, 1999). Teaching about ecological processes and environmental hazards in a supposedly
objective and rational manner is understood to belie the fact that knowledge is socially constructed and
therefore partial (A. Gough, 1997; Robertson, 1994; Robottom, 1991; Stevenson, 1993). N. Gough (1999) explicitly goes beyond critical approaches
to advocate poststructuralist positions in environmental education. He asks science and environmental educators to adopt skepticism towards
metanarratives, an attitude that characterizes poststructuralist discourses. Working from the assumption that science and environmental education are
story-telling practices, he suggests that the adequacy of narrative strategies be examined in terms of how they represent and render problematic “human
trans-actions with the phenomenal world” (N. Gough, 1993, p. 607). Narrative strategies, he asserts, should not create an illusion of neutrality,
objectivity, and anonymity, but rather draw attention to our kinship with nature and to “the personal participation of the knower in all acts of
understanding” (N. Gough, 1993, p. 621). We contend, of course, that Gough’s proposal should extend beyond the work of science and environmental
educators. The
societal narratives that legitimize the domination of nature, like those that underlie racism, sexism,
classism, heterosexism, and so on, merit everyone’s concern. And since the ecological crisis threatens especially
those most marginalized and vulnerable (Running-Grass, 1996; D. Taylor, 1996), proponents of critical pedagogy in
particular need to come to terms with the humancentred frameworks that structure their endeavours. No doubt
poststructuralist theory will be indispensable in this regard. Nevertheless, anthropocentric assumptions about language,
meaning, and agency will need to be revisited . In the meantime, perhaps we can ponder the spontaneous creativity of spiders
and the life-worlds of woodticks. Such wondrous possibilities should cause even the most committed of humanists to pause for a moment at least.
anthro – at: perm
Perm fails
Hudson, 2k4 (Laura, Cultural Studies PhD UC-Davis, The Political Animal: Species-Being and Bare life,
Mediations: Journal of Marxist Literary Group, http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/the-politicalanimal)//RSW
In his discussion of religion, Marx argues that the recognition of religion as the
alienated self-consciousness of human beings allows
humans to “know” themselves: “I therefore know my own self, the self-consciousness that belongs to its very nature, confirmed not in religion
but rather in annihilated and superseded religion.”35 Marx argues that Hegel’s negation of the negation, which is to lead in a
positive progression toward the Absolute, is actually the negation of pseudo-essence, not true essence: “A peculiar
role, therefore, is played by the act of superseding in which denial and preservation — denial and affirmation — are bound together.”36 Religion is the
misrecognized, abstract, and alienated form of human self-consciousness.
In recognizing this, and in superseding it, a better
understanding of human self-consciousness and potentiality is revealed. Rather than waiting for reward in the
next life, we must change our lives in the material world. Religion is a human construct, not a force from outside. Humanism
appears as the annulment of religion, but it, too, remains an abstraction until brought into relation with the
natural world. Extrapolating from Marx here, we might say that the concept of “the human” occupies the same space
in our conceptual framework as religion does: The supersession of the concept of the human as an
essence based in a political identity, or even an anti-naturalism, requires that we recognize that the concept is
the result of the alienation of human beings from their sensual, living selves: the concept of “the human” is not
the thing-in-itself. Nature as presented in Hegel was only the alienated form of the Absolute and, as such, remained an abstraction of thought.
Marx argues that we must come to recognize the sensual reality of nature and the supersession of the abstract thought-entity. As elements of
nature ourselves, we must move beyond the abstract forms through which we recognize ourselves and come to
terms with the fact that we are natural, sensual beings, animals who may be captivated, who may also be
processed, objectified, reified things as well as transcendent beings. In bare life, perhaps, we find the first moment of this
supersession: Under modern capitalist sovereignty, we are all equally abandoned by the law we have created to free us from nature. We are all equally
reduced to mere specimens of human biology, mute and uncomprehending of the world in which we are thrown. Species-being, or “humanity
as a
species,” may require this recognition to move beyond the pseudo-essence of the religion of humanism.
Recognizing that what we call “the human” is an abstraction that fails to fully describe what we
are, we may come to find a new way of understanding humanity that recuperates the natural
without domination. The bare life that results from expulsion from the law removes even the illusion of freedom. Regardless of one’s
location in production, the threat of losing even the fiction of citizenship and freedom affects everyone. This may create new means of organizing
resistance across the particular divisions of society. Furthermore, the
concept of bare life allows us to gesture toward a more
detailed, concrete idea of what species-being may look like. Agamben hints that in the recognition of this fact, that in our
essence we are all animals, that we are all living dead, might reside the possibility of a kind of redemption.
Rather than the mystical horizon of a future community, the passage to species-being may be experienced as a deprivation, a
loss of identity. Species-being is not merely a positive result of the development of history; it is equally the absence of many of the features of
“humanity” through which we have learned to make sense of our world. It is an absence of the kind of individuality and atomism
that structure our world under capitalism and underlie liberal democracy, and which continue to inform the
tenets of deep ecology. The development of species-being requires the collapse of the distinction between
human and animal in order to change the shape of our relationships with the natural world. A true speciesbeing depends on a sort of reconciliation between our “human” and “animal” selves, a breakdown of the
distinction between the two both within ourselves and in nature in general. Bare life would then represent not
only expulsion from the law but the possibility of its overcoming. Positioned in the zone of indistinction, no longer a subject of
the law but still subjected to it through absence, what we equivocally call “the human” in general becomes virtually indistinguishable from the animal or
nature. But through this expulsion and absence, we may see not only the law but the system of capitalism that shapes it from a position no longer blinded
or captivated by its spell. The structure of the law is revealed as always suspect in the false division between natural and political life, which are never
truly separable. Though clearly the situation is not yet as dire as Agamben’s invocation of the Holocaust suggests, we are all, as citizens, under the threat
of the state of exception. With the decline of the nation as a form of social organization, the whittling away of civil liberties and, with them, the state’s
promise of “the good life” (or “the good death”) even in the most developed nations, with the weakening of labor as the bearer of resistance to
exploitation, how are we to envision the future of politics and society?
Perm still links
J. Baird Callicott, Professor of Philosphy at UNT, 2002
[Environmental Ethics p. 548-550]
Bryan Norton, another environmental antiphilosopher, thinks that theoretical environmental ethics is not only an irrelevant subterfuge, but that it is also
downright pernicious. Environmental ethicists arguing with one another about whether nature has intrinsic as well as instrumental value and about
whether intrinsic value is objective or subjective divide environmentalists into deep and shallow camps. While these two camps spend precious time and
energy criticizing one another, their common enemy, the hydra-headed forces of environmental destruction, remains unopposed by a united and resolute
counterforce.But according
to Norton a long and wide anthropocentrism "converges" on the same environmental policies-the
preservation of biological diversity, for example- as nonanthropocentrism.Hence the intellectual differences between anthropocentrists and
nonanthropocentrists, deep ecologists and reform environmentalists are, practically speaking, otiose. Environmental philosophers, in Norton's view,
should therefore cease spinning nonanthropocentric theories of the intrinsic value of natureand, as Norton himself does, concentrate instead on refining
environmental policy. Norton opts for anthropocentrism because it is the more conservative alternative. Most people are anthropocentrists to begin with,
and when the instrumental value of a whole and healthy environment to both present and future generations of humans is fully accounted, anthropocentrism, he believes, is sufficient to support the environmental policy agenda. 3Norton's "convergence hypothesis," however,
is dead
wrong. If all environmental values are anthropocentric and instrumental, then they have to compete head-to-head with the economicvalues derived
from converting rain forests to lumber and pulp, savannahs to cattle pasture, and so on. Environmentalists, in other words, must show that preserving
biological diversity is of greater instrumental value to present and future generations than lucrative timber extraction, agricultural conversion,
hydroelectric empoundment, mining, and so on. For this simple reason, a persuasive philosophical case for the intrinsic value of nonhuman natural
entities and nature as a whole would make a huge practical difference. Warwick Fox explains why. Granting an entity intrinsic value would not imply
"that it cannot be interfered with under any circumstances."' Believing, as we do, that human beings are intrinsically valuable does not imply that human
beings ought never be uprooted, imprisoned, put at grave risk, or even deliberately killed. Intrinsically valuable human beings may-ethically may-be
made to suffer these and other insults with sufficient justification. Therefore, Fox points out, the mere fact that moral agents must be able to justify their
actions in regard to their treatment of entities that are intrinsically valuable means thatrecognizing
the intrinsic value of the nonhuman
world has a dramatic effect upon the framework of environmental debate and decision-making. If the nonhuman world is
only considered to be instrumentally valuable then people are permitted to use and otherwise interfere with any aspect of it for whatever reasons they
wish (i.e., no justification is required). If anyone objects to such interference then, within this framework of reference, the onus is clearly on the person
who objects to justify why it is more useful to humans to leave that aspect of the nonhuman world alone. If, however, the nonhuman world is considered
to be intrinsically valuable then the onus shifts to the person who wants to interfere with it to justify why they should be allowed to do so: anyone who
wants to interfere with any entity that is intrinsically valuable is morally obliged to be able to offer a sufficient justification for their actions. Thus
recognizing the intrinsic value of the nonhuman world shifts the onus of justification from the person who wants to protect the nonhuman world to the
person who wants to interfere with it-and that, in itself, represents a fundamental shift in the terms of environmental debate and decisionmaking.5Just
as Sayre seems to think of moral norms as hanging alone in an intellectual void, so Norton
seems to think of environmental policies in the same
way. We environmentalists just happen to have a policy agenda-saving endangered species, preserving biodiversity in all its forms,
lowering CO2 emissions, etc. To rationalize these policies-to sell them to the electorate and their representatives-is the intellectual task, if there is any.
(Much of Norton's research for his book, Unity Among Environmentalists, consisted of interviewing the Washington based lobbyists for "big ten"
environmental groups.Such
cynicism maybe characteristic of lobbyists who are hired to pitch a policy, butstarting with a policy and
just don't adopt a
policy like they decide which color is their favorite.They adopt it for what seems to them to be good reasons. Reasons
come first, policies second, not the other way around. Most people, of course, do not turn to philosophers for something to believe-as
looking for persuasive reasons to support it is not how sincere environmentalists outside the Beltway actually think.) People
if they didn't at all know what to think and philosophers can and should tell them. Rather, philosophers such as Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Roiston
give voice to the otherwise inchoate and articulate thoughts and feelings in our changing cultural Zeitgeist. A maximally stretched anthropocentrism
may, as Norton argues, rationalize the environmental policy agenda, but anthropocentrism may no longer ring true.That is, the claim that all and only
human beings have intrinsic value may not be consistent with a more general evolutionary and ecological worldview. I should think that contemporary
environmental philosopherswould want to give voice and form to the still small but growing movement that supports environmental policies for the right
reasons-which, as Fox points out, also happen to be the strongest reasons.Granted, we may not have the leisure to wait for a majority to come over to a
new woridview and a new nonanthropocentric, holistic environmental ethic. We environmentalists have to reach people where they are, intellectually
speaking, right now. So we might persuade Jews, Christians, and Muslims to support the environmental policy agenda by appeal to such concepts as
God, creation, and stewardship; we might persuade humanists by appeal to collective enlightened human self-interest; and so on. But that is no
argument for insisting, as Norton seems to do, that environmental philosophers should stop exploring the real reasons why we ought to value other
forms of life, ecosystems, and the biosphere as a whole.The eventual institutionalizationof a new holistic, nonanthropocentric environmental
ethic will make as much practical difference in the environmental arena as the institutionalization of the intrinsic value
of all human beings has made in the social arena. As recently as a century and a half ago, it was permissible to own human beings. With the
eventual institutionalization of Enlightenment ethics-persuasively articulated by Hobhes, Locke, Bentham, and Kant, among others-slavery was
abolished in Western civilization. Of course, a case could have been made to slaveowners and an indifferent public that slavery
was economically backward and more trouble than it was worth. But that would not have gotten at the powerful moral
truth that for one human being to own another is wrong. With the eventual institutionalizationof a holistic, nonanthropocentric
environmental ethic-today persuasively articulated by Aldo Leopold, Arne Naess, Holmes Roiston, and Val Plumwood, among others-the wanton
destruction of the nonhuman world will, hopefully, come to be regarded as equally unconscionable.
State reforms produce human domination of nature --- only a radical orientation away from
speciesm solves
Roderick Nash, Professor of History and Environmental Studies at UC-SB, 1989 [The Rights of Nature p. 164-166]
Karl Marx, of course, had studied this last form of hierarchy and proposed a revolutionary remedy. Bookchin began
where Marx stopped. He recommended discarding ecological as well as economic class distinctions along
with the governments that sanctioned and sustained them. This meant revolution and, here again,
Bookchin transcended Marx. The nineteenth-century revolutionary called for a government of and by the working
class; Bookchin wanted no government at all. His objective was not to seize power for one group or
another but to dissolve- it entirely as an apparatus by which people related to each other and, as a
species, to nature. As early as 1965 Bookchin linked anarchism and ecology. Both. perspectives, he believed,
stressed the equal value of every part of the community and the necessity of maximizing individual freedom so that
every component could fulfill its potential. "I submit," Bookchin wrote in "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" (1965),
"that an anarchist community would approximate a [normal] ecosystem; it would be diversified, balanced and
harmonious." 6 The means to this end, he explained in his major work, The Ecology of Freedom (1982), was through
an "ethics of complementarity" derived from an "ecological vision of nature." Bookchin's utopia was not only based on
ecological models; it included the ecosystem. He sought a "new and lasting equilibrium with nature" just as he did with
other humans. Bookchin was under no illusion about the fact that his ecoanarchism necessitated the wholesale
replacement of his civilization's "institutional and ethical framework.” He also knew that this was another
word for revolution. "I would like to ask," he wrote in 1974, "if the environmental crisis does not have its roots in the
very constitution of society as we know it today, if the changes that are needed.., do not require a fundamental, indeed
revolutionary, reconstitution of society along ecological lines?" 9 It was from this perspective that Bookchin, like the
deep ecologists whom he anticipated, criticized most manifestations of American conservation and even large parts of
modern environmentalism. As one of the first of the radical environmentalists, and as an avowed revolutionary,
Book-chin remained profoundly suspicious of those who would save the world by banning aerosol
cans or staging Earth-Day cleanups. He regretted that by 1980 "ecology is now fashionable, indeed faddish--and
with this sleazy popularity has emerged a new type of environmentalist hype." 10 It featured anti-pollution campaigns
but did not challenge the mental pollution that Bookchin regarded as the root of the problem. Dismissing charges that
environmentalist demands were too radical, he argued "they are not radical enough." Specifically, Bookchin continued,
"'environmentalism' does not bring into question the underlying notion of the present society that man must dominate
nature; it seeks to facilitate domination by developing techniques for diminishing the hazards caused by domination.”
The only meaningful, long-term solution was to replace the modern world's "odious morality" with a
holistic, environmental ethic that had as its basis respect for all people and all nature. Armed with new
definitions of right and wrong, ecoanarchists could tear down the old order and erect the new. Unless this happened
soon, Bookchin warned, a poisoned, lifeless earth would be "a dead witness to [the] cosmic failure" of
its most advanced life-form.” Murray Bookchin disappointed readers seeking practical programs for action, but
his bitter indictment of contemporary ethics and his forthright call for revolutionary changes emboldened the
liberators of nature. For more than a century after Karl Marx's manifesto of the 1840s, socialist advocates of universal
human liberation said little about the oppression of nature. But in the second half of the twentieth century the rising
tide of opposition to the exploitation of nature--and the perception, noted by Bookchin, that it was closely linked to
human exploitation--opened many eyes to the possibility of a transcendent libertarianism. For instance, after thirty
years of protesting the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, science, and technology, Herbert Marcuse added nature to
the category of subjects deserving freedom. Indeed Marcuse was the first well-known American radical to see nature as
humanity's slave and to use the phrase "the liberation of nature.''13 Capitalism, Marcuse continued, reduced both
nature and people to raw materials with strictly utilitarian value. But capitalism was in its death
throes and the "coming revolution" would bring "universal liberation" including "a new relation
between man and nature." Its basis, Marcuse thought, was the recognition, later publicized by the deep
ecologists, that everything existed first and foremost "for its own sake." This led Marcuse to advocate a
reduction of human impact on animals and plants, and he concluded his essay with a widely quoted phrase: "nature,
too, awaits the revolution!" As it turned out, some American environmental activists were also waiting to be
revolutionaries.
Perm can’t overcome the link – the 1AC treats nature as a knowable good for maximization –
can’t go north and south at the same time!
Taylor 98 (Prue, Senior Lecturer of law and a founding member of the New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law at the University of Auckland,
An Ecological Approach to International Law: Responding to the Challenges of Climate Change (Hardcover) p. 39-42, 45-48)
The question 'are
ecocentric ethics really necessary?' is frequently asked. Could we not, for example, achieve our environmental
goals by more rigorous environmental legislation? Obviously much could be improved as a consequence of tighter controls, but two important
limitations would remain. First, the question of 'how clean is clean' would continue to be answered solely by reference to human needs and standards.
Thus water quality would he determined by interests such as human welfare, recreation needs and aesthetic values. The interests of nature and the needs
of fully functioning ecosystems, which full below a human centred threshold, would be left unprtxected. By taking into account a much larger and more
complex set of ecocentrically determined interests, tougher environmental standards would he achieved.217 Second, as Bosselmann points out,
decision makers would not be able to make the important paradigm jump to protecting nature for its own sake.
Worse, in cases where decision makers felt morally committed to such a jump, they would be forced to find constrained logic to justify their decisions.
The variety of ethical approaches to environmental decision making has raised the question of moral pluralism. Stone, for example, has suggested that
situations can be resolved according to either anthropocentric or ecocentric views depending on the nature of the problem. Thus decision
makers
are able to switch from one value system to another. Such a process is rejected by commentators such as 3. Baird
Callicott who believes that ecocentric ethics are 'not only a question of better rational arguments but the expres¬sion of a fundamentally changed
attitude to nature. Callicott reminds Stone that anthropocentric attitudes and ecocentric
ethics represent quite different paradigms.
That in reality people do not follow anthropocentric attitudes in the morning, only to switch to ecocentric
ethics after lunch. In the context of New Zealand's primary environmental legislation, this debate is currently being worked through in practice.
The Resource Management Act 1991 (1RMA') is guided by 'sustainable management', a concept which is defined in both anthropocentric and ecocentric
terms, leaving room for tension between the supporters of alternative approaches." 221 To date the RMA has been largely dominated by
anthropocentricic interests due to a failure by key authorities, such as the Environment Court and local govern ment, to make the significant changes in
attitude required by the Act's ecocentric principles. It has been suggested that this tension, evident in implementation of the RMA, can only be resolved
by an interpretation of sustainable management' which is ecological.
If we win that a moral universe anchored in humanism, they can’t severe that link since it’s the
reason for the plan.
Greene, Assistance Profession Communications @ UT-Austin, 1998 (Ronald, Argumentation and Advocacy, Summer, p. 20-21)
In Scott’s hands rhetoric becomes a particular form of human action with ethical consequences. The ethical
problematization of rhetoric follows from Scott’s view that rhetoric entails the ability to create situational
truths which give meaning to collective human behaviors. Human agents should be held ethically
responsible for what they say, how they say it and whether they say anything at all. At this point,
rhetoric is a unique cultural practice, exhibiting an exemplary form through debate, locating the
substance of rhetorical knowledge in the creation of a situational truth. Scott’s turn to the sophistic tradition reactivates the ethical and epistemological consequences of an Isocratean-Ciceronian thread in the tapestry of rhetorical
theory. Scott allows for a rhetorical epistemology that is future oriented; moreover, the ability of rhetorical
practices to imagine a future is at the heart of Scott’s initial gambit. Scott’s emphasis on imaging a
future sets in motion a standard of rhetorical effectivity that can be understood as a constitutive
model in opposition to an “influence model.” The point I want to emphasis here is that Scott’s articulation of
the Isocratean-Ciceronian rhetorical tradition to phenomenology emphasizes how rhetoric becomes a human action of
world disclosure. Since we can only imagine the future consequences of particular policy options, the
“epistemic” function of rhetoric is to draw a portrait of this future. My claim is that the rhetorical
process of world-disclosure marks the emergence of a constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity. Those
readers familiar with Habermas (1987) might suggest that an emphasis on a constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity
requires an aesthetic appreciation of rhetoric. I would agree, but to appreciate how speech communication acquired an
aesthetic sensibility of its constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity it is necessary to turn to Edwin Black. In 1970,
Edwin Black published the "Second Persona." In this essay, he explicated the anxiety associated with making
moral judgments about rhetorical practices. Yet, he advanced the claim that moral judgments must be
made if we were "to bring order to our history" (p. 109). Drawing analogically on Wayne Booth's concept of author as
persona, Black argues that every discourse implies that an audience - a second persona. Black advanced a
form of rhetorical reading is symptomatic - that is, it investigates the stylistic tokens of a message in order to
account for the type of audience implied by the discourse. Consequently, a rhetorical critic was
authorized to make moral judgments about a text by investigating the type of audience that was being
called forth by the message. Black identified his project as a form of ideological criticism whereby: "what is
important in characterizing a persona . . . is not age or temperament or even discreet attitude. It is ideology - ideology
in the sense that Marx used the term: the network of interconnected convictions that functions in a man [or women]
epistemically and that shapes his [or her] identity by determining how he [or she] views the world" (p. 113). What I
would like to emphasize here is less Black's gloss of Marx but the implications of turning to Booth and Marx to ground
the concept of the second persona.
Overcoming speciesism requires a qualitative transformation in consciousness—any
justifications for the plan not centered on overcoming speciesism means the perm won’t solve
Katherine Perdlo, PhD, 2007 [Journal of Critical Animal Studies 5.1]
Animal rights campaigners disagree as to whether empirical arguments, based on facts such as those concerning nutrition, or ethical arguments, based
on values such as the wrongness of hurting sentient beings, have greater validity and potential effectiveness. I want to address the issue in terms of
“extrinsic” and “intrinsic” arguments – a distinction that corresponds only partly to the empirical and ethical couplet – and to make the case that
animal rights campaigns are most effectively advanced through intrinsic appeals. “Extrinsic
arguments” are those that seek to promote an aim and its underlying principle by appealing to considerations
politically, historically, or logically separable from that aim and that principle. “Intrinsic arguments”
appeal to considerations within and inseparable from the aim and principle. In this case, the aim is
animal liberation and the principle is the moral equality of species. For example, the claim that
vegetarianism (ideally, veganism) helps reduce animal suffering is an intrinsic argument, but it can
also be justified on extrinsic grounds through appeal to its environmental benefits. You can separate
vegetarianism from the benefit to the environment, since it is logically possible that the one might not lead to the other, and environmentalism is an
independent political cause. But you cannot separate vegetarianism from the benefit to animals, since the word vegetarianism, whatever its etymology,
is used to mean abstention from meat or from all animal products. You might say that “benefit to animals” is an independent issue in that there are
other means of ameliorating animal suffering besides vegetarianism, or you might promote vegetarianism only for human health benefits. But in terms
The case for
intrinsic arguments rests not on a concern for ideological purity, but on the need to reach a
public that, although partly responsive to our ideas in some areas, has stopped far short of the
acceptance needed to make significant breakthroughs. At some point in the encounter with us,
the reaction sets in of either, “Yes, it’s terrible, but it’s justified if it saves human lives,” or,
“Yes, it’s terrible and unjustifiable, but we have more important [i.e. human] things to worry
about.” We need to tackle speciesism head-on, instead of relying on less challenging extrinsic
arguments – “widely-accepted and existing frames” in Yates’s (2006) formulation – which tacitly consign
“animal rights” and its policy demands to a marginal, indeed “extreme,” position. Besides disowning
animal rights, extrinsic arguments contain inconsistent or evasive implications that can leave the
audience doubtful and confused without being able to pin down what is wrong. It is true that extrinsic
of animal rights campaigning, vegetarianism is advanced for the intrinsic reasons that it benefits the animals themselves.
arguments have had some positive effect. If, for non-animal rights reasons, even one person has turned vegan or decided to oppose vivisection, while
another has taken a small step in the right direction, such as by giving up “red meat,” there are nonetheless 2! ! benefits for animals and the planet. But
what is truly needed to free billions of animals is a qualitative transformation in people’s thinking.
Without a moral paradigm shift, the public may never be motivated to overcome either its own
self-interest in using animals or governments’ aggressive protection of animal-abusing
industries
anthro – at: nature aint people
This is another link- their rejection of animist intersubjectivity degrades indigenous culture
and is the ultimate form of human mastery over nature
Endres ’12 (Danielle, Professor of Communication and Environmental Humanities @ University of Utah,
“Animist Intersubjectivity as Argumentation: Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute Arguments Against a
Nuclear Waste Site at Yucca Mountain Abstract, Project MUSE, SG)
Communication scholars have asserted that communication is the means through which intersubjectivity is
manifest; reality is socially constructed and understood through communication (e.g., Brummett 1976;
Grossberg 1982; Smeltzer 1996). Argumentation scholars have used intersubjectivity to examine a variety of
topics including dialectic and lying (Bermejo-Luque 2010; Smeltzer 1996). I am drawing from a
phenomenological perspective on intersubjectivity that assumes that intersubjectivity is not just a relationship
between humans, but can be a relationship between all sensing subjects. To differentiate this concept from
intersubjectivity as discussed in previous argumentation research, I call it animist intersubjectivity. From a
phenomenological perspective, animist intersubjectivity refers to ‘‘phenomena [that are] experienced by a
multiplicity of sensing subjects’’ (Abram 1996, p. 38). Sensing subjects expand beyond humans to include
animals, plants, mountains, and landscapes, despite the Western philosophical tradition’s tendency to view
sensing, communicating, and meaning-making as the unique realm of humans. Husserl (1960), Merleau-Ponty
(1962) and other phenomenologist theorists examine how the sensible world—including non-human beings—is
animate and participatory. In his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram (1996) extends the work of
phenomenologist theorists to explore the possibility of communicating between human and non-human
sensing beings. He argues that ‘‘at the most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience, we find ourselves
in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that speaks.’’ (p. 81). This intersubjective relationship between
human and non-human sensing beings is a common assumption in animism, which describes ‘‘a planet where
everything is alive and sentient’’ (Sheridan and Longboat 2006, p. 368), meaning that humans can engage in
forms of communication with mountains, animals, and other non-human beings. Animist intersubjectivity has
been associated with (but is not limited to) indigenous peoples (e.g., Levy-Bruhl 1985), particularly those
indigenous peoples that maintain strong roots to their oral traditions (Abram 1996). The belief in
intersubjectivity among indigenous peoples can be linked to realist animism (Sheridan and Longboat 2006)
and spiritual ecology (Cajete 1999). For many Native American cultures, realist animism and spiritual ecology
converge in a cultural belief system that posits that the intimate intersubjective relationship between humans
and their environment is ‘‘the essence of their survival and identity as people’’ (Cajete 1999, p. 4). The late
Deloria (1992) generalizes that most Native American cultures view the earth as animate. From this
perspective, ‘‘everything the creator made is a living entity’’ making possible communication and relationships
between all living things (Kidwell et al. 2001, pp. 127–128). For many contemporary Native American cultures,
animist intersubjectivity connotes an intimate relationship between humans and other sensing beings in
particular culturally significant places where communication across humans, animals, and landscape occur
(Abram 1996; Carbaugh 1999; Kuletz 1998; Wilkinson 1991). It is important to note that belief in animist
intersubjectivity does not preclude exploitation, damage to the environment, or lack of alignment between
spiritual ideals and actual practices within indigenous cultures. Moreover, it does not mean that Native
Americans were (or are) the embodiment of the ideals of the modern Western environmental movement.
Rather, animist intersubjectivity describes a set of beliefs about the natural world. When the natural world is
viewed as animate and able to speak, participate, and experience, humans tend to act in different ways towards
it. While Native American cultures have changed over time and adapted, the roots of animist intersubjectivity
as a cultural belief remain for many Native Americans (Kuletz 1998). Animist intersubjectivity still plays a role
in many contemporary Native American cultures (and more broadly for many indigenous and Asian cultures
worldwide). In particular, spiritual leaders, medicine men and women, and healers in Native American cultures
may be more in touch with the animist intersubjective relationship or have special abilities to communicate
with non-humans (Sheridan and Longboat 2006). Animist intersubjectivity is a way to describe the human
relationship to nature. Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) suggest that people turn to culture to answer basic
questions about the nature of life (see also Condon and Yousef 1975; Samovar et al. 2009). Regarding the
relationship between humans and nature, Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck introduce a range of variation that spans
from subjugation-to-nature, to harmony-with-nature, to mastery-over-nature, arguing that all cultures fall
somewhere within this range. The belief that humans are subject to nature assumes, for example, ‘‘that there
was little or nothing a [hu]man could so to save or protect either land or flocks when damaging storms
descended upon them’’ (Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck 1961, p. 13). A perspective of humans in harmony with
nature contends that ‘‘there is no real separation of [hu]man, nature, and supernature. One is simply an
extension of the other, and a conception of wholeness derives from their unity’’ (Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck
1961, p. 13). Human mastery of nature presumes that ‘‘natural forces of all kinds are to be overcome and put to
the use of human beings’’ (Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck 1961, p. 13). Animist intersubjectivity assumes that all
beings in the natural world—animals, plants, mountains—to sense and communicate with each other and is
therefore consistent with the presumption of human harmony with nature. In contrast to animist
intersubjectivity, cultures that assume that humans have dominion over nature and that humans are distinct
from nature exclude the possibility of an animist intersubjective relationship between humans and nature. At
risk of oversimplification, animist intersubjectivity is often contrasted with Western cultural perspectives that
fall with in the human control over nature portion of Kluckholn and Strodtbeck’s continuum. This view ‘‘is
characteristic of the Western approach’’ that ‘‘has a long tradition of valuing technology, change, and science’’
and believes ‘‘that nature was something that could and had to be mastered’’ (Samovar et al. 2009, p. 211). In
comparing cultures’ abilities to recognize animist intersubjectivity, Abrams (1996) notes, ‘‘Nonhuman nature
can be perceived and Scholars argue over whether indigenous people really do have stronger environmental
ethics than nonindigenous people, whether linking indigenous people to the environment perpetuates
stereotypes such as the ‘‘noble savage,’’ and whether indigenous people (pre- and post-Columbus) lived in
sustainable relationships with their environments (e.g., Forbes 2001; Johnson 2007; Kretch 1999; Martin
1978; Nelson 2006; Weaver 1996). It is important to note that we must be cautious of essentializing Native
Americans as fundamentally ecological, or environmentalist. As is true with any culture, there are differences
between ideal cultural beliefs and actual practices. Animist Intersubjectivity as Argumentation experienced
with far more intensity and nuance than is generally acknowledged in the West’’ (p. 27). Further, Sheridan and
Longboat (2006) also note, ‘‘Disallowing the correspondence between systems and environments is not
possible, but ignoring that correspondence is now a Western cultural dynamic’’ (Sheridan and Longboat 2006,
p. 378). It is important to recognize that the simple contrast between Western cultures and indigenous cultures
presented in this literature may be too simplistic. Rather than contrast Western and indigenous cultures, it is
more useful to contrast animist intersubjectivity (as a perspective of cooperation with nature) and other
perspectives on the human relationship with nature. Culture presumptions that assume control over nature are
consistent with what Fisher (1984) has termed the rational world paradigm and what others have termed a
technocratic paradigm (e.g., Goodnight 1982). Carbaugh and Wolf (1999) describe this as a cultural discourse
that is premised on the notions that ‘‘People are best when rational, and people should think rationally about
the world; the world does not know or feel in any real sense … people dwell in a world that can be used for the
advancement of human objectives’’ (pp. 25–26). They continue, ‘‘human activity is separated from nature’s
objects, and mountains are not conveyors of messages’’ (p. 26). While I will not engage in a comparative
analysis of cultural discourses in the Yucca Mountain case, it is still important to understand that other cultural
presumptions about the relationship between humans and nature are not only possible, but also affect how one
classifies things for comparative argument forms. Animist Intersubjectivity in Shoshone and Paiute Cultures
Shoshone and Paiute are closely related Shoshonean cultures who lived in ethnic coresidence in the Great
Basin (Stoffle and Zedeno 2001). There are several cultures within the broad categories of Western Shoshone
(e.g., Timbisha Shoshone, Duckwater Band of Shoshone) and Paiute (e.g., Chemehuevi Paiute, Owens Valley
Paiute) that have unique cultural practices, these cultures ‘‘share similar languages, social structures, and
similar epistemological beliefs’’ (Van Vlack 2007, p. 14). Shoshone and Paiute cultures hold animist
intersubjective beliefs, each in their own way (Kuletz 1998; Van Vlack 2007). In particular, elders,
traditionalists, and healers make an effort to retain the ‘‘old ways’’ (including animist intersubjectivity) as
opposed to those that have pursued integration and assimilation with the dominant US culture (Kuletz 1998).
Within this belief is the recognition of interrelationship between humans, animals, and landscape. The
Shoshone and Paiute peoples view the entire earth as a living being with power (puha) that animates spirits in
humans, animals, plants, and rocks (Fowler 1991). For example, The late Western Shoshone For example,
Carrie Dann—a self-described Western Shoshone traditionalist—stated ‘‘Traditional people still follow the old
faith. You know like the spirit life and things like that. A lot of our indigenous people no longer practice that.
But the traditional ones are—still practice that. They still believe in that’’ (2009, p. 15). Yet, Clara Rambeau, an
Owens Valley Paiute elder, reflects that these beliefs are infused throughout the culture: ‘‘And you know that
kind of a spiritual thing [communicating with animal and landscape spirits], it’s engrained into even our
children. They want to be sophisticated and be with the ‘now’ generation, but still they come back, and they
want to know who they are’’ (as cited in Kuletz 1998, p. 230). D. Endres spiritual leader Corbin Harney
describes the Western Shoshone relationship to nature in his book The Nature Way: ‘‘all of us are related to
everything else, to the elements, to the animal life’’ (Harney 2009, p. 33). He continues, ‘‘the mountains’ got a
life to it. Everything’s’ got a spirit, the mountain’s got a spirit, and all the living things on the mountains have
got a spirit’’ (p. 45). Shoshone and Paiute cultural presumptions suggest that it is possible for humans to
communicate with animals, rocks, water, and other animate parts of the earth. In an oral history interview,
Western Shoshone Reilly (2004) talks about his wife who is a healer. Although he does not have the special
skill to talk to animals, he describes the times he has observed his wife talking to eagles: Lot of times, I see her
talk to an eagle. I’ve seen her talk to an eagle on the side of the road and we’ll stop, eagle’ll be sitting there,
she’ll open her window and get out and talk to him, and they’ll sit there and look at her, you know, turn their
head around and all that, you know, and all that, listen for a while. (p. 28) Through these animal, plant, and
rock spirits that are infused with power (puha), some Shoshone and Paiute people can communicate with the
natural world. Yucca Mountain in an important center of puha for Shoshone and Paiute people. Kuletz (1998)
states, ‘‘Yucca Mountain may be comparatively small, but it is a powerful place nonetheless. Shoshone and
Paiute people call the power such places possess Puha because the mountain, like all things Euroamericans call
‘inanimate,’ possesses energy, vitality, [and] life force’’ (p. 131). Considering that animist intersubjectivity is a
Shoshone and Paiute cultural presumption, I now turn to an analysis of how this cultural presumption appears
in Shoshone and Paiute arguments against the Yucca Mountain High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository.
***imperialism k
imperialism – link – travel
Travel replicates imperialist logic – it becomes the guise by which those haves extend
domination to those who have not and reinforces dependence on the hegemon
Jobanputra, 10 - writer and anthropologist specialising in development, cultural change and environmental ethic, PhD in Social Anthropology
at University College London, (David, “Travel as Imperialism” http://www.tourdust.com/blog/posts/travel-imperialism)//ah
In last week’s piece, I looked at the idea that travel
is simply a symptom of the chronic consumerism that defines the current era.
This gluttonous urge to splurge has made culture a commodity, as surplus demand from the West makes markets of the Rest.
With this in mind, we have no choice but to wonder: is travel a new form of imperialism? The Age of Imperialism (1850-1914) saw the leading Western
nations – Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the US – engaged in a tireless quest for virgin lands to sow with their surplus capital. Now consider the
Age of Tourism (1950-), which has also seen
the major Western nations engaged in a tireless quest for virgin lands to sow
with their surplus capital. Put simply, late capitalism has generated more wealth than anyone knows what to do with while at the same
time expending most of the West’s natural resources (picturesque landscapes, pristine nature, etc.), so the hunt is on for new,
resource-rich territories in which to invest some cash. These wealthy tourists are like capitalist parasites,
draining their hosts of their land and labour and blighting their cultures to boot. From political organisation to the
economy, social structures to morality, tourism has affected (or perhaps infected) every aspect of society, relieving its
victims of all autonomy and breeding an abject dependence. The tourists, for their part, see such sorry subordination
as evidence of backwardness, and thus justify their presence as promoting both material and moral
development. Surprisingly, people buy this. Travel is imperialism. It is born of inequality, of gaps of power and
wealth. Like imperialism, travel involves territorial expansion and the occupation of foreign lands. In both cases, the
colonised regions are subject to control from beyond their borders, as economic and political structures are
increasingly shaped by those in far-flung metropoles. As a consequence, local livelihoods are transformed; it’s out with
farming, fishing and forestry, in with service, subservience. At the heart of this arrangement is dependence. It is a guest-host
relationship in which the host is wholly at the mercy of its parasitic guest . As such, the latter must be kept happy;
anything that the guest desires is promptly provided, regardless of its fit with local tradition. Swimming pools, beach
bars, English breakfasts and banana pancakes – these are the wants of imperial travellers. If the good sahib wishes to eat a hamburger in Hyderabad, or
if ma’am sahib is wont to wear her miniskirt in Marrakesh, so be it! As
ever, the West knows best. All this poses a paradox: does travel
destroy the very cultures it purports to encounter? If the tourist is indeed a parasite that contaminates all it
consumes, if it is replete with infectious moralities, then what becomes of its host? These questions form the backbone of
next week’s article.
***tourism/travel bad
tourism bad – general
Tourism is terrible – multiple warrants
Parkins, 9 - Senior Programmer/Analyst Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester (Keith, “Globalisation - tourism the new
imperialism” http://www.heureka.clara.net/gaia/global03.htm)//ah
Today the tourist
is a consumer. The raw material of the tourist industry is the flesh and blood of people and their
cultures, thus its long-term effect on a country whose main income is derived from tourism can be devastating.
Once a people or culture has been exploited and subverted to the needs of the tourist industry it can never be
replaced. -- Cecil Rajendra, lawyer and human rights activist, Malaysia I saw pregnant women struggling to lift their shovels while the soldiers
laughed. -- refugee from the forced labour camps in Burma Aside from war, tourism is the single most destructive global
force unleashed by man. Tour companies, for their image, often claim to adhere to a code of conduct, on the ground they rarely even
bother to pay lip service. Tourism is the fastest growing global industry. In 1996 tourism revenue amounted to $423 billion, the number
of tourist arrivals clocked in at 592 million. By the year 2000, if not before, tourism is expected to be the world's largest industry. 1 in 4 Brits now travel
abroad on a package holiday. This is an industry that has grown from nothing not long after the Second World War. The early operators were viewed in
the same light as second hand car dealers, the way the travelling
public is still treated little has changed. The growth in the package
holiday business has destroyed much of the Mediterranean and the tour operators are now looking further afield
for places to despoil. Majorca, population 700,000, has 6 million tourists each year, 2 million of them Brits. It has brought in a lot of money
and taken the local people on a journey to hell. Tourism is having a massive global impact, not just on the global economy.
Airports are seizing vast tracts of land. Residents living near airports are having their lives made a misery.
Aircraft are rapidly becoming the number one global polluter, the effect is made all the more dramatic as the pollutants are emitted at high altitude
where they have the maximum effect. Local
cultures are being destroyed. In Tenerife local bars serve English beer
and pander to English tourists, in Cyprus local Cypriot bars make way for karaoke nights and moronic English
DJs. Hotels and tourist resorts need land and water. In Cyprus water is rationed to ensure a plentiful supply to hotel resorts. It is in the Third
World that tourism is having the maximum impact. Hotels, tourist resorts, the supporting infrastructure needs land.
In Akamas, an area of outstanding natural beauty in the West of Cyprus, there is pressure to open it up for development and tourism. In Malaysia, 29
local shops were destroyed to make way for a tourist development project. Tourists like to be on prime coastal sites. These
sites are often important fishery grounds, places where turtles come ashore to lay eggs. Tourist resorts need water. The villagers of
Sinquerim (Goa) were denied piped water and have to rely on a well. Water is piped through the village to the nearby Taj Holiday Village and Fort
Aguada complex. Golf courses consume vast tracts of land. 350 new golf courses every year. The golf courses demand large volumes of water for
irrigation; the pesticide, fertiliser, and herbicide run-off effects local water courses bringing damage to fisheries, polluting drinking water. In Thailand
the health of many local people has been damaged through eating fish poisoned by pesticide run-off from golf courses. In Bali local people were forced
from their land to make way for a golf course and hotel complex by shutting off the water that irrigated their fields. Not everywhere are local people
compliant. In Vietnam when Daewoo (one of the biggest exploiters in Vietnam) planned a £93 million golf course near Hanoi local villagers set up
barricades and refused to budge. They were offered a paltry £125 per family to move. Tourism
is destroying the environment. Tenerife is
rapidly becoming one big building site. The pleasant green Orotava valley in the north of Tenerife will soon have disappeared
under concrete. Inter-island high speed ferries are killing whales and dolphins. In the south of Tenerife the sheer mass of whale
watching trips is harassing whales and dolphins to death. UK tour companies have codes of conduct on protecting the environment. These same tour
companies are promoting whale watching trips, inter-island day trips that use high speed ferries. Tourist feet trample across sacred religious sites,
showing no respect to the indigenous cultures. Native people are often expected to perform sacred rituals on demand. In Peru, Yagua indians were
forced from the remote Upper Amazon region to more accessible areas to enable tourists to see them perform
their sacred rites. Viewing stations were built for the voyeurs. In Hawaii many tourist complexes have been built on sites sacred to indigenous
Hawaiians. Many burial grounds have been destroyed. Tourism directly and indirectly supports and finances human rights
violations. Burma is one of the world's most repressive regimes. In scenes reminiscent of the Japanese occupation, forced labour is being used to
prepare infrastructure and resort complexes. On one railway project alone, it has been estimated that 200-300 people have died through illness and
exhaustion. On other similar projects the death rates are reported as averaging one a day. 30,000 forced labourers helped to construct the new airport at
Bassein, when cholera broke out they received no medical care. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes and lands to make
way for tourist projects. Like Burma, Turkey is another country with an appalling human rights record. Tourists who rarely venture beyond their airconditioned hotel complexes fail to see the squalor or abuses. Hard currency earned from the tourists is used to buy military hardware to continue the
repression against the Kurds and the illegal occupation of northern Cyprus. Sexploitation is a growing sector of the tourist trade, with many tour
companies offering special package tours to the best sex spots. Favoured destinations are Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Thailand, Brazil, with Eastern
Europe rapidly developing its sex market - all perversions well catered for. Many children are forced to work as prostitutes in brothels. In Sri Lanka a
survey showed that 86% of children had their first sexual experience with a foreign tourist, for the majority of the children they were aged between 12
and 13 years old at the time. There is no such thing as a cheap holiday. The price is bought on the back of some one else's pain. Tourism is often offered
as a model to Third World countries as a means to earn hard foreign currency. Like many other models forced on the Third World, it tightens the
shackles, for which only the West has the keys. Third World countries are encouraged to build their tourist sector as a means of earning hard foreign
currency. The reality is somewhat different. The holiday will be run by a foreign tour company, foreigners build, own and manage the tourist complexes,
food and capital equipment is imported. What little is paid to local people will be marginally higher than the local wage rate thus ensuring the
destruction of local industry. The few crumbs that trickle down to a handful of local people do not make up for the destruction of their environment and
culture. Zanzibar has a fragile eco- and social system dependent upon agriculture and fishing. Villagers are being evicted from their coastal villages and
placed in compounds, their beautiful coral cottages left to rack and ruin. All inclusive tourist compounds surrounded by razor wire and protected by
armed guards are built on the vacated land. Fish bought from local fisherman for the tourist compounds drives up the price reducing local people to a
diet of boiled rice. In Cuba dollar tourism
is destroying the country its people and its culture. Two internal markets are
developing - the dollar market and the pesos market. The real Cuba is discovered by visiting local people in
their homes, not interacting with dollar prostitutes who work the tourist trade. Fidel Castro should hang his
head in shame for turning his beautiful country into a dollar whore. Air transport is the fastest growing transport sector, with a
consequential effect on global pollution. Air travel is the most energy intensive, polluting mode of travel. Air transport has been growing at a rate of
about 10% a year. Emissions from aircraft account for about 3% of global emissions, but because these emissions take place at high altitudes their
significance and impact on climate change is considerably higher than the figure would suggest (aircraft have more than half the global warming
potential of road traffic). Aircraft emissions are currently exempt from the Kyoto protocol under the climate convention. The aviation industry enjoys
many tax concessions, including duty free fuel. Within the EU alone, the externalised costs are estimated at 4.6% of EU GDP, 16.4 billion euros/year.
Knock on effects include large infrastructure demands, noise, generation of road traffic etc.
tourism bad– culture
Extinction
UNESCO 1 – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (“The Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural, and Biologic Diversity”)//ah
The world’s languages represent an extraordinary wealth of human creativity. They contain and express the total “pool of ideas”, nurtured over time through heritage, local
traditions and customs communicated through local languages. The
diversity of ideas carried by different languages and sustained by
different cultures is as necessary as the diversity of species and ecosystems for the survival of humanity and of
life on our planet. In many cases the knowledge of natural cures and remedies for illnesses transmitted by languages through generations and linked to local plant
life have been lost due to the abandonment of languages and cultures, and the destruction of natural habitat. Cultural diversity is as necessary for the world as biodiversity is
for our planet. Yet, similar
to the growing crisis of extinction faced by the world’s environment, the world’s cultural
diversity, particularly the diversity and richness of languages is being threatened with extinction. Ethnologue lists over
400 languages that reached near extinction at the end of the twentieth century, while UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing (2001) edition
estimates that half of the world’s languages are in varying degrees of endangerment.
Elimination of cultures results in extinction
Weatherford, 94 - DeWitt Wallace Professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota, (Jack, “Savages and Civilization: Who Will
Survive?”, 1994, pp. 287-291)
The world now stands united in a single, global civilization. Collapse in one
part could trigger a chain reaction that may well sweep away cities across the globe. Will the fate of Yaxchilán be the fate of all
Today we have no local and regional civilizations.
cities, of all civilization? Are they doomed to rise, flourish, and then fall back into the earth from which they came? Whether we take an optimistic view or a pessimistic one, it
seems clear that we
stand now at the conclusion of a great age of human history. This ten-thousand-year episode seems to be coming to an
tribal people of the world
who have been killed or scattered. But just at the moment when victory seems in the air for civilization, just at the moment when it has defeated all external
foes and made itself master of the world, without any competing system to rival it, civilization seems to be in worse danger than ever before.
No longer in fear of enemies from outside, civilization seems more vulnerable than ever to enemies from within. It has become a victim of its own success. In its quest
for dominance, civilization chewed up the forest, leeched the soil, stripped the plains, clogged the rivers, mined
the mountains, polluted the oceans, and fouled the air. In the process of progress, civilization destroyed one
species of plant and animal after another. Propelled by the gospel of agriculture, civilization moved forcefully
across the globe, but it soon began to die of exhaustion, leaving millions of humans to starve. Some of the oldest places in
the agricultural world became some of the first to collapse. Just as it seems to have completed its victory over tribal people, the
nation-state has begun to dissolve. Breaking apart into ethnic chunks and cultural enclaves, the number of states has multiplied in the twentieth century to
end, winding down. For now, it appears that civilization has won out over all other ways of life. Civilized people have defeated the
the point that the concept of a nation-state itself starts to deteriorate. The nation-state absorbed the remaining tribal people but has proven incapable of incorporating them
fully into the national society as equal members. The state swallowed them up but could not digest them. The state could destroy the old languages and cultures, and it easily
divided and even relocated whole nations. But the state proved far less effective at incorporating the detribalized people into the new national culture. Even though the state
expanded across the frontier, it could not make the frontier disappear. The frontier moved into the urban areas with the detribalized masses of defeated nations, emancipated
slaves, and exploited laborers. After ten thousand years of struggle, humans may have been left with a Pyrrhic victory whose cost may be much greater than its benefits. Now
that the victory has been won, we stoop under the burdensome costs and damages to a world that we may not be able to heal or repair. Unable to cope with the rapidly
changing natural, social, and cultural environment that civilization made, we see the collapse of the social institutions of the city and the state that brought us this far. The
cities and institutions of civilization have now become social dinosaurs. Even though we may look back with pride over the last ten thousand years of evolution and cite the
massive number of humans and the ability of human society and the city to feed and care for all of them, one
major fluctuation in the world might
easily end all of that. The civilization we have built stretches like a delicate and fragile membrane on this
Earth. It will not require anything as dramatic as a collision with a giant asteroid to destroy civilization.
Civilization seems perfectly capable of creating its own Armageddon. During the twentieth century, civilization
experience a number of major scares, a series of warning shots. Civilization proved capable of waging world
war on itself. Toward that end, we developed nuclear energy and came close to provoking a nuclear holocaust,
and we may well do so yet. When we survived World War I, then World War II, and finally the nuclear threat of the Cold War, we felt safe. When catastrophe
did not follow the warning, we felt relief, as though the danger had passed, but danger still approaches us. Civilization experienced several
“super plagues” ranging from the devastating world influenza epidemic early in the century to AIDS at the close
of the century. These may be only weak harbingers of the epidemics and plagues to come. Even as life expectancy in most
countries has continued to climb throughout the twentieth century, diseases from cancer to syphilis have grown stronger and more
deadly. If war or new plagues do not bring down civilization, it might easily collapse as a result of
environmental degradation and the disruption of productive agricultural lands. If the great collapse comes, it
might well come from something that we do not yet suspect. Perhaps war, disease, famine, and environmental
degradation will be only parts of the process and not the causes. Today all of us are unquestionably part of a
global society, but that common membership does not produce cultural uniformity around the globe. The
challenge now facing us is to live in harmony without living in uniformity, to be united by some forces such as worldwide commerce, pop culture, and
communications, but to remain peacefully different in other areas such as religion and ethnicity. We need to share some values such as a commitment to fundamental human
We need to find
a way for all of us to walk in two worlds at once, to be part of the world culture, without sacrificing the cultural
heritage of our own families and traditions. At the same time we need to find ways to allow other people to walk in two worlds, or perhaps even to walk in four or five
worlds at once. We cannot go backwards in history and change one hour or one moment, but we do have the power
to change the present and thus alter the future. The first step in that process should come by respecting the
mutual right of all people to survive with dignity and to control their own destinies without surrendering their
cultures. The aborigines of Australia, the Tibetans of China, the Lacandon of Mexico, the Tuareg of Mali, the Aleuts of Alaska, the Ainu of Japan, the Maori of New
rights and basic rules of interaction, but we can be wildly different in other areas such as life-styles, spirituality, musical tastes, and community life.
Zealand, the Aymara of Bolivia, and the millions of other ethnic groups around the world deserve the same human rights and cultural dignity as suburbanites in Los Angeles,
bureaucrats in London, bankers in Paris, reporters in Atlanta, marketing executives in Vancouver, artists in Berlin, surfers in Sydney, or industrialists in Tokyo. In recent
centuries, Western civilization has played the leading role on the stage of human history. We should not mistake this one act for the whole drama of human history, nor should
We must
recognize the value of all people not merely out of nostalgic sentiment for the oppressed or merely to keep them like exhibits in a nature park. We must
recognize their rights and value because we may need the combined knowledge of all cultures if we are to overcome the
problems that now threaten to overwhelm us. At first glance, the Aleuts who hunt seals on isolated islands in
the Bering Sea may seem like unimportant actors on the world stage of today, but their ancestors once played a
vital role in human survival of the Ice Age. The Quechua woman sitting in the dusty market of Cochamba may seem backward and insignificant, but
her ancestors led the way into an agricultural revolution from which we still benefit. Because we do not know the problems that lie ahead of
us, we do not know which set of human skills or which cultural perspective we will need. The coming age of
human history threatens to be one of cultural conflicts between and within countries, conflicts that rip cities
apart. If we continue down the same path that we now tread, the problems visible today in Tibet or Mexico may seem
trifling compared with the conflicts yet to come. If we cannot change our course, then our civilization too may
become as dead as the stones of Yaxchilán, and one day the descendants of some alien civilization will stare at our ruined
cities and wonder why we disappeared.
we assume that the present act is the final one just because it is before us at the moment. Much came before us, and much remains yet to be enacted.
tourism bad – local communities
Tourism decimates local cultures – causes physical destruction and cultural transformation
Lee, 12 - writefix (David, “Can cultural traditions be destroyed by over-exposure to tourism?” http://writefix.com/?page_id=2722/about-thisforum/does-cultural-traditions-use-as-touist-attraction-will-be-destroyed-or-saved-by-tourists)//ah
Today, as the disposable income of citizens are increasing, travelling
to historical attractions and learning other cultures is becoming
popular. Some residents worry about that the surging tourist population would disrupt the normal life and ruin the culture in
their hometown. In this essay, I will analyze the link between tourists and tourist attractions, and explain why congested travelers may jeopardize
the local cultural tradition. Regarding the place where has historical value as tourist destination elevate its reputation; therefore, both local
inhabitants and governments could earn more money. Citizens and authorities could utilize these funds to improve their living standard of citizens and
to protect the old architectures respectively. Tourists also propagandize
the characteristics of the place which impress them
most to their companions. It is the reputation that attracts increasing number of visitors to visit the place and
disseminates the cultural tradition to more people. Achieving the attention from governments is another reason. If the culture is
popular enough, governors would take measures to protect this culture efficiently. However, the crowded travelers undermine the
ambience of the tourist venue. Residents become more materialistic. For instance, some local residents in famous historical
villages cheat tourists amid the temptation of profit. Cultural transformation is happening in these places and
changing their morality. Some tourists ruin the architectures and historical treasure as well, such as lettering on the
priceless brick and touching the objects arbitrarily. Also, the excessive number of tourists makes the tourist attractions bustle and
hustle, and the tranquil and serene living habits lost. Even though attracting more people increases the income of
local citizens and elevates the reputation of the place, it jeopardizes the life style of the local residents.
Be it residents or scenery, the local historical culture cannot be fully protected. Instead, governments should shoulder more
responsibility.
Competition and hostility destroy unique enviroments and cultures
II, 12 – I to I tourism and volunteering consulting website (“How Your Travels Will Affect Local Communities” http://www.i-to-i.com/ecotourism/local_communities.html)//ah
Tourism can have a negative impact on local communities when done without respect or consideration. Indeed, tourism can
cause hostility, competition, jealousy and the loss or destruction of the local culture. Many travellers fail to research
before they go and simple mistakes which can often be avoided are often made, causing offence to local people and making the lives of the next travellers
to visit that little bit more difficult. It's vitally important that you make an effort to fit in, to limit the impact of your presence and to show your respect for
the traditions and culture of the community that you are staying in. Otherwise, you are likely to confirm the bad reputation that travellers are gradually
developing. Loss of culture Loss
of culture can take many forms. One major change can be seen in the production of
souvenirs. Once tourists arrive in an area, the local people realise that money can be made by selling their crafts to visitors. After a while, though,
crafts which once had a spiritual or cultural significance suddenly are just goods. Some designs may be changed
to meet tourists’ demands and lose all cultural value. Tourists are often unwilling to completely immerse themselves in the local
culture and this means that in order to keep your custom, local communities must adjust to your needs. Traditional food, wares and
customs are replaced with those of the traveller's homeland, effectively creating a home away from home. Yet by doing this, by demanding
that destinations change to meet your demand you are taking away the very essence of travel. Therefore, in order to travel responsibly you must
accept your surroundings for what they are and not expect anything else. Culture clashes Tourists are frequently disrespectful of local customs. Women
(and men) often walk around in revealing clothing when the social norm is to politely cover yourself up. This is particularly important in places of
worship and it is often considered extremely rude. This behaviour can cause ill-will and can also cause the local people to stray from their beliefs and
customs. Ill will can also be caused by the way tourists interact with locals. Many take pictures of local people like animals in the zoo, without subtlety or
permission, then move on without purchasing any of their crafts. Physical influences Tourism
can lead to overuse of natural resources,
vandalism and crime. Competition for local resources is a huge problem in tourist areas. Resorts use an enormous amount of
water to run a golf course, depriving local people of drinking water. Similarly, grazing land may be destroyed for resort development,
therefore significantly damaging the ability of local communities to maintain their traditional lifestyles. Frequently local people are denied access to
areas that have been set up as tourist destinations. Local
people can no longer play on nearby beaches or visit the local
national park, which doesn’t give them much incentive to protect it. This is more often an indirect consequence of tourism as
local people simply cannot afford the prices that tourists can.
Travel Integration prompts forces the “disney-ification” of cultures – creates ripple effects and
multiple negative impacts
Matt, 9 – travel specialist with an MBA (Nomadic, “Why Travel is Bad for the World”
November 28th, 2009, http://www.nomadicmatt.com/travel-blogs/why-travel-is-bad-for-the-world)//ah
Travel destroys local cultures – The globalization of food, travel, hotels, and language diminishes the very culture
we traveled so far to see. Instead of going out to seek the unknown, most people stay in resorts and hotels, never experiencing the country they
are in. We go to McDonald’s or eat food we can get at home. It’s as though we travel to never leave home. Wherever we go, we seem to bring
our western culture with us. Travel makes the world Disneyland – From the hill tribes of Thailand to the Andes to cowboys of America,
travelers have a certain expectation of what a place is and how the people should act. We travel to see that expectation. We travel to see Crocodile
Cultures around the world then put on a show to give us what
we want and in the process “Disneyize” their culture. I hate seeing the little hill tribes in Thailand or Native American shows in
Dundee, Mayans, Native Americans, and hill tribe cultures in Asia.
America or “traditional” dance in Vietnam. It’s not how they really act. It’s how they act for tourists. Doesn’t that just cheapen the experience and, in the
end, cause more harm than good? Travel
destroys local economies – All that travel in big hotels and global restaurants
doesn’t help the local economy. Most of that money is removed by corporations to the head office. Travelers go with what they know and most
will stay at the Marriott before they stay in some unknown place, never thinking about where the money is going. Travel can be a huge economic boon
but only if the money stays local. Travel
hurts the environment – Traveling is not the most eco-friendly of activities. Flying, cruising,
eating out, and driving around all have a negative impact on the environment. Most people when they travel constantly use
towels in hotel rooms, leave the air conditioner going, or forget to turn off the lights. Jetsetting around the world in airplanes or driving around in an RV
all contribute to global warming. Between
waste, development, and pollution, we are doing exactly what The Beach said
we would do- destroy the very paradise we seek. Travel produces short term profits – Everyone tries to grab that last
dollar. Travel isn’t the only industry this happens with but it’s the most relevant to us. Instead of building for the long term, people overdevelop in the
name of short term gain. You see it in Thailand with the built up beaches, you see it in Cambodia, you see it in southern Spain, you see it in Las Vegas
with all the casinos (where’s all that water going to come from?). It’s everywhere. Money now, forget later. Eventually, the tourists will stop coming
because they will be so put off and so sad the beauty they came for is gone. While
there is a growing effort among people to mitigate
these downsides, the truth is we can’t ignore the negative side of travel. Yet I don’t think these reasons should make us stop
traveling. In fact, I’m just thinking out loud here. Simply letting the wheels turn. At the end of the day, these negatives come down to personal choice.
You can easily travel the world and not do any of these things. I don’t fly much, I don’t stay in giant hotels, I avoid chain restaurants, I stay in local
guesthouses, and I won’t do tours that exploit animals or the environment.
***environment turn
environment turn – 1nc
Cubas environment is protected now but easing restrictions leads to massive increase in
investment and tourism in Cuba – devastates the unique ecological environment
Dean, 7 - science writer for the New York Times, taught seminars and courses at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Vassar
College, and the University of Rhode Island, member of the Corporation of Brown University, a founding member of the advisory board of the Metcalf
Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting (Cornelia, “Published: Conserving Cuba, After the Embargo”, December 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25cuba.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&)//ah
Through accidents of geography and history, Cuba
is a priceless ecological resource. That is why many scientists are so
worried about what will become of it after Fidel Castro and his associates leave power and, as is widely anticipated, the American
government relaxes or ends its trade embargo. The New York Times Cuba has avoided much environmental
degradation in recent decades, but now hotel developments are seen extending into the water in Cayo Coco.
More Photos > Cuba, by far the region’s largest island, sits at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and
the Caribbean Sea. Its mountains, forests, swamps, coasts and marine areas are rich in plants and animals,
some seen nowhere else. And since the imposition of the embargo in 1962, and especially with the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, its
major economic patron, Cuba’s economy has stagnated. Cuba has not been free of development, includig Soviet-style top-down agricultural and
mining operations and, in recent years, an expansion of tourism. But it also has an abundance of landscapes that elsewhere in the
region have been ripped up, paved over, poisoned or otherwise destroyed in the decades since the Cuban revolution, when development has
been most intense. Once the embargo ends, the island could face a flood of investors from the United States and
elsewhere, eager to exploit those landscapes. Conservationists, environmental lawyers and other experts, from Cuba and
elsewhere, met last month in Cancún, Mexico, to discuss the island’s resources and how to continue to protect them. Cuba has done “what we should
have done — identify your hot spots of biodiversity and set them aside,” said Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University Law
School who attended the conference. In the late 1990s, Mr. Houck was involved in an effort, financed in part by the MacArthur Foundation, to advise
Cuban officials writing new environmental laws. But, he said in an interview, “an
invasion of U.S. consumerism, a U.S.dominated future, could roll over it like a bulldozer” when the embargo ends. By some estimates, tourism
in Cuba is increasing 10 percent annually. At a minimum, Orlando Rey Santos, the Cuban lawyer who led the law-writing effort, said in an interview at
the conference, “we
can guess that tourism is going to increase in a very fast way” when the embargo ends. “It is
estimated we could double tourism in one year,” said Mr. Rey, who heads environmental efforts at the Cuban ministry of science,
technology and environment. About 700 miles long and about 100 miles wide at its widest, Cuba runs from Haiti west
almost to the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. It offers crucial habitat for birds, like Bicknell’s thrush, whose summer
home is in the mountains of New England and Canada, and the North American warblers that stop in Cuba on their way south for the winter. Zapata
Swamp, on the island’s southern coast, may be notorious for its mosquitoes, but it is also known for its fish, amphibians, birds and
other creatures. Among them is the Cuban crocodile, which has retreated to Cuba from a range that once ran from the Cayman
Islands to the Bahamas. Cuba has the most biologically diverse populations of freshwater fish in the region . Its
relatively large underwater coastal shelves are crucial for numerous marine species, including some whose larvae can be
carried by currents into waters of the United States, said Ken Lindeman, a marine biologist at Florida Institute of Technology. Dr. Lindeman, who
did not attend the conference but who has spent many years studying Cuba’s marine ecology, said in an interview that some of these
creatures were important commercial and recreational species like the spiny lobster, grouper or snapper. Like
corals elsewhere, those in Cuba are suffering as global warming raises ocean temperatures and acidity levels. And like other corals in the
region, they reeled when a mysterious die-off of sea urchins left them with algae overgrowth. But they have
largely escaped damage from pollution, boat traffic and destructive fishing practices. Diving in them “is like
going back in time 50 years,” said David Guggenheim, a conference organizer and an ecologist and member of the advisory board of the Harte
Research Institute, which helped organize the meeting along with the Center for International Policy, a private group in Washington. In a report last
year, the World Wildlife Fund said that “in
dramatic contrast” to its island neighbors, Cuba’s beaches, mangroves, reefs,
seagrass beds and other habitats were relatively well preserved. Their biggest threat, the report said, was
“the prospect of sudden and massive growth in mass tourism when the U.S. embargo lifts.”
environment turn – impact – enviro
Environmental degradation results in extinction
Birch, 12 - PhD, Emeritus Professor @ University of Sydney, Professor of Zoology, Professor of Biology, won the Templeton Prize in 1990, (Charles,
"As Humans Send Earth Toward Extinction, " Feb. 29, http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/ecology/extinct.htm)//ahayes
Unlike Alston Chase, Charles Birch is a noted biologist and scientist. Birch argues that the growing
human destruction of the Earth and
the global environment threatens our future. He argues that our growing impact on the "life-support systems of the
planet" threaten our extinction. Just as the dinosaurs became extinct because they couldn't adapt to their
changing environment, humanity faces extinction if it can't adapt to a rapidly changing
environment caused by our global industrial civilization. Like Wilson, Birch argues that "the sort of society we are building with
the aid of science and technology has self-destructive features built into it." So how is our industrial civilization threatening its future? Birch argues that
the increasing
demands placed on the "limited resources of the Earth and the capacity of the planet to cope with air and water
pollution" weaken the ability of the Earth to support our global industrial civilization. He argues that the rich nations-the developed nations--"high rate of consumption and pollution" have led scientists to develop the "impossibility
theorem," which states that this level of consumption and pollution for rich nations is not possible for all the peoples
of the world. Birch warns that "it is now widely believed that the industrialization of the whole world would be lethal to the planet." In fact, 20
percent of the global human population now consumes 80 percent of the resources and wealth, while the remaining 80 percent of the people consume
only 20 percent of the resources and wealth. If we continue to try to bring up the underdeveloped peoples' standard of living to our level, Birch argues,
we will destroy the ability of the Earth to support our industrial civilization. Birch concludes that we must reduce our
impact on the global environment, reduce our levels of consumption and pollution, and try to preserve
endangered environments and threatened species. But in order to do so we must undergo "a revolution in values, in lifestyles, in
economic and political goals, and even in the nature of the science and technology we practice." But Birch leaves it open whether we can do this before
our industrial
civilization destroys the planet that supports and nourishes it. Like Wilson, and unlike Chase, Birch believes
health and well-being depends on the existence of a healthy environment. Unlike Chase, Wilson is worried
about species extinction. He warns: "If Homo Sapiens goes the way of the Dinosaurs, we have only ourselves to blame."
Like Chase, Wilson recognizes that the environment evolves and changes and that species become extinct. Where he disagrees
that human
with Chase is over the rate of this evolution and species loss. Like Birch, Wilson argues that the scale of the increasing impact of industrial civilization on
the Earth and the rate of change that this impact is having on the global environment is way beyond the natural levels of evolution. Wilson concludes that
humanity has "become a geophysical force, swiftly changing the atmosphere and climate as well as the
composition of the world's fauna and flora." He even declares that "the human species is an environmental
abnormality," because our growing impact on the Earth is threatening to cause the collapse of our global
industrial civilization and threaten our survival as a species. However, Wilson now pauses to assess the overall nature of the
human impact on the Earth. He now asks: "Who can safely measure the human capacity to overcome the perceived limits of the Earth?....Are we
racing to the brink of an abyss, or are we just gathering speed for a takeoff to a wonderful future." It is in how they answer these
questions that Wilson and Chase and Julian Simon really differ. Recognizing critics like Chase and Simon, Wilson argues that there are two different
perspectives on the human future: exemptionalism and environmentalism. The exemptionalists believe that humanity's intelligence and spirit allows it to
transcend nature and the iron laws of ecology and life. They believe that "no matter now serious the problem, civilized human beings by ingenuity, force
of will and--who knows--divine dispensation will find a solution."Instead of worrying about pollution, limited resources, species extinction, population
growth, and the human future, exemptionalists argue that human intelligence, work, creativity, and determination will allow us to create a better, safer,
more abundant future. Exemptionalists believe if there are current environmental problems they are minor, mainly the result of growing pain and
ignorance, and with continued economic growth and advances in science and technology we will solve these problems. The environmentalists believe
that "humanity
is a biological species tightly dependent on the natural world....As formidable as our intellect may be and as
fierce as our spirit, ...these qualities are not enough to free us from the constraints of the natural environment in which
our human ancestry evolved." For environmentalists, human health depends on "sustaining the planet in a relatively unaltered state." They are not arguing that we have to keep the
environment in a steady-state, constant and unchanging. What they mean is that humanity can't remake the Earth in its own image, replacing forests, grasslands, wetlands, and fisheries with human
development, because we depend on these environments to support us. In the end, unlike the exemptionalists who believe that humanity can understand and control the global environment and nature,
environmentalists argue that the Earth and the global environment is "too complex to understand, let alone replace, in the foreseeable future." The increasing human efforts to remake the Earth and
control the global environment for human use, environmentalists argue, is causing such rapid, complex, and global changes in the environment that we cannot predict whether the Earth will be able to
continue to support our global civilization, or even support the continued survival of the human race. Because Wilson, like Birch, holds the environmentalist perspective, he is worried that humanity is
threatening to destroy the global environment that supports it. Wilson now asks the critical question: Does the drive to global environmental conquest, population growth, and human control over the
environment demonstrate that "humanity is suicidal?" He argues that we aren't suicidal, we aren't doomed to destroy ourselves by destroying the ability of the global environment to support human life.
Wilson argues that we "are smart enough and have time enough to avoid an environmental catastrophe of civilization-threatening dimensions." But if we are to save the environment, Wilson argues, we
must recognize that "we have only a poor grasp of the ecosystem services by which other organisms cleanse the water, turn soil into a fertile living cover, and manufacture the very air we breathe."
Challenging the exemptionalists, Wilson argues that the "world is too complicated to be turned into a garden....[And] to believe otherwise is to risk reducing a large part of the Earth to a wasteland." Wilson
we have "perhaps 50 to 100 years" to stabilize the global environment and transform our values, our
political and economic systems, and our development and use of science and technology. If we continue on the path of ever-accelerating
concludes that
human impacts on the global environment, we will probably cause the collapse of our global, industrial
civilization. But what will it take to finally cause our global industrial civilization to recognize that it is facing a global environmental crisis that
demands fundamental changes in our attitudes towards and our use of the environment? Wilson doesn't really answer this question. For it is such a
daunting challenge because the
stakes are so huge. We know that like the dinosaurs who dominated the earth for 165
million years and became extinct in a biological instant 65 million years ago, humanity could also fail to adapt
to a rapidly changing Earth and become extinct too.
Extinction
Jowit 8 Julien, The Guardian, World is facing a natural resources crisis worse than financial crunch,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/29/climatechange-endangeredhabitats
The world is heading for an " ecological credit crunch " far worse than the current financial crisis because humans
are over-using the natural resources of the planet, an international study warns today. The Living Planet report calculates
that humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replenish each year, which is leading to deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and
water, and dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species. As a result, we are running up an ecological debt of $4tr (£2.5tr) to $4.5tr every
year - double the estimated losses made by the world's financial institutions as a result of the credit crisis - say the report's authors, led by the
conservation group WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund. The figure is based on a UN report which calculated the economic value of services
provided by ecosystems destroyed annually, such as diminished rainfall for crops or reduced flood protection.
The problem is also getting
worse as populations and consumption keep growing faster than technology finds new ways of expanding what can be produced from the natural
world. This had led the report to predict that by 2030, if nothing changes, [hu]mankind would need two planets to
sustain its lifestyle. "The recent downturn in the global economy is a stark reminder of the consequences of living beyond our means," says
James Leape, WWF International's director general. "But the possibility of financial recession pales in comparison to
the looming ecological credit crunch." The report continues: "We have only one planet. Its capacity to support a
thriving diversity of species, humans included, is large but fundamentally limited . When human demand on
this capacity exceeds what is available - when we surpass ecological limits - we erode the health of the Earth's
living systems. Ultimately this loss threatens human well-being." Speaking yesterday in London, the report's authors
also called for politicians to mount a huge international response in line with the multibillion-dollar rescue plan for the
economy. "They now need to turn their collective action to a far more pressing concern and that's the
survival of all life on planet Earth ," said Chief Emeka Anyaoku, the president of WWF International.
environment turn – impact – marine
Tourist expansion in Cuba kills marine biodiversity – infrastructure effects water-flow and
marine habitat
Whittle et. al., 9 - Senior Attorney, Environmental Defense, Raleigh, North Carolina (Daniel J., “International Tourism and Protection of Cuba’s
Coastal and Marine Environments”, 05/08/09, http://apps.edf.org/documents/9707_Whittle_Tulane_Journal.pdf)//ah
As discussed in more detail below, Cuba has been a major tourist destination for well over one hundred years. And though it virtually
turned its
back on international tourism for nearly three decades following the 1959 Revolution, Cuba has not escaped unscathed from the
adverse environmental impacts that all too often accompany “sol y playa” (sun-and-sand) tourism development in natural areas.34 For example,
Cuba’s most popular beach resort, Varadero Beach on the north central coast, about a ninety-mile drive from Havana, was first developed in
the 1940s on a long and narrow spit of land that juts out from the shore.35 Over the last decade, Varadero has been targeted for extensive new growth
and now boasts a new airport with an annual capacity for 4 million visitors,36 a golf course, 22 kilometers of beaches, no fewer than 41 hotels, and an
array of nightclubs and recreational facilities.37 Prior
to its conversion to a beach resort, the peninsula was dominated by a
diverse natural complex of mangrove swamps, pristine cays, coastal caves, sand dunes, and other natural
features.38 Only relics of these natural systems/habitats remain and many species that depend on those
habitats have been lost to the area. Sewage treatment facilities for older tourist hotels and local communities
are often primitive and foster coastal nutrient pollution near reefs already subject to some localized
overfishing. Because Cuba’s coastline is dotted with small islets and keys, access by large numbers of tourists is
not easy or practical without the development of a network of roads, bridges, causeways, and marinas in and
over sensitive marine waters. In fact, the transportation and other infrastructure (e.g., wastewater treatment, landfills) needed to
support large numbers of tourists have already resulted in severe impacts in some areas and represent one of the most
significant threats to coastal and marine resources associated with developing international tourism. One of the problems often cited
by Cuban fishery scientists and marine biologists is the impact to fish habitats associated with the construction of stone causeways that connect the
island of Cayo Coco to the mainland of the Sabana-Camaguey region.39 These and other causeways,
estimated to influence over 1760
square kilometers of fragile marine systems, impede the natural flow of waters in and out of the bays and
coastal lagoons and degrade nursery areas and other essential habitats for a wide array of coastal fishes and
invertebrates.40 Development of hotels and other resort facilities in Cayo Coco may also have degraded important breeding
habitat for the roseate spoonbill and the greater flamingo.41 Many of the problems discussed above (e.g., habitat loss and
nutrient pollution in coastal waters) are typical in both developed and developing countries and certainly not unique to Cuba. Others
(e.g., aging or non-existent environmental infrastructure) are more prevalent in developing countries and especially pronounced in Cuba, where the
decade-long economic crisis has made matters worse. The Rio +10 report outlines a series of strategies, laws, investments, and other actions for
addressing current problems and preventing future ones, especially those associated with the four problem areas cited above.42 Some of these actions
are discussed below. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to developing a sustainable touristbased economy in Cuba lies not in remediating past impacts,
though the importance of doing so should not be understated, but in developing and sticking to a different model for new and expanded tourism
development on the coast that does not rely upon the destruction of vast areas of natural habitats or cuts corners on
waste treatment, transportation development, and land-use planning. Cuba has developed such a model and so far appears to be moving toward
implementation of it with an iron will.43 Ultimate success will depend on the country’s resolve to resist the promise of lucrative, but short-term
economic gains that accompany rapid coastal development in favor of more profitable and environmentally
sustainable development over the long run. We examine these issues in more detail below.
Ocean bio-d loss causes extinction
CRAIG 3 Robin Kundis Craig, Associate Professor of Law, Indiana University School of Law, 2k3 34 McGeorge L. Rev. 155
Biodiversity and ecosystem function arguments for conserving marine ecosystems also exist, just as they do for terrestrial ecosystems, but these
arguments have thus far rarely been raised in political debates. For example, besides significant tourism values - the most economically valuable
ecosystem service coral reefs provide, worldwide - coral reefs protect against storms and dampen other environmental fluctuations, services worth more
than ten times the reefs' value for food production. n856 Waste treatment is another significant, non-extractive ecosystem function that intact coral reef
ecosystems provide. n857 More generally, "ocean
ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all the
elements that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well
as other less abundant but necessary elements." n858 In a very real and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine
ecosystems impairs the planet's ability to support life. Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to maintaining
the functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in general, an ecosystem's ability to keep functioning in
the face of disturbance is strongly dependent on its biodiversity, "indicating that more diverse ecosystems are
more stable." n859 Coral reef ecosystems are particularly dependent on their biodiversity.
[*265] Most ecologists agree that the complexity of
interactions and degree of interrelatedness among component species is higher on coral reefs than in any other marine environment. This implies that
the ecosystem functioning that produces the most highly valued components is also complex and that many otherwise insignificant species have strong
effects on sustaining the rest of the reef system. n860 Thus,
maintaining and restoring the biodiversity of marine ecosystems
is critical to maintaining and restoring the ecosystem services that they provide. Non-use biodiversity values for marine
ecosystems have been calculated in the wake of marine disasters, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. n861 Similar calculations could derive
preservation values for marine wilderness. However, economic value, or economic value equivalents, should not be "the sole or even primary justification
for conservation of ocean ecosystems. Ethical arguments also have considerable force and merit." n862 At the forefront of such arguments should be a
recognition of how little we know about the sea - and about the actual effect of human activities on marine ecosystems. The
United States has
traditionally failed to protect marine ecosystems because it was difficult to detect anthropogenic harm to the
oceans, but we now know that such harm is occurring - even though we are not completely sure about causation or about how to fix
every problem. Ecosystems like the NWHI coral reef ecosystem should inspire lawmakers and policymakers to admit that most of the time we
really do not know what we are doing to the sea and hence should be preserving marine wilderness whenever
we can - especially when the United States has within its territory relatively pristine marine ecosystems that may be unique in the world. We may not
know much about the sea, but we do know this much: if we kill the ocean we kill ourselves, and we will take most of the
biosphere with us. The Black Sea is almost dead, n863 its once-complex and productive ecosystem almost entirely replaced by a monoculture of
comb jellies, "starving out fish and dolphins, emptying fishermen's nets, and converting the web of life into brainless, wraith-like blobs of jelly." n864
More importantly, the Black Sea is not necessarily unique. The Black Sea is a microcosm of what is happening to the ocean systems at large. The stresses
piled up: overfishing, oil spills, industrial discharges, nutrient pollution, wetlands destruction, the introduction of an alien species. The
sea
weakened, slowly at first, then collapsed with [*266] shocking suddenness. The lessons of this tragedy should not be lost to the
rest of us, because much of what happened here is being repeated all over the world. The ecological stresses imposed on the Black
Sea were not unique to communism. Nor, sadly, was the failure of governments to respond to the emerging crisis. n865 Oxygen-starved "dead zones"
appear with increasing frequency off the coasts of major cities and major rivers, forcing marine animals to flee and killing all that cannot. n866 Ethics as
well as enlightened self-interest thus suggest that the United States should protect fully-functioning marine ecosystems wherever possible - even if a few
fishers go out of business as a result.
environment turn – impact – biodiversity
Repeal of travel restrictions kills biodiversity – Cuba is a hotspot
PBS, 10 – Public Broadcasting Service, (“Cuba: The Accidental Eden A Brief Environmental History” Sep 27, 2010,
www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/cuba-the-accidental-eden/a-brief-environmental-history/5830/)//ah
Cuba has been called the “Accidental Eden” for its exceptional biodiversity and unique historical development. The
island nation and its archipelagos support thousands of plant and animal species, many of which are endemic, making
Cuba the most naturally diverse Caribbean nation and a destination for biological scientists and ecotourists. Cuba’s natural blessings
are the result of a manifold historical trajectory. The American trade and tourism embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union have both made
“accidental” contributions to the survival of Cuban wildlife. Cuba’s
low population density (about 102 people per square kilometer) and
relative land isolation as an island have afforded it moderately low levels of environmental destruction and
high levels of endemism. And Cuba remains biologically diverse, but it has seen its share of loss. Spanish colonialism invited new
plants, animals, and diseases, and some native lifeforms failed to cope. Species unique to Cuba became extinct, including varieties of sloths and monkeys,
among other animals. The expansion of Cuban commercialism and industry, particularly with the influence of European and American capital, continued
to threaten Cuban wildlife populations. Tobacco and more significantly sugar transformed the country from a Spanish shipping port to a major
agricultural exporter. As sugar demand rose, habitat was destroyed for farming. Today, farmers still compete with wildlife for use of the land. At the same
time, heavy industrial development polluted Cuban air, land, and water. Cuba’s 1959 revolution set the country on a path apart from other post-colonial
nations. Although revolutionary Cuba instituted policies around agriculture, industry, forests, and water, like most states in the 1960s, its moderate
environmental efforts had mixed results. Focusing more heavily on agriculture rather than heavy industry probably did more to save Cuban wildlife in
the ‘60s and ‘70s than did any environmentally conscious policies. While global capitalism continued on a general course of thoughtless environmental
destruction, the U.S. embargo against Cuba, including a
travel ban, freed the country from its most salient
environmental threat while putting the nation under great economic strain. Cuba traded and underwent forms of “development,” but in
many ways avoided the developments of late century American capitalism. While both “capitalism” and “communism” ultimately undervalued natural
resources, American executive and legislative dispositions helped nurture the blossoming of Cuban wildlife. A dramatic shift toward agriculture,
industry, and the environment appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. With shortages in fossil fuels and the disappearance of 80% of
both imports and exports, Cuba entered the “Special Period,” an economic depression that required new techniques to help the country become more
self-sustaining. Although
Cuban beaches were opened to international tourism, an environmentally significant
aspect of the Special Period was the adoption of permaculture agriculture and land use strategies. Circumstances
since the ’90s have led the Cuban government to take a stronger legislative and rhetorical stance toward environmental management. Although initially
centered around the human species, Fidel Castro’s 1992 address to the UN Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro expresses this attitude of environmental
awareness and urgency: “An
important biological species is in danger of disappearing due to the fast and progressive
destruction of its natural living conditions: mankind. We have now become aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it.
… Tomorrow it will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.” Today Cuba exhibits thriving natural diversity,
though it may be tenuous. Agricultural pollution, habitat destruction, and significantly tourism all threaten the island’s plants
and animals and compete for land and water use. Every moment brings Cuba closer to the possibility of a lifted
U.S. embargo, which would dramatically affect Cuba’s economic possibilities and thus its wildlife. One of the many
mixed blessing would be increased tourism. Marine conservationist Fernando Bretos notes that “The tourism impact has really been minimal in
Cuba, but that’s going to change. When you go from 2 million tourists a year to 4 to 6 to 8, everything will change.” Those with concern for
Cuban wildlife but an understanding of the inevitable promote an ecotourism that focuses on enjoying and even actively supporting nature. This practice
necessitates natural preservation, though potentially favoring certain species of flora and fauna over others. Mixed messages from officials make it
unclear how Cuba’s tourism industry will proceed, but some conservationists see Cuba’s position as an opportunity to set a constructive example.
The impact is extinction
WATSON 2006 (Captain Paul, Founder and President of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has a show on Animal Planet, Last Mod 9-17,
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/beerswil.html)
The facts are clear. More
plant and animal species will go through extinction within our generation than have been
lost thorough natural causes over the past two hundred million years. Our single human generation, that is, all people born
between 1930 and 2010 will witness the complete obliteration of one third to one half of all the Earth's life forms, each and every one of them the product
of more than two billion years of evolution. This
is biological meltdown, and what this really means is the end to vertebrate
evolution on planet Earth. Nature is under siege on a global scale. Biotopes, i.e., environmentally distinct regions, from tropical and temperate
rainforests to coral reefs and coastal estuaries, are disintegrating in the wake of human onslaught. The destruction of forests and the proliferation of
human activity will remove more than 20 percent of all terrestrial plant species over the next fifty years. Because
plants form the foundation
for entire biotic communities, their demise will carry with it the extinction of an exponentially greater number
of animal species -- perhaps ten times as many faunal species for each type of plant eliminated. Sixty-five million
years ago, a natural cataclysmic event resulted in extinction of the dinosaurs. Even with a plant foundation intact, it took more than 100,000 years for
faunal biological diversity to re-establish itself. More importantly, the resurrection of biological diversity assumes an intact zone of tropical forests to
after
the age of humans, the Earth will remain a biological, if not a literal desert for eons to come. The present course
of civilization points to ecocide -- the death of nature. Like a run-a-way train, civilization is speeding along tracks of our own
provide for new speciation after extinction. Today, the tropical rain forests are disappearing more rapidly than any other bio-region, ensuring that
manufacture towards the stone wall of extinction. The human passengers sitting comfortably in their seats, laughing, partying, and choosing to not look
out the window. Environmentalists are those perceptive few who have their faces pressed against the glass, watching the hurling bodies of plants and
animals go screaming by. Environmental activists are those even fewer people who are trying desperately to break into the fortified engine of greed that
propels this destructive specicidal juggernaut. Others are desperately throwing out anchors in an attempt to slow the monster down while all the while,
the authorities, blind to their own impending destruction, are clubbing, shooting and jailing those who would save us all. SHORT MEMORIES Civilized
humans have for ten thousand years been marching across the face of the Earth leaving deserts in their footprints. Because we have such short
memories, we forgot the wonder and splendor of a virgin nature. We revise history and make it fit into our present perceptions. For instance, are you
aware that only two thousand years ago, the coast of North Africa was a mighty forest? The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians built powerful ships from
the strong timbers of the region. Rome was a major exporter of timber to Europe. The temple of Jerusalem was built with titanic cedar logs, one image of
which adorns the flag of Lebanon today. Jesus Christ did not live in a desert, he was a man of the forest. The Sumerians were renowned for clearing the
forests of Mesopotamia for agriculture. But the destruction of the coastal swath of the North African forest stopped the rain from advancing into the
interior. Without the rain, the trees died and thus was born the mighty Sahara, sired by man and continued to grow southward at a rate of ten miles per
year, advancing down the length of the continent of Africa. And so will go Brazil. The precipitation off the Atlantic strikes the coastal rain forest and is
absorbed and sent skyward again by the trees, falling further into the interior. Twelve times the moisture falls and twelve times it is returned to the sky -all the way to the Andes mountains. Destroy the coastal swath and desertify Amazonia -- it is as simple as that. Create a swath anywhere between the
coast and the mountains and the rains will be stopped. We did it before while relatively primitive. We learned nothing. We forgot. So too, have we
forgotten that walrus once mated and bred along the coast of Nova Scotia, that sixty million bison once roamed the North American plains. One hundred
years ago, the white bear once roamed the forests of New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces. Now it is called the polar bear because that is
where it now makes its last stand. EXTINCTION IS DIFFICULT TO APPRECIATE Gone forever are the European elephant, lion and tiger. The Labrador
duck, gint auk, Carolina parakeet will never again grace this planet of ours. Lost for all time are the Atlantic grey whales, the Biscayan right whales and
the Stellar sea cow. Our children will never look upon the California condor in the wild or watch the Palos Verde blue butterfly dart from flower to flower.
Extinction is a difficult concept to fully appreciate. What has been is no more and never shall be again. It would
take another creation and billions of years to recreate the passenger pigeon. It is the loss of billions of years of
evolutionary programming. It is the destruction of beauty, the obliteration of truth, the removal of uniqueness,
the scarring of the sacred web of life To be responsible for an extinction is to commit blasphemy against the divine. It is the
greatest of all possible crimes, more evil than murder, more appalling than genocide, more monstrous than
even the apparent unlimited perversities of the human mind. To be responsible for the complete and utter destruction of a unique
and sacred life form is arrogance that seethes with evil, for the very opposite of evil is live. It is no accident that these two words spell out each other in
reverse. And yet, a reporter in California recently told me that "all the redwoods in California are not worth the life on one human being." What
incredible arrogance. The rights a species, any species, must take precedence over the life of an individual or another species. This is a basic ecological
law. It is not to be tampered with by primates who have molded themselves into divine legends in their own mind. For each and every one of the thirty
million plus species that grace this beautiful planet are essential for the continued well-being of which we are all a part, the planet Earth -- the divine
entity which brought us forth from the fertility of her sacred womb. As a sea-captain I like to compare the structural integrity of the biosphere to that of a
ship's hull. Each species is a rivet that keeps the hull intact. If I were to go into my engine room and find my engineers busily popping rivets from the
hull, I would be upset and naturally I would ask them what they were doing. If they told me that they discovered that they could make a dollar each from
the rivets, I could do one of three things. I could ignore them. I could ask them to cut me in for a share of the profits, or I could kick their asses out of the
engine room and off my ship. If I was a responsible captain, I would do the latter. If I did not, I would soon find the ocean pouring through the holes left
by the stolen rivets and very shortly after, my ship, my crew and myself would disappear beneath the waves. And that is the state of the world today. The
political leaders, i.e., the captains at the helms of their nation states, are ignoring the rivet poppers or they are cutting themselves in for the profits. There
With the rivet poppers in command, it will not be long
until the biospheric integrity of the Earth collapses under the weight of ecological strain and tides of death
come pouring in. And that will be the price of progress -- ecological collapse, the death of nature, and with it
the horrendous and mind numbing specter of massive human destruction.
are very few asses being kicked out of the engine room of spaceship Earth.
Biodiversity collapse outweighs – default to irreversibility.
Chen, Professor of Law at University of Minnesota and Dean of Law School at Louisville, 2K (Jim, Globalization and Its Losers:, 9 Minn. J. Global
Trade 157’ LexisNexis Legal)
Conscious decisions
to allow the extinction of a species or the destruction of an entire ecosystem epitomize the
"irreversible and irretrievable commitments of resources" that NEPA is designed to retard.312 The original Endangered Species Act
gave such decisions no quarter whatsoever;313 since 1979, such decisions have rested in the hands of a solemnly convened "God Squad."314 In its
permanence and gravity, natural extinction provides the baseline by which all other types of extinction should be judged.
The Endangered Species
Act explicitly acknowledges the "esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value" of endangered species and the
biodiversity they represent.315 Allied bodies of international law confirm this view:316 global biological diversity is part of the commonly owned
heritage of all humanity and deserves full legal protec- tion.317 Rather remarkably, these broad assertions understate the value of biodiversity and the
urgency of its protection. A Sand County Almanac, the eloquent bible of the modern environmental movement, contains only two demonstrable biological errors. It opens with one and closes with another. We can forgive Aldo Leopold's decision to close with that elegant but erroneous epigram,
"ontogeny repeats phylogeny."318 What concerns erns us is his opening gambit: "There are some who can live without wild things, and some who
cannot."319 Not quite. None
of us can live without wild things. Insects are so essential to life as we know it that if
they "and other land-dwelling anthropods ... were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a
few months."320 "Most of the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals," along with "the bulk of the flowering plants and ... the physical structure
of most forests and other terrestrial habitats" would disappear in turn.321 "The land would return to" something resembling its Cambrian condition,
"covered by mats of recumbent wind-pollinated vegetation, sprinkled with clumps of small trees and bushes here and there, largely devoid of animal
life."322 From this perspective, the mere thought of valuing biodiver- sity is absurd, much as any attempt to quantify all of earth's planetary
amenities as some trillions of dollars per year is ab- surd. But the frustration inherent in enforcing the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species (CITES) has shown that conservation cannot work without appeasing Homo economicus, the profit-seeking ape. Efforts to ban the
interna- tional ivory trade through CITES have failed to stem the slaugh- ter of African elephants.323 The preservation of biodiversity must therefore
begin with a cold, calculating inventory of its benefits. Fortunately, defending biodiversity preservation in human- ity's self-interest is an easy task.
As yet unexploited species might give a hungry world a larger larder than the storehouse of twenty plant species that provide nine-tenths of humanity's
cur- rent food supply.324 "Waiting in the wings are tens of thousands of unused plant species, many demonstrably superior to those in favor."325 As
genetic warehouses, many plants enhance the pro- ductivity of crops already in use. In the United States alone, the lates phylogeny" means that the life
history of any individual organism replays the entire evolutionary history of that organism's species. genes of wild plants have accounted for much of
"the explosive growth in farm production since the 1930s."326 The contribution is worth $1 billion each year.327 Nature's pharmacy demonstrates
even more dramatic gains than nature's farm.328 Aspirin and penicillin, our star analgesic and antibiotic, had humble origins in the meadowsweet
plant and in cheese mold.329 Leeches, vampire bats, and pit vipers all contribute anticoagulant drugs that reduce blood pressure, pre- vent heart
attacks, and facilitate skin transplants.330 Merck & Co., the multinational pharmaceutical company, is helping Costa Rica assay its rich biota.33' A
single commercially viable product derived "from, say, any one species among... 12,000 plants and 300,000 insects ... could handsomely repay Merck's
entire investment" of $1 million in 1991 dollars.332 Wild animals, plants, and microorganisms also provide eco- logical services.333 The Supreme
Court has lauded the pes- ticidal talents of migratory birds.334 Numerous organisms process the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ground we
stroll.335 Other species serve as sentries. Just as canaries warned coal miners of lethal gases, the decline or disappearance of indicator species provides
advance warning against deeper environmental threats.336 Species conservation yields the great- est environmental amenity of all: ecosystem
protection. Saving discrete species indirectly protects the ecosystems in which they live.337 Some larger animals may not carry great utilitarian value in
themselves, but the human urge to protect these charis- matic "flagship species" helps protect their ecosystems.338 In- deed, to save any species, we
must protect their ecosystems.339
Defenders of biodiversity can measure the "tangible eco- nomic value" of the pleasure derived from "visiting,
photograph- ing, painting, and just looking at wildlife."340 In the United States alone, wildlife observation and feeding in 1991 generated $18.1 billion
in consumer spending, $3 billion in tax revenues, and 766,000 jobs.341 Ecotourism gives tropical countries, home to most of the world's species, a
valuable alternative to subsis- tence agriculture. Costa Rican rainforests preserved for ecotour- ism "have become many times more profitable per
hectare than land cleared for pastures and fields," while the endangered go- rilla has turned ecotourism into "the third most important source of
income in Rwanda."342 In a globalized economy where commodities can be cultivated almost anywhere, environmen- tally sensitive locales can
maximize their wealth by exploiting the "boutique" uses of their natural bounty.
The value of endangered species and the
biodiversity they embody is "literally . . . incalculable."343 What, if anything, should the law do to preserve it? There are those that
invoke the story of Noah's Ark as a moral basis for biodiversity preser- vation.344 Others regard the entire Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the
biblical stories of Creation and the Flood, as the root of the West's deplorable environmental record.345 To avoid getting bogged down in an
environmental exegesis of Judeo- Christian "myth and legend," we should let Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology determine the imperatives of our
moment in natural "history."346 The
loss of biological diversity is quite arguably the gravest problem facing humanity.
If we cast the question as the contemporary phenomenon that "our descend- ants [will] most regret," the "loss
of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats" is worse than even "energy depletion,
economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or con- quest by a totalitarian government."347 Natural evolution may
in due course renew the earth with a diversity of species approximating that of a world unspoiled by Homo
sapiens - in ten mil- lion years, perhaps a hundred million.348
environment turn – impact – coral
Tourism hurts coral development
YA, 4 – Youth Ambassadors environmentalist program, (“The Destruction Of Coral Reefs”,
http://youthambassadors.barrie.ca/global2004/ISUs/DA.htm)//ah
Cuba is the largest of all the Caribbean islands, and it also has the least percentage of high-risk areas (Appendix II). Coral reefs
surround nearly the entire island, some are, however, offshore and resemble barrier reefs. The 14 500 km² coastline holds a
total reef area of 3020 km². 46% of those reefs are considered to be at risk. The Cuban population is 11 184 000. 100% of that population lives within the
coastal range. Tourism
is confined to certain parts of the island, which has helped to protect the coral reefs from
much disturbance and destruction. Most of the high-risk areas in Cuba are located around the southeastern section (Appendix II). Cuba
has the most biologically diverse system of reefs and more endemic species than any other Caribbean country.
Cuba’s marine habitat is also important to distant ecosystems whose marine life migrates to Cuban shores. The
growing tourism in Cuba “offers hope for preserving the area, but presents dangers of its own. If not properly developed and
managed, tourism can lead to greater pollution, destruction of habitat and recreational overfishing ” (The Ocean
Conservancy). The revenues earned from tourism can be put towards programs that will help to protect marine habitats. Tourists often lack any
sympathy for the coral reefs and their habitats. They feel no remorse in picking coral out of the ocean or taking shells that may have
been otherwise used for a crab home. Some coral might only grow a millimetre per year, and when somebody steps on it or deliberately
breaks off a piece of coral they may be destroying hundreds of years of growth. Locals are also helping to fuel the
demolition of the reefs by selling souvenirs from the ocean such as coral and shells. Although the selling of such items can benefit the
economy momentarily, in the long run the coral reefs will suffer as they become depleted and no longer able to provide any
economical support in the means of fishing. Aside from the tourist industry, another contributor to the degradation of coral reefs
surrounding Cuba is pollution. In and around Havana Bay, pollution has been observed affecting the coral population. Sewage and other
pollutants are causing a scum to form over many of the corals, suffocating them. Thermal pollution that is created by
power plants through their cooling process has caused bleaching in nearby reefs, thus killing the reefs. Sugar cane is one of
Cuba’s largest exports, and farmers who grow it and other crops need to use pesticides and other chemicals to ensure a successful harvest. However,
these chemicals do find their way into rivers and streams and runoff into the ocean where again harm is caused to the coral reefs.
Tourism devastates reefs
WRI, 12 – world resource institute, environmental thinktank (“Cuba” http://www.wri.org/publication/content/7883)//ah
Cuba is the largest of the Caribbean islands (111,950 sq km), with a long, complex coastline and considerable chains of
offshore islands and coral cays. Fore reefs can be found along almost the entire border of the Cuban shelf, [1] which
extends for approximately 3200 km. In many places these fore reefs bear crest reefs at their shallowest zone. These reef crests are more abundant at the
edges of the four broad sections of the Cuban shelf: Gulf of Guanahacabibes (northwest Cuba), Sabana-Camaguey Archipelago (central north Cuba), Gulf
of Ana Maria-Guanayabo (southeast Cuba), and Gulf of Batanabo (southwest Cuba). Inshore, patch reefs are also found in the northwestern,
southwestern and southeastern sections of the shelf. [2] Overall, the Reefs at Risk analysis rates more than 70
percent of Cuba’s reefs as
threatened, with over 35 percent at high threat. The threat from overfishing is estimated to be the main threat to Cuba’s reefs (over 65 percent
threatened), and the landing statistics for the commercially important snapper and grouper underline this threat with
decreasing annual catches and maximum size over the last 20 years because of the use of unsustainable fishing practices. [3] From 1970 to 1975,
increased fishing effectiveness (e.g., use of trawls, seines, and set nets) resulted in overfishing of several important species (e.g., lane snapper, nassau
grouper). Overfishing also resulted from the use of non-selective fishing gear, the indiscriminate use of set nets during spawning aggregations, and
limited enforcement. [4] This situation led to the introduction of a series of drastic fishery-management regulations [5] and ultimately to a change in
fishery administration policy. [6] However, the Cuban
coral reef fishery today is probably in better condition than the fisheries of
other Caribbean countries (higher species richness, biomass, and average size), with about 40 percent of the total commercial catch coming
from the reefs. [7] Furthermore, in 2004, an official resolution of the Fisheries Ministry banned the use of trawl nets and set nets in Cuban waters. About
one-quarter of reefs were rated as threatened by sedimentation and pollution from inland sources, about one-fifth by coastal development, and fewer
than 10 percent by marine-based sources. The
low sedimentation and coastal development threats are mainly due to the
relatively undeveloped tourist
offshore location of many reefs, outside the influence of land-based sources of pollution, [8] and to Cuba’s
industry. Watersheds have historically been extensively deforested, increasing the sediment runoff to the sea, [9] and satellite images have revealed
large amounts of sediment along the southern coast of the island of Cuba, probably as a result of forest removal and agricultural practices, possibly
combined with severe rains. Remote
reefs (e.g., around the southern archipelagos) are in very good condition, but near large
population centers such as Havana, signs of decline are evident, with low coral cover, overgrowth by algae, and disease
outbreaks. [10] Tourism, a prevalent impact on many reefs in the Caribbean, is relatively undeveloped in Cuba
and thus has only a limited impact on Cuban coral reefs. However, the tourist diving industry is rapidly growing,
there is increasing awareness of the need to deploy more mooring buoys, and the number of diving sites with such buoys is increasing
(though theft of mooring buoys near population centers is a problem). [11] Anchoring on coral outcrops has been and continues to
be a practice in fishery and other nautical activities. [12] The extraction of stony corals and other organisms is degrading the reefs of tourist areas
where there is easy access for the general public, such as the reefs of Puerto Escondido to the northeast of Havana Province. [13] < p>Hurricanes are
more frequent in the south and west, where the reef communities are dominated by species resistant to sedimentation, especially in the Gulf of Bataban.
environment turn – impact – coral
Coral loss risks massive biodiversity loss – maintain most of marine biodiversity
Spalding et. al., 9 - Prof. at Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge (M. “The coral reef crisis: The critical importance of <350 ppm
CO”, Marine Pollution Bulletin 58 (2009) 1428–1436)//ah
Although they make up only 0.2% in area of the marine environment, coral
reefs are the most biodiverse ecosystems of the ocean,
estimated to harbour around one third of all described marine species (Reaka-Kudla, 1997, 2001), most of which are found
nowhere else. Their intricate three-dimensional landscapes promote elaborate adaptation, richly complex species
interdependencies, and a fertile source of medically active compounds (Fenical, 2002; Bruckner, 2007). The extensive
ramparts formed by reefs shield thousands of kilometres of coastline from wave erosion, protecting essential
lagoon and mangrove habitat for vulnerable life stages of a wide range of commercial and non-commercial
species (Johnson and Marshall, 2007). More than 100 countries have coastlines with coral reefs (Moberg and Folke, 1999) and almost 500 million
people (8% of the world’s population) live within 100 km of a reef (Bryant et al., 1998). Consequently, tens of millions of people depend on
reef ecosystems for protein and other services (Costanza et al., 1997). Resulting exploitation, combined with lack of regulation, has
resulted in severe depletion of many reef resources and has caused widespread reef degradation particularly in highly populated regions (Pet-Soede et al.,
1999). Despite these impacts, human
dependence on reefs continues to increase. The values of goods and services
provided by reefs have not been accurately determined, but estimates range from $172 billion to $375 billion
per year (Moore and Best, 2001; Wilkinson, 2002; Fischlin et al., 2007; Martínez et al., 2007). This is probably underestimated given
that many of the benefits of coral reefs pass through non-market economies (Donner and Potere, 2007) or involve intangible
ecosystem services such as sand production and gas exchange. Importantly, the consequences of coral reef destruction would not be
limited to the loss of the value of these goods and services, for the demise of reefs would also mean the
extinction of a large part of the Earth’s total biodiversity – something never experienced before in human
history.
Extinction – prefer probability
Kunich, 5 - Professor of Law at Roger Williams University School of Law, (John, “ARTICLE: Losing Nemo: The Mass Extinction Now Threatening
the World's Ocean Hotspots,” 2005, Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, 30 Colum. J. Envtl. L. 1)//ah
On the other hand, there
is an unimaginable cost from failing to preserve the marine hotspots if they contain numerous
could cost ourselves and our posterity untold advancements in medicine, therapies,
genetic resources, nutrients, ecosystem services, and other areas, including perhaps a cure to a global health threat
that might not materialize until centuries from now...truly a "grave error" of the first order. [*128] But if we sit on the sidelines
and fail to invest in hotspots preservation, and we "get lucky" (few species, low value, small extinction risk), our only gain is in the form of saving
the money and effort we could have spent on the hotspots. Even if this amounts to several billion dollars a year, it is a small benefit compared
to the incalculably catastrophic losses we could suffer if we guess wrong in betting on the inaction option.¶
species of high value at great risk of extinction. We
The Decision Matrix actually under-represents the extent to which the rational decision is to invest in hotspots preservation. Because the Decision
Matrix, in tabular form, devotes equal space to each of the sixteen possible combinations of extreme variable values, it can mislead readers into thinking
that each of the sixteen outcomes is equally probable. This is most emphatically not the case. Some of these results are far more probable than others.
This problem of apparent equality of disparate results is of the same type as a chart that depicts a person's chances of being fatally injured by a
plummeting comet on the way home from work on any given day. There are only two possible results in such a table (survives another day, or killed by
meteor), and they would occupy an equal amount of tabular space on the printed page, but the probability of the former outcome is, thankfully, much
higher than the likelihood of the latter tragic event.¶ As explained in this Article, it is much more likely that there are numerous, even millions, of
unidentified species currently living in the marine hotspots than that these hotspots are really not centers of profuse biodiversity. It
is also very
probable that the extinction threat in our oceans is real, and significant, given what we know about
the horrific effects wrought on coral reefs and other known marine population centers by overfishing, pollution, sedimentation, and other
human-made stressors. n525 Recent discoveries have revealed very high rates of endemism in small areas such as seamounts,
which are extremely vulnerable to trawl damage. n526 Even in the deep ocean areas, there is evidence that new technologies are
making it both a possibility and a reality to exploit the previously unexploitable biodiversity in these waters via [*129] demersal fishing/trawling, to
devastating effect. n527 Only a truly Orwellian brand of doublethink could label as progress the development of fishing methods that do to the benthic
habitats what modern clearcutting has done to so many forests, only on a scale 150 times as severe, but it is this "progress" that has brought mass
extinction to the seas. n528 However, there is also the positive side, in light of the large numbers of marine species and habitat types, including life forms
adapted to extraordinary niches such as hydrothermal vents and the abyss. That is, it would be surprising if there were not highly valuable genetic
resources, natural medicines, potential sources of food, and other boons waiting to be discovered there.¶ Therefore, the results that are linked to high,
rather than low, values of each of the three variables are far more probable than the converse outcomes. In
terms of probabilities, it is much
more likely that either a "first order grave error" or "first order jackpot" will occur than a "lucky wager" or an "unused
insurance" result. In fact, all of the combinations with either two or three "high" values of the variables are significantly more probable that any of the
combinations with two or three "low" variable values. This
means that the tilt in favor of betting on the hotspots is much more
pronounced than is apparent from a cursory glance at the Decision Matrix. The extreme results are far likelier to fall in favor of
hotspots preservation than the opposite.
Coral reefs underpin all human life
Green Reefs, 12 – Green Reefs environmental magazine (“About Us; Who Are We?” 4/22/12,http://green-reefs.com/GreenReefAboutUs.html)
Here at Green Reefs we are dedicated to the preservation of these precious marine ecosystems known as coral reefs. We will examine the role these
fragile biotopes have in our everyday life, from the food we eat to the medicines which may one day cure cancer. Not
only do the reefs sustain
much of human life, nearly all of aquatic life depends on these small ecosystems as well either directly or
indirectly. As the effects of climate change, global warming, overfishing and overpopulation become more dangerous, the reefs find
themselves more and more vulnerable. Human survival may ultimately hinge on the survival of the reef
ecosystems. With that being said, reefs are home to some of the most colorful and majestic creatures in the world, as
well as some of the strangest. With more biodiversity than the Amazon, new creatures are constantly being discovered. New medicines
continue to be developed from venomous creatures in the seas. The oceans are becoming more impactful in
human civilization. Despite this, the ocean remains relatively unexplored, even though it covers nearly three quarters of our planet. Scientists
know more about the surface of the moon than the ocean floor.
environment turn – at: cuba not key
Cuba is the environmental keystone of the Caribbean
EDF, 2k – environmental defense fund (November 30, 2000, “Cuba, "Crown Jewel Of Caribbean Biodiversity," Threatened”,
http://www.edf.org/news/cuba-crown-jewel-caribbean-biodiversity-threatened)//ah
Cuba has one of the Caribbean's most diverse marine environments, with massive reefs that exceed the Florida Keys and
serve as spawning grounds for many species of fish. Environmental Defense scientists and attorneys and their Cuban colleagues are
working to protect these marine treasures by reducing overfishing and helping design protected areas for marine life. In addition to publishing marine
research and building education programs with Cuban scientists, Environmental Defense will co-sponsor the Fifth Cuban Marine Science Congress,
December 4-8 in Havana. "Cuba
is the Caribbean's biological crown jewel," said Environmental Defense scientist Dr. Ken Lindeman.
"With over 3,000 miles of coastline and 4,200 islets and keys ? Cuba is literally teeming with marine and
terrestrial treasures. Cuba is also at a historic crossroads: coastal development and overfishing have begun to
damage these resources. Environmental Defense and our Cuban colleagues are working to ensure Cuba's resources are preserved for future
generations." In December, 500 managers and scientists from Cuba and the rest of Latin America, North America and Europe will gather in Havana for
the Fifth Cuban Marine Science Congress to present the latest research on marine conservation. Environmental Defense scientists and Cuban colleagues
will present research on innovative designs for marine protected areas that can benefit local fishers. Environmental Defense experts also will present
lessons learned in coastal protection along the US Atlantic coast, where water
pollution, habitat destruction and overfishing also
threaten marine life. "Cuba is the environmental keystone of the Caribbean. This conference is a crucial gathering of
knowledge that can help preserve the marine treasures of the greater Caribbean for years to come, " said Environmental
Defense scientist Dr. Doug Rader.
Ecologically distinct
Whittle et. al., 9 - Senior Attorney, Environmental Defense, Raleigh, North Carolina (Daniel J., “International Tourism and Protection of Cuba’s
Coastal and Marine Environments”, 05/08/09, http://apps.edf.org/documents/9707_Whittle_Tulane_Journal.pdf)//ah
In 1502, Christopher Columbus pronounced that Cuba “esta es la tierra mas hermosa que ojos humanos hayan vista” [“is
the most beautiful
land human eyes have ever seen”].7 Though written five hundred years ago, these words are virtually sacred to modern-day
Cubans and are often repeated by contemporary travelers and writers. With over 3000 miles of coastline and 3200 islets and
keys, Cuba is a biological crown jewel, home to some of the world’s most spectacular and least-disturbed coral
reefs, at the seam of the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico. Its massive reefs provide key
spawning grounds for economically important species such as grouper, snapper, and lobster.8 The country has
hundreds of miles of sandy beaches, and a number of natural, well-protected harbors throughout the country.9 Coastal ecosystems include
vast mangrove forests, coral reefs, wetlands, and spectacular backreef systems associated with hundreds of keys around the
island. One prime example is the Jardines de la Reina (Gardens of the Queen) Archipelago, a 1000-square-mile marine and terrestrial wilderness off the
southeast coast that is also the site of an innovative ecotourism joint-venture, and a potential national park. Another
jewel in Cuba’s
ecological crown is the vast Zapata Swamp on Cuba’s southern coast, the country’s largest wetland system and the
host to a large number of endemic bird species.10 The 1.1 million-acre Zapata Swamp is characterized by expanses of
sawgrass and mangroves and is extremely rich in both plant and animal species.11 Though not as thoroughly researched as
other natural areas in Cuba’s coastal zone and mountains, by latest count this area is home to almost 900 plant species (121 of which
are endemic to the country), 172 species of birds (2 of which are locally endemic to the swamp), and the Cuban crocodile, the only endemic crocodile
species of the Caribbean insular region.12 Zapata
Swamp is also an important stopover for migratory birds flying south
from Florida to South America.13 Zapata also has approximately 15% of the total forest cover in the country, or about 634,790 acres, and is
considered to be “one of the most important green zones in the Caribbean insular region.”14 Overall, Cuba is
home to thousands of animal species, many which are endemic to the country.15 The island has more than 300 species of
birds, 18,000 species of insects, 38,000 species of crustaceans, and 1500 species of mollusks.16 Cuba’s plant diversity is also remarkable.
With Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico. Its massive reefs provide key spawning grounds for economically important species such as
grouper, snapper, and lobster.8
environment turn – at: no tourists
Millions of tourists will travel to Cuba – studies
Whittle et. al., 9 - Senior Attorney, Environmental Defense, Raleigh, North Carolina (Daniel J., “International Tourism and Protection of Cuba’s
Coastal and Marine Environments”, 05/08/09, http://apps.edf.org/documents/9707_Whittle_Tulane_Journal.pdf)//ah
As discussed above, U.S. travelers have been making the short jaunt to Cuba for more than 150 years, and until 1959, made up the lion’s share of tourists
on the island. And now after a four-decade long hiatus, U.S. citizens are ready to come back to Cuba in droves, and many already
have. In 2001, between 130,000 and 206,000 U.S. citizens traveled to Cuba, many of whom were authorized to travel by the U.S. Department of
Treasury and thousands more who were not.201 If
travel restrictions are lifted (as has been proposed by bills that have been passed by the
U.S. House of Representatives, most recently in July 2002), estimates of the number of U.S. citizens who would travel to Cuba
vary widely. Some conservatively predict that between 300,000 and 500,000 U.S. citizens would travel to the
island in the first year and within five years numbers would reach up to 1.4 million U.S. tourists to Cuba.202
Officials with the United States International Trade Commission predicted in 2001 that absent the embargo, only 100,000 to 350,000 more U.S. tourists
would travel to the island, while the private consultants, The
Brattle Group, forecast that within a few years approximately 3
million U.S. citizens would visit Cuba annually, many as tourists and others for business and family
visits.203 Cuban planning officials predict that total tourist arrivals could range between 5 and 10 million by the year
2010, if the embargo is lifted or significantly eased.204 Some experts in Cuba anticipate that up to 1 million U.S. tourists could travel to
Cuba in the first year alone after the embargo is lifted.205 Of the U.S. tourists to Cuba, many would be “diverted” (i.e., they would have otherwise gone to
another destination), while others would be “incremental” (i.e., passengers who would not otherwise have traveled).206
Trave
Whittle et. al., 9 - Senior Attorney, Environmental Defense, Raleigh, North Carolina (Daniel J., “International Tourism and Protection of Cuba’s
Coastal and Marine Environments”, 05/08/09, http://apps.edf.org/documents/9707_Whittle_Tulane_Journal.pdf)//ah
Increased travel by U.S. tourists to Cuba brings with it special implications, in part because of the proximity of the
two countries to each other and in part because of the tastes and travel habits of U.S. travelers. For example, U.S. citizens in pleasure
boats would surely flock to the island in great numbers, filling the country’s existing marinas and driving up the
demand for new ones. In addition to expansions of existing commercial airports, many would want to pilot their own private planes to
the island, creating the need for even further airport capacity. Cruise ship industry demands will skyrocket
throughout some of the most pristine areas of the island (e.g., there are already impacts from cruise ship activities at Punta
Frances on the Isle of Youth). High speed ferries from Miami or Key West could provide transportation for thousands of U.S. travelers to Cuba.208 And
with ferries would come cars and trucks, tens of thousands of them. All of this would require additional
investments in transportation
infrastructure (roads, port and marina facilities, airports, etc.) above and beyond what is currently on the drawing board in
Cuba. This scenario also demands that those Cuban environmental laws and policies already on the books stay in place postembargo, and that
implementation and enforcement of those laws be a top priority. Successful and sustainable tourism development in Cuba post-embargo will also require
the identification of public and/or private funding sources sufficient to upgrade and modernize transportation and environmental infrastructure.209
Some claim that the absence
of U.S. visitors, and the foregone billions of dollars in potential income, is an obstacle to sustainable
tourism development because without such revenues Cuba may not be able to afford the facilities,
infrastructure, and other services needed to protect the environment.210 That might be true, but it should not serve as an
excuse to ease environmental protection requirements in the near term. Even while U.S. travel restrictions are still in place, Cuba should move forward
quickly to invest in infrastructure and implement and enforce recently enacted environmental laws and policies needed to ensure that U.S. tourism,
when it finally comes, is not overwhelming.
environment turn – at: cuban law
Cuba lacks environment groups and public support – breaks down law
Dean, 7 - science writer for the New York Times, taught seminars and courses at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Vassar
College, and the University of Rhode Island, member of the Corporation of Brown University, a founding member of the advisory board of the Metcalf
Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting (Cornelia, “Published: Conserving Cuba, After the Embargo”, December 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25cuba.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&)//ah
the best lessons for Cubans to ponder as they contemplate a more prosperous future can be
seen 90 miles north, in the Florida Keys. There, he said, too many people have poured into an ecosystem too fragile
to support them. “As Cuba becomes an increasingly popular tourist resort,” Dr. Guggenheim said, “we don’t want to
see and they don’t want to see the same mistakes, where you literally love something to death.” But there are people skeptical
that Cuba will resist this kind of pressure. One of them is Mr. Houck. The environmental laws he worked on are “a very
strong structure,” he said, “But all laws do is give you the opportunity to slow down the wrong thing. Over time, you
can wear the law down.” That is particularly true in Cuba, he said, “where there’s no armed citizenry out there with
high-powered science groups pushing in the opposite direction. What they lack is the counter pressure of
environmental groups and environmental activists.” As Mr. Rey and Daniel Whittle, a lawyer for Environmental Defense, put it in the
book “Cuban Studies 37” (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), “policymaking in Cuba is still centralized and top down.” But, they
For Dr. Guggenheim,
wrote, “much can be done to enhance public input in policymaking.” Mr. Rey said in the interview that Cubans must be encouraged to use their
environmental laws. By “some kind of cultural habit,” he said, people
in Cuba rarely turn to the courts to challenge decisions they
dislike. “There’s no litigation, just a few cases here and there,” Mr. Rey said. “In most community situations if a citizen has a problem he writes
a letter. That’s O.K., but it’s not all the possibilities.”
environment turn – at: collaboration
Collaboration is full of problems
Dean, 7 - science writer for the New York Times, taught seminars and courses at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Vassar
College, and the University of Rhode Island, member of the Corporation of Brown University, a founding member of the advisory board of the Metcalf
Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting (Cornelia, “Published: Conserving Cuba, After the Embargo”, December 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25cuba.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&)//ah
To prepare for that day, researchers
from a number of American institutions and organizations are working on ecological
conservation in Cuba, including Harte, the Wildlife Conservation Society, universities like Tulane and Georgetown, institutions like the American
Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden, and others. What they are studying includes coral health, fish stocks, shark abundance,
turtle migration and land use patterns. Cuban scientists at the conference noted that this work continued a tradition of collaboration that dates from the
mid-19th century, when Cuban researchers began working with naturalists from the Smithsonian Institution. In the 20th century, naturalists from
Harvard and the University of Havana worked together for decades. But
now, they said, collaborative relationships are full of
problems. The Cancún meeting itself illustrated one. “We would have liked to be able to do this in Havana or in the
United States,” Jorge Luis Fernández Chamero, the director of the Cuban science and environment agency and leader of the
Cuban delegation, said through a translator in opening the meeting. “This we cannot do.” While the American government grants
licenses to some (but not all) American scientists seeking to travel to Cuba, it routinely rejects Cuban researchers seeking permission
to come to the United States, researchers from both countries said. So meeting organizers turned to Alberto Mariano Vázquez De la Cerda, a
retired admiral in the Mexican navy, an oceanographer with a doctorate from Texas A & M and a member of the Harte advisory board, who supervised
arrangements for the Cuban conferees. The travel situation is potentially even worse for researchers at state institutions in Florida. Jennifer Gebelein, a
geographer at Florida International University who uses global positioning systems to track land use in Cuba, told the meeting about restrictions
imposed by the Florida Legislature, which has barred state colleges from using public or private funds for travel to Cuba. As
a result of this move
and federal restrictions, Dr. Gebelein said “we’re not sure what is going to happen” with her research program.
Permission and the internet hamstring collaborative potential
Dean, 7 - science writer for the New York Times, taught seminars and courses at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Vassar
College, and the University of Rhode Island, member of the Corporation of Brown University, a founding member of the advisory board of the Metcalf
Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting (Cornelia, “Published: Conserving Cuba, After the Embargo”, December 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25cuba.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&)//ah
On the other hand, John Thorbjarnarson, a zoologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that he had
difficulty obtaining
permission from Cuba to visit some areas in that country, like a habitat area for the Cuban crocodile near the Bay of Pigs. “I have to
walk a delicate line between what the U.S. allows me to do and what the Cubans allow me to do,” said Dr.
Thorbjarnarson, who did not attend the conference. “It is not easy to walk that line.” But he had nothing but praise for his scientific colleagues in Cuba.
Like other American researchers, he described them as doing highly competent work with meager resources. “They are a remarkable bunch of people,”
Dr. Thorbjarnarson said, “but my counterparts make on average probably less than $20 a month.” American scientists, foundations and other groups are
ready to help with equipment and supplies but are hampered by the embargo. For example, Maria Elena Ibarra Martín, a marine scientist at the
University of Havana, said through a translator that American organizations had provided Cuban turtle and shark researchers with tags and other
equipment. They shipped it via Canada. Another thorny issue is ships. “If you are going to do marine science, at some point you have to go out on a ship,”
said Robert E. Hueter, who directs the center for shark research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., and attended the Cancún meeting. But,
he and others said, the United States government will not allow ships into American ports if they have recently been in Cuban waters in the previous six
months, and the Cuban government will not allow American research vessels in Cuban waters. One answer might be vessels already in Cuba, but
nowadays they are often tied up in tourism-related efforts, Cubans at the Cancún meeting said. And even with a ship, several American
researchers at the conference said, it is difficult to get Cuban government permission to travel to places like the
island’s northwest coast, the stretch closest to the United States. As a result, that region is the least-studied part of the Cuban
coast, Dr. Guggenheim and others said. Another big problem in Cuba is the lack of access to a source of information researchers
almost everywhere else take for granted: the Internet. Critics blame the Castro government, saying it limits access to
the Internet as a form of censorship. The Cuban government blames the embargo, which it says has left the country with inadequate bandwidth and
other technical problems that require it to limit Internet access to people who need it most. In any event, “we find we do not have access,”
Teresita Borges Hernández, a biologist in the environment section of Cuba’s science and technology ministry, said through a translator. She appealed to
the Americans at the meeting to do “anything, anything to improve this situation.” Dr. Guggenheim echoed the concern and said even telephone calls to
Cuba often cost as much as $2 a minute. “These
details, though they may seem trite,” he said, “are central to our ability to
collaborate.” Dr. Gebelein and several of the Cubans at the meeting said that some American Web sites barred access to people whose electronic
addresses identify them as Cuban. She suggested that the group organize a Web site in a third country, a site where they could all post data, papers and
the like, and everyone would have access to it.
Major impediments to cooperation
Bloom, 12 - director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Program and Bassett Maguire Curator of Botany at the New York Botanical Garden. (Brian,
“Biodiversity without Borders”, 8-4-12, http://www.sciencediplomacy.org/article/2012/biodiversity-without-borders)//ah
Project Approvals: Environmental
projects conducted in collaboration with Cuban organizations must be approved
by an array of Cuban agencies—and at various levels within those agencies—depending on the nature of the project. This can be a
daunting procedure for U.S.-based NGOs attempting to initiate collaborative activities in Cuba, but even NGOs
experienced in the process of project approval can have delays and frustrations. Some of the impediments are related to
technical problems (e.g., spotty Internet connections and difficulty transmitting large file attachments via email) or to changes in key
administrative personnel at agencies. The most important Cuban agency for most projects is the Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología y Medio
Ambiente (CITMA), but depending on the situation other entities must give high-level approval for environmental projects. For example, the Jardín
Botánico Nacional (JBN) reports administratively to the Ministerio de Educación Superior, so projects with the JBN need to be approved by that
ministry, in addition to CITMA. Projects taking place in Cuba’s numerous protected marine and terrestrial areas must be approved by the Centro
Nacional de Áreas Protegidas (CNAP), which is part of CITMA.
The major impediment with respect to conducting collaborative
environmental projects in Cuba is what can be a complex, non-linear, and slow approval process. Visas: Once an
appropriate OFAC license is obtained, a U.S. citizen must also obtain the appropriate visa from Cuba to enter the country and conduct the approved
activity. In some cases, for example to attend a professional conference, this can be accomplished with a tourist visa, which can be issued by airline
companies for a modest fee. However, for a U.S. citizen to engage in research activities, a research visa is required from Cuba, and this needs to be
arranged through the Cuban counterpart’s organization, which can take up to thirty working days to process. The challenge here is that the collaborative
activity for which the visa is sought must already have been approved by the Cuban counterpart organization, but that to get the approval it is usually
necessary to meet with and explain the project concept and to work out the specifics in person, thus creating a “catch-22” situation. Permits: Once
projects are approved and research visas secured, the third category of impediment in Cuba for U.S.-based
environmental researchers is
to obtain the permits needed for implementing the project’s specific activities. Probably the key permits pertain to the
conduct of field expeditions in collaboration with Cuban counterparts. Such permits require information about the individuals who will be doing the field
work and a detailed schedule of sites they will visit and on what dates. However, the
time it takes to get a permit approved often can
affect the specific details in the permit application. For example, illness or other external factors may affect an individual’s availability
(substitutions are not allowed) and natural events, such as hurricanes, may prohibit the expedition from going somewhere on the approved day. The high
degree of specificity of information required, the
relative inflexibility to modify what has been approved due to changing
circumstances of personnel or weather, and the length of time to get the approvals of the permits impede
research expeditions.
environment turn – at: repeal inevitable
No political incentive for repeal – it will stick
Brinkley, 12 - a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for The New York Times,
(Joel, “Cuba embargo isn’t working but isn’t going away”, Politco, http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/cuba-embargo-isnt-working-but-isnt-goingaway-85281.html)
America’s embargo on Cuba began its 53rd year this fall, and it’s hard to find anyone who thinks it’s working. Even Cuban-Americans who hate the
Castro brothers and fervently insist that the embargo remain in place generally agree that it has accomplished little, if anything.¶ Still, said Jaime
Suchlicki, a Cuban émigré who is the director of the Cuba Transition Project at the University of Miami, “do
you give away a policy that has
been in place for 50 years, whether you think it’s right or wrong, good or bad, effective or not — for nothing? Without a quid pro
quo from Cuba?Ӧ Suchlicki came to the United States in the first wave of Cuban refugees in 1960 after the communist revolution. His hardline
views mirror those of many in his generation. And for decades, it dominated the Cuba discussion in Florida, a state presidential candidates have long
believed they need to win to be elected.¶ But today the Cuban-American population is more diverse, as the U.S. presidential election last month showed.
Previously, Cuban-Americans regularly voted in favor of Republicans, who are generally staunch embargo supporters, by 4 to 1. This time, President
Barack Obama won half their vote.¶ Now an
argument can be made that if the half-century of political paralysis on this issue can be
overcome, both Cuba and the United States would benefit. American tourists would most likely pour into Cuba, buying
cigars, staying in beachfront hotels — spending money in the Cuban economy. And American businesses would find an eager new market for a range of
products beyond the food and medicine they are already authorized to sell.¶ “We cannot afford an obsolete ideological war against Cuba,” Richard Slatta,
a history professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in Latin America, wrote in an op-ed last month. “The embargo against Cuba denies
North Carolina businesses and farmers access to a major, proximate market.Ӧ Cuba experts say many business leaders, particularly, are making the
same case, especially now that the American economy has remained in the doldrums for so long. They add that it’s an obvious second-term issue; Obama
doesn’t have to worry about winning Florida again.¶ But for so many people in Washington, “Cuba
doesn’t matter any more now,” said Ted
Piccone, deputy director for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and a former National Security Council official.
“There’s no political incentive” to change the policy — even though the arguments for changing it are rife. Despite
ample provocation, the U.S. doesn’t impose similar embargoes on other authoritarian states.
***util good***
util good – frontline
In a nuclear world we have to weigh consequences.
Bok, 88 (Sissela, Professor of Philosophy, Brandeis, Applied Ethics and Ethical Theory, Ed. David Rosenthal
and Fudlou Shehadi, 1988)
The same argument can be made for Kant's other formulations of the Categorical Imperative: "So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in
the person of every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means"; and "So act as if you were always through actions a law-making
member in a universal Kingdom of Ends." No one with a concern for humanity could consistently will to risk eliminating humanity in the person of
himself and every other or to risk the death of all members in a universal Kingdom of Ends for the sake of justice. To risk their collective death for the
sake of following one's conscience would be, as Rawls said, "irrational, crazy." And to say that one did
that one merely
not intend such a catastrophe, but
failed to stop other persons from bringing it about would be beside the point when the end of the world was
at stake. For although it is true that we cannot be held responsible for most of the wrongs that others commit, the Latin maxim presents a case where
we would have to take such a responsibility seriously- - perhaps to the point of deceiving, bribing, even killing an innocent person, in
order that the world not perish.
Utilitarianism inevitable even in deontological frameworks
Green, 02 – Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University (Joshua, November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very
Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It", 314)
Some people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which rights take priority over which. If that’s what we mean by
302 “balancing rights,” then we are wise to shun this sort of talk.
Attempting to solve moral problems using a complex
deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but dogmatism all the same. However, it’s likely that
when some people talk about “balancing competing rights and obligations” they are already thinking like
consequentialists in spite of their use of deontological language. Once again, what deontological language does best is express the
thoughts of people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: “It doesn’t matter that you can save five people by pushing him to his death. To do this
would be a violation of his rights!”19 That
is why angry protesters say things like, “Animals Have Rights, Too!” rather
than, “Animal Testing: The Harms Outweigh the Benefits!” Once again, rights talk captures the apparent clarity
of the issue and absoluteness of the answer. But sometimes rights talk persists long after the sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded.
One thinks, for example, of the thousands of children whose lives are saved by drugs that were tested on animals and the “rights” of those children. One
finds oneself balancing the “rights” on both sides by asking how many rabbit lives one is willing to sacrifice in
order to save one human life, and so on, and at the end of the day one’s underlying thought is as thoroughly
consequentialist as can be, despite the deontological gloss. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except for the fact that the
deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the myth that there really are “rights,” etc. Best to drop it. When
deontological talk gets sophisticated, the thought it represents is either dogmatic in an esoteric sort of way or
covertly consequentialist.
Extinction is categorically the ultimate risk – It is necessary to try and prevent it
Schell, 1982 (Jonathan, professor at Wesleyan University, former writer and editor at the New Yorker, “The Fate of the Earth,” 1982, pg. 93-94)
<To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course, be a misrepresentation—just as it would be a misrepresentation to say
that extinction can be ruled out. To begin with, we know that a holocaust may not occur at all. If one does occur, the adversaries may
not use all their weapons. If they do use all their weapons, the global effects, in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are
not moderate but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to withstand them without breaking down catastrophically. These are all
substantial reasons for supposing that mankind will not be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust, or even that extinction in a holocaust is unlikely,
we are compelled to admit that there may
be a holocaust, that the adversaries may use all their weapons, that the global effects, including effects of
which we are as yet unaware, may be severe, that the ecosphere may suffer catastrophic breakdown, and
that our species may be extinguished. We are left with uncertainty, and are forced to make our decisions in
a state of uncertainty. If we wish to act to save our species, we have to muster our resolve in spite of our
awareness that the life of the species may not now in fact be jeopardized. On the other hand, if we wish to ignore
the peril, we have to admit that we do so in the knowledge that the species may be in danger of imminent
self-destruction. When the existence of nuclear weapons was made known, thoughtful people everywhere in the world realized that if the
great powers entered into a nuclear-arms race the human species would sooner or later face the possibility
of extinction. They also realized that in the absence of international agreements preventing it an arms race would probably occur. They knew
that the path of nuclear armament was a dead end for mankind. The discovery of the energy in mass—of "the
basic power of the universe"—and of a means by which man could release that energy altered the
and they tend to calm our fear and to reduce our sense of urgency. Yet at the same time
relationship between man and the source of his life, the earth. In the shadow of this power, the earth became
small and the life of the human species doubtful. In that sense, the question of human extinction has been
on the political agenda of the world ever since the first nuclear weapon was detonated , and there was no need for
the world to build up its present tremendous arsenals before starting to worry about it. At just what point the species crossed, or will have crossed,
the boundary between merely having the technical knowledge to destroy itself and actually having the arsenals at hand, ready to be used at any
it is clear that at present, with some twenty thousand megatons of nuclear explosive power in
existence, and with more being added every day, we have entered into the zone of uncertainty, which is to say the zone
of risk of extinction. But the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from,
and immeasurably greater than, that of any other risk, and as we make our decisions we have to take that
significance into account. Up to now, every risk has been contained within the frame of life; extinction
would shatter the frame. It represents not the defeat of some purpose but an abyss in which all human purposes
would be drowned for all time. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on
the same footing as risks that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs in our particular transient moment of
human history. To employ a mathematical analogy, we can say that although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the
stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that
a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over,
and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the
second, is not precisely knowable. But
difference in the world between the mere possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same,
and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that
their use would put an end to our species. In weighing the fate of the earth and, with it, our own fate, we stand before a mystery,
and in tampering with the earth we tamper with a mystery. We are in deep ignorance. Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder, our wonder
should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution, and our reverence and caution should lead us to act without
delay to withdraw the threat we now pose to the earth and to ourselves. In trying to describe possible consequences of a nuclear holocaust, I have
mentioned the limitless complexity of its effects on human society and on the ecosphere—a complexity that sometimes seems to be as great as that
of life itself. But if
these effects should lead to human extinction, then all the complexity will give way to the utmost simplicity—
the simplicity of nothingness. We—the human race—shall cease to be.>
Upholding life is the ultimate moral standard.
Uyl and Rasmussen, 81 (profs. of philosophy at Bellarmine College and St. John’s University, 1981, Douglas Den and Douglas, “Reading
Nozick”, p. 244)
Rand has spoken of the ultimate end as the standard by which all other ends are evaluated. When the ends to
be evaluated are chosen ones the ultimate end is the standard for moral evaluation. Life as the sort of thing a
living entity is, then, is the ultimate standard of value; and since only human beings are capable of choosing
their ends, it is the life as a human being-man's life qua man-that is the standard for moral evaluation.
util good – survival outweighs
Utilitarianism is the only way to access morality. Sacrifice in the name of preserving rights
destroys any hope of future generations attaining other values.
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs;
“Nuclear Ethics” pg. 45-46)
Is there any end that could justify a nuclear war that threatens the survival of the species? Is not all-out nuclear war just
as self contradictory in the real world as pacifism is accused of being? Some people argue that "we are required to undergo gross
injustice that will break many souls sooner than ourselves be the authors of mass murder."73 Still others say that "when
a person makes survival the highest value, he has declared that there is nothing he will not betray. But for a civilization to sacrifice itself
makes no sense since there are not survivors to give meaning to the sacrifical [sic] act. In that case, survival
may be worth betrayal." Is it possible to avoid the "moral calamity of a policy like unilateral disarmament that
forces us to choose between being dead or red (while increasing the chances of both)"?74 How one judges the issue of
ends can be affected by how one poses the questions. If one asks "what is worth a billion lives (or the survival of the species)," it is natural to
resist contemplating a positive answer. But suppose one asks, "is it possible to imagine any threat to our civilization and values
that would justify raising the threat to a billion lives from one in ten thousand to one in a thousand for a
specific period?" Then there are several plausible answers, including a democratic way of life and cherished freedoms that give meaning to life
beyond mere survival. When we pursue several values simultaneously, we face the fact that they often conflict and
that we face difficult tradeoffs. If we make one value absolute in priority, we are likely to get that value and little
else. Survival is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of other values, but that does not make it sufficient.
Logical priority does not make it an absolute value. Few people act as though survival were an absolute value in their personal lives, or they would never
enter an automobile. We
can give survival of the species a very high priority without giving it the paralyzing status of
an absolute value. Some degree of risk is unavoidable if individuals or societies are to avoid paralysis and
enhance the quality of life beyond mere survival. The degree of that risk is a justifiable topic of both prudential
and moral reasoning.
util good – nuke war outweighs
Nuclear war requires the evaluation of consequences
Moore, 97 (Michael, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at University of San Diego School of Law, 1997,
Placing Blame, p. 719-721)
3. Non-Absolute Moral Norms: Threshold Deontology Apart from the exceptions that the content of moral norms must have for them to be plausible, a
third modification of absolutism is the softening of the 'whatever the consequences' aspect mentioned earlier. This aspect of absolutism is often
attributed to Kant, who held that though the heavens may fall, justice must be done. Despite my nonconsequentialist views on morality, I cannot accept
the Kantian line.
It just is not true that one should allow a nuclear war rather than killing or torturing an
innocent person. It is not even true that one should allow the destruction of a sizable city by a terrorist nuclear device rather than kill or torture
an innocent person. To prevent such extraordinary harms extreme actions seem to me to be justified. There is
a story in the Talmudic sources that may appear to appeal to a contrary intuition. 122 It is said that where the city is surrounded and threatened with
destruction if it does not send out one of its inhabitants to be killed, it is better that the whole city should perish rather than become an accomplice to the
killing of one of its inhabitants, Benjamin Cardozo expressed the same intuition in rejecting the idea that those in a lifeboat about to sink and drown may
jettison enough of their number to allow the remainder to stay afloat. As Cardozo put it: Where two or more are overtaken by a common disaster, there is
no right on the part of one to save the lives of some by the killing of another. There is no rule of human jettison. Men there will often be who, when told
that their going will be the salvation of the remnant, will choose the nobler part and make the plunge into the waters. In that supreme moment the darkness for them will be illumined by the thought that those behind will ride to safety. If none of such mold are found aboard the boat, or too few t<3 save
the others, the human freight must be left to meet the chances of the waters. 123 There is admittedly a nobility when those who are threatened with
destruction choose on their own to suffer that destruction rather than participate in a prima facie immoral act. But what happens when we eliminate the
choice of all concerned to sacrifice themselves? Alter the Talmudic example slightly by making it the ruler of the city who alone must decide whether to
send one out in order to prevent destruction of the city. Or take the actual facts of the lifeboat case'24 to which Cardozo was adverting, where it was a
seaman who took charge of the sinking lifeboat and jettisoned enough of its passengers to save the rest. Or consider Bernard Williams's example, where
you come across a large group of villagers about to be shot by the army as an example to others, and you can save most of them if you will but shoot one;
far from choosing to 'sink or swim' together, the villagers beg you to shoot one of their number so that the rest may be saved. 125 In all such cases it no
longer seems virtuous to refuse to do an act that you abhor. On the contrary, it
seems a narcissistic preoccupation with your
own 'virtue'—that is, the 'virtue' you could have if the world were ideal and did not present you
with such awful choices—if you choose to allow the greater number to perish. In such cases, I prefer Sartre's
version of the Orestes legend to the Talmud: the ruler should take the guilt upon himself rather than allow his people to perish.'26 One should
feel guilty in such cases, but it is nobler to undertake such guilt than to shut one's eyes to the
horrendous consequences of not acting.
util good – extinction outweighs
Extinction is categorically the ultimate risk – It is necessary to try and prevent it
Schell, 1982 (Jonathan, professor at Wesleyan University, former writer and editor at the New Yorker, “The Fate of the Earth,” 1982, pg. 93-94)
<To say that human extinction is a certainty would, of course, be a misrepresentation—just as it would be a misrepresentation to say
that extinction can be ruled out. To begin with, we know that a holocaust may not occur at all. If one does occur, the adversaries may
not use all their weapons. If they do use all their weapons, the global effects, in the ozone and elsewhere, may be moderate. And if the effects are
not moderate but extreme, the ecosphere may prove resilient enough to withstand them without breaking down catastrophically. These are all
substantial reasons for supposing that mankind will not be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust, or even that extinction in a holocaust is unlikely,
we are compelled to admit that there may
be a holocaust, that the adversaries may use all their weapons, that the global effects, including effects of
which we are as yet unaware, may be severe, that the ecosphere may suffer catastrophic breakdown, and
that our species may be extinguished. We are left with uncertainty, and are forced to make our decisions in
a state of uncertainty. If we wish to act to save our species, we have to muster our resolve in spite of our
awareness that the life of the species may not now in fact be jeopardized. On the other hand, if we wish to ignore
the peril, we have to admit that we do so in the knowledge that the species may be in danger of imminent
self-destruction. When the existence of nuclear weapons was made known, thoughtful people everywhere in the world realized that if the
great powers entered into a nuclear-arms race the human species would sooner or later face the possibility
of extinction. They also realized that in the absence of international agreements preventing it an arms race would probably occur. They knew
that the path of nuclear armament was a dead end for mankind. The discovery of the energy in mass—of "the
basic power of the universe"—and of a means by which man could release that energy altered the
relationship between man and the source of his life, the earth. In the shadow of this power, the earth became
small and the life of the human species doubtful. In that sense, the question of human extinction has been
on the political agenda of the world ever since the first nuclear weapon was detonated , and there was no need for
and they tend to calm our fear and to reduce our sense of urgency. Yet at the same time
the world to build up its present tremendous arsenals before starting to worry about it. At just what point the species crossed, or will have crossed,
the boundary between merely having the technical knowledge to destroy itself and actually having the arsenals at hand, ready to be used at any
it is clear that at present, with some twenty thousand megatons of nuclear explosive power in
existence, and with more being added every day, we have entered into the zone of uncertainty, which is to say the zone
of risk of extinction. But the mere risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from,
and immeasurably greater than, that of any other risk, and as we make our decisions we have to take that
significance into account. Up to now, every risk has been contained within the frame of life; extinction
would shatter the frame. It represents not the defeat of some purpose but an abyss in which all human purposes
would be drowned for all time. We have no right to place the possibility of this limitless, eternal defeat on
the same footing as risks that we run in the ordinary conduct of our affairs in our particular transient moment of
human history. To employ a mathematical analogy, we can say that although the risk of extinction may be fractional, the
stake is, humanly speaking, infinite, and a fraction of infinity is still infinity. In other words, once we learn that
a holocaust might lead to extinction we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over,
and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance. Therefore, although, scientifically speaking, there is all the
second, is not precisely knowable. But
difference in the world between the mere possibility that a holocaust will bring about extinction and the certainty of it, morally they are the same,
and we have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that
their use would put an end to our species. In weighing the fate of the earth and, with it, our own fate, we stand before a mystery,
and in tampering with the earth we tamper with a mystery. We are in deep ignorance. Our ignorance should dispose us to wonder, our wonder
should make us humble, our humility should inspire us to reverence and caution, and our reverence and caution should lead us to act without
delay to withdraw the threat we now pose to the earth and to ourselves. In trying to describe possible consequences of a nuclear holocaust, I have
mentioned the limitless complexity of its effects on human society and on the ecosphere—a complexity that sometimes seems to be as great as that
of life itself. But if
these effects should lead to human extinction, then all the complexity will give way to the utmost simplicity—
the simplicity of nothingness. We—the human race—shall cease to be.>
util good – inevitable
Utilitarianism inevitable even in deontological frameworks
Green, 02 – Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University (Joshua, November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very
Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It", 314)
Some people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which rights take priority over which. If that’s what we mean by
302 “balancing rights,” then we are wise to shun this sort of talk. Attempting
to solve moral problems using a complex
deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but dogmatism all the same. However, it’s likely that
when some people talk about “balancing competing rights and obligations” they are already thinking like
consequentialists in spite of their use of deontological language. Once again, what deontological language does best is express the
thoughts of people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: “It doesn’t matter that you can save five people by pushing him to his death. To do this
would be a violation of his rights!”19 That
is why angry protesters say things like, “Animals Have Rights, Too!” rather
than, “Animal Testing: The Harms Outweigh the Benefits!” Once again, rights talk captures the apparent clarity
of the issue and absoluteness of the answer. But sometimes rights talk persists long after the sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded.
One thinks, for example, of the thousands of children whose lives are saved by drugs that were tested on animals and the “rights” of those children. One
finds oneself balancing the “rights” on both sides by asking how many rabbit lives one is willing to sacrifice in
order to save one human life, and so on, and at the end of the day one’s underlying thought is as thoroughly
consequentialist as can be, despite the deontological gloss. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except for the fact that the
deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the myth that there really are “rights,” etc. Best to drop it. When deontological talk gets
sophisticated, the thought it represents is either dogmatic in an esoteric sort of way or covertly
consequentialist.
Compromising moral values and trading off for other injustices proves deontology is
impossible
Spragens 2K – Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University (Thomas A., Political Theory and Partisan Politics- "Rationality
in Liberal Politics" pg 81-2)
My thesis that all three layers/forms of political association are important in a well-ordered liberal democracy also implies the untenability of Rawls's
argument that agreement regarding norms of social justice is a possible and sufficient way to overcome the deficiencies of the modus vivendi approach.
In the first place, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, the
fundamental unfairness of life and the presence of gratuitous
elements in the moral universe make it impossible to settle rationally upon a single set of distributive principles
as demonstrably fair (See also, Spragens 1993). Simply put, the problem is that the contingencies of the world ineluctably allocate assets and
sufferings quite unfairly. We can cope with and try to compensate for these "natural injustices," but only at the price
of introducing other elements of unfairness or compromising other moral values. The other major problem in this context
is that real world human beings are not deontologists: their moral intuitions about distributive justice are
permeated and influenced by their moral intuitions about the' good. The empirical consequence of these two difficulties is the
falsification of Rawls's hermeneutic claims about an overlapping consensus. Rational people of good will with a liberal democratic
persuasion will be able to agree that some possible distributive criteria are morally unacceptable. But, as both
experience and the literature attest, hopes for a convergence of opinion on definitive principles of distributive
justice are chimerical.
util good – in this instance
Right and wrong don’t matter in the face of “the catastrophic”
Fried ’94 (Charles Fried “Rights and Wrongs as Absolute.” Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics. , p. 76. Ed. Haber 1994)
Even within such boundaries we can imagine extreme cases where killing an innocent person may save a whole
nation. In such cases it seems fanatical to maintain the absoluteness of the judgment, to do right even if the
heavens will in fact fall. And so the catastrophic may cause the absoluteness of right and wrong to yield, but even
then it would be a non sequitur to argue (as consequentialists are fond of doing) that this proves that judgments of right and wrong are always a matter
of degree, depending on the relative goods to be attained and harms to be avoided. I believe, on the contrary, that the
concept of the
catastrophic is a distinct concept just because it identifies the extreme situations in which the usual categories
of judgment (including the category of right and wrong) no longer apply. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the concept
of the trivial, the de minimis where the absolute categories do not yet apply. And the trivial also does not prove that right and wrong are really only a
matter of degree. It is because of these complexities and because the term absolute is really only suggestive of a more complex structure, that I also refer
to the norms of right and wrong not as absolute but as categorical
util good – key to change
Utilitarianism is key to change the problems of society
Dale Jamieson, New York University, 5/14/07. Cambridge Journals: “When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists,
“http://www.journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=1015132&jid=&volumeId=&issueId=02&aid=1015128&fulltextType=RA&fileId
=S0953820807002452
Part of the answer is that we are simply able to recognize some extreme cases as such: we just do it. When the house is on fire,
a child is screaming, atrocities are being committed and civilizations threatened, moral mathematics are not needed in order to see that the patterns of
behavior that are generally best may not be up to it in the present case. Of
course there may also be cases in which calculation
would be needed in order to see that it would be best to break patterns of behavior given to us by the green virtues.
But on these occasions the virtuous green will just have to forgo the best, trusting in the overall utility-maximizing power of the green virtues. 19. There is
a further challenge to which I have already briefly alluded (in section 11).
If others are having a good time changing climate,
destroying ozone and driving species to extinction, and the green cause is hopeless, then it appears that I am
morally obliged to join in the fun. A utilitarian should not, at great cost to herself, plow through the snow on her bike while everyone else is
blowing past her in their gas-guzzling ‘suburban utility vehicles’ (SUVs). If the world is to be lost anyway, then the morally responsible utilitarian will try
If the best outcome (preventing global environmental change) is beyond my control
and the worst outcome would be for me to live a life of misery and self-denial in a futile attempt to bring about
the inaccessible best outcome, then the best outcome that I can produce may involve my living a highconsumption lifestyle. But everyone can reason in this way and so we may arrive at the conclusion, not just that it is permissible to live
like a normal American, but that utilitarians are morally obliged to do so. This seems truly shocking. There are
to have a good time going down with the planet.
really two arguments here. The first argument concerns the decision process of a single agent; the second claims that the first argument generalizes to all
similarly situated agents. Consider the second argument first. This
argument trades on equivocating as to whether or not the
best outcome is in fact accessible to an agent. Imagine a world of only two agents, Kelly and Sean. From Kelly's point of view, if it is clear
that Sean will fail to behave in an environmentally friendly way, then it may be best for Kelly to fail to do so as well. But if Sean is in the same position
with respect to her decision as Kelly, then it cannot be taken as given that Sean will not engage in the environmentally friendly behavior, for that is just
what she is reasoning about. If
there is any point to her reasoning about this, then the environmentally friendly behavior
must be accessible to her, contrary to what we assumed when we considered Kelly's decision process. The apparent
generalization of the first argument introduces an equivocation that is not implicit in the first argument
itself.47The first argument should not be confused with what might be called the Nero objection. This objection states that, just as Nero fiddled while
Rome burned, so a utilitarian agent should fiddle (or its functional equivalent) while global environmental change ravages the planet. Since Nero's
fiddling was morally horrendous, the functionally equivalent utilitarian fiddling must be morally horrendous as well. However, Nero's fiddling and that
of the utilitarian are not equivalent in relevant respects. What
is horrendous about the image of Nero fiddling while Rome
burns is that he probably set the fires, or could have had than it could be. As we have seen, utilitarianism can
have no such implication.
The moral obligation to take the utilitarian approach it allows us to solve the problems of the
squo through public deliberation
Dale Jamieson, New York University, 5/14/07. Cambridge Journals: “When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists,
“http://www.journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=1015132&jid=&volumeId=&issueId=02&aid=1015128&fulltextType=RA&fileId
=S0953820807002452
If the best outcome is truly inaccessible to me, then it is not obviously implausible to suppose that I have a duty
to make the best of a bad situation.50 When I was a kid, growing up in a neighborhood that would certainly have been a ‘first-strike’ target
had there been a nuclear war between the Americans and the Russians, we often seriously discussed the following question. Suppose that you know that
they have launched their missiles and that We have retaliated (or vice versa), and that in twenty minutes the planet will be incinerated. What should you
do?51 The idea that we should enjoy the life that remains to us may not be the only plausible response to this question, but it is surely not an implausible
What many people find grating about this answer, I think, is the idea that we have a duty to enjoy life in
such a situation. Some might agree that it would be prudentially good to do so, but find it outrageous that
morality would be so intrusive, right up to the end of the world. When it comes to the case in which the green cause is hopeless, it
might be thought that matters are even worse. It is one thing to say that it is permissible or excusable to abandon our green
commitments in such circumstances; it is another thing entirely to say that we have an affirmative duty to join
the ranks of the enemy, and to enjoy the very activities that destroy the features of nature that we cherish. 52 This
objection has proceeded under the assumption that we might find ourselves in circumstances in which we know that living
according to our green values would be entirely ineffectual, and that we would enjoy helping ourselves to the
pleasures of consumerism. On these implausible assumptions, the objector is correct in claiming that utilitarianism would require us to join
one.
the side of the environmental despoilers. However, there is nothing really new in principle about this kind of case. It is another example of either the
demandingness of utilitarianism, or of how utilitarianism holds our ‘ground projects’ (and therefore our integrity) hostage to circumstances beyond our
control.53 It
is not my task here to defend utilitarianism as anything more than a plausible research program.
However, it is surely old news that utilitarianism can require us to break familiar patterns of behavior that are dear to
our hearts when doing so would realize what is best. Of course this would be difficult to do, and most of us, most of the time, would
not succeed in doing what is right. (No one said that it was easy to be a utilitarian.) But our failures to do what is right would not count
against doing what is best as a moral ideal, anymore than the human proclivity for violence should lead us to
give up on peace as a cherished moral value. Or so it seems at first glance. However, the most important point is this. My present
concern is not with alternative realities or possible worlds; it is facts about this world that are relevant for
present purposes. I am concerned with how a utilitarian agent should respond to the problem of global
environmental change that we actually face here and now. Global environmental change is not like the case of an impending
interplanetary collision that is entirely beyond our control. Nor is it an ‘all or nothing’ phenomenon. Collectively, we can prevent or
mitigate various aspects of global environmental change, and an individual agent can affect collective behavior in several ways. One's behavior in
producing and consuming is important for its immediate environmental impacts, and also for the example-setting and role-modeling dimensions of the
behavior.54 It
is a fact of life that one may never know how one's long-term projects will fare, or even how
successful one has been in motivating and enlisting other people to pursue them, but this is as much grounds
for optimism as pessimism. Nor does an environmentally friendly lifestyle have to be a miserable one.55 Even if in the end one's values do not
prevail, there is comfort and satisfaction in living in accordance with one's ideals.56 All of this taken together suggests that real
utilitarian agents here and now should try to prevent or mitigate global environmental change rather than
celebrate its arrival. However, presently there is no algorithm for designing the optimal utilitarian agent.57 Nor is there an algorithm for
constructing the perfect constitution, which constrains majority rule when it should, but does not prevent its expression when it should not.58
Nevertheless, we have better and worse people and constitutions, and sometimes we know them when we see
them. It might be nice to have a calculus that we could apply to constitutions and character, but absent this, we
can still go forward living our lives and organizing our societies. These responses may not satisfy those who are
concerned with the logic of collective action or who believe that every question must admit of a precise answer.
But they should go some way towards satisfying those who like me are concerned with the moral psychology of collective action, and are willing to
accept Aristotle's view that deliberation can never be completely divorced from practical wisdom.
Util is the only real framework for policymaking. Even deontology requires making certain
decisions that WILL hurt someone – the best framework is to achieve the most moral result for
the most people – sacrificing along the way is inevitable and can still be a moral action
Cummiskey, 96 (David, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bates College and a PhD from UM, 1996,
Kantian Conseuquentialism, Pg. 158-159.)
Indeed, despite Kant’s deontological intuitions about particular moral cases, his basic normative principle is best interpreted as having a fundamentally
consequentialist structure. In order to justify agent-centered constraints, one needs a non-value-based rationale. Many
Kantians attempt to provide such a rationale by appealing to the Kantian principle of treating persons as ends. The Kantians’ strategy is clear: Treating
persons as ends involves respecting persons, and respecting persons involves recognizing agent-centered constraints on action. We have seen, however,
that this strategy is problematic. The
Kantian principle itself generates a duty to advance a moral goal: The duty to strive
as much as one can to promote the flourishing of rational beings, and to make others’ ends one’s own, is the
very essence of treating humanity as an end. Morality thus constrains and shapes the pursuit of individual wellbeing or happiness. We have seen, however, that Kant’s moral theory does not provide a rationale for basic agentcentered constraints that limit what we can do in the pursuit of this complex moral goal. The imperative to
respect persons thus does indeed generate a consequentialist normative theory, rather than the desired
deontological alternative. It certainly seems that a Kantian ought to be a normative consequentialist. Conscientious Kantian agents
have a basic duty to strive, as much as possible, to promote the freedom and happiness of all rational beings. In the
pursuit of this moral goal, it may be necessary for the interests of some to give way for the sake of others. If we
are sacrificed, we are not treated simply as a means to another’s goal; on the contrary, our sacrifice is required
by a principle we endorse. Our non-moral interests and inclinations may cause us to feel reluctant, but since our sacrifice furthers a
moral goal that we endorse and that we are required to pursue, our sacrifice does not violate our moral
autonomy or our rights.
util good – prevents atrocities
We must choose the lesser evil. Utilitarianism limits further atrocities against civilization.
Issac 02 – Professor of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale
(Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean taking seriously the
specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. There
is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate
the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the
starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this
assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico,
Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of
suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian
airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent
civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does
not make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive,
in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an
extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is
inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion. Because it threatens
everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought. And it must be
fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped.
Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is
often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends. A just or even a
better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to
barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work.
In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that
confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the
means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to oppose it. In such situations there is a
danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is the
danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed
with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative
means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open
debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.
Moral policy only blocks decision making necessary to limit injustice and atrocities.
Issac, 02 – Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale
(Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It
is assumed that U.S. military intervention is an act of
"aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The status quo
ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist violence abetted by a
regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that most
"peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a
Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and
international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order.
But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how diplomacy or
international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand. The campus left offers no such account. To do so
would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not
purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is
the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power.
To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it
about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It
is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught,
an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable,
reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring
violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised
parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as
serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real
violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in
injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially
immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices
with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about
intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment
with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is
not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it
is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these
goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits
this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political
effectiveness.
util good – morality
Utilitarianism is the only moral framework and alternatives are contradictory
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs;
“Nuclear Ethics” pg. 18-19)
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case.34 Imagine that you are visiting a
Central American country and you happen upon a village square where an
army captain is about to order his men to shoot two
peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village shot at the captain's men last night. When
you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all have dirty
hands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle and
tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other.
Otherwise both die. He warns you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will you shoot one person with the
consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play
his dirty game? The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both traditions. Integrity is clearly an
important value, and many of us would refuse to shoot. But at what point does the principle of not taking an
innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it matter if there were twenty or 1,000 peasants to be saved?
What if killing or torturing one innocent person could save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists'
nuclear device? At some point does not integrity become the ultimate egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more
important than the lives of countless others? Is it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit remorse or regret
over the immoral means, but justify the action by the consequences? Do absolutist approaches to integrity become selfcontradictory in a world of nuclear weapons? "Do what is right though the world should perish" was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in
the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that he did not mean it to be taken literally even then. Now
that it may be literally
possible in the nuclear age, it seems more than ever to be self-contradictory.35 Absolutist ethics bear a heavier
burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.
The type of morality the aff tries to engage in is utopian because these theories were
developed before extinction became possible – now the true moral self must be committed to
bringing about the best possible world and that necessitates util
Jamieson 07 [Dale Jamieson, New York University, 5/14/07. Cambridge Journals: “When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists,
“http://www.journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=1015132&jid=&volumeId=&issueId=02&aid=1015128&fulltextType=RA&fileId
=S0953820807002452]
For present purposes I assume that our problem is a moral problem. I investigate utilitarian approaches to our problem because utilitarianism,
with its unapologetic focus on what we bring about, is relatively well positioned to have something interesting to say about our problem. Moreover,
since utilitarianism
is committed to the idea that morality requires us to bring about the best possible world,
and global environmental change confronts us with extreme, deleterious consequences, there is no escaping the fact
that, for utilitarians, global environmental change presents us with a moral problem of great scope, urgency and
complexity. However, I would hope that some of those who are not card-carrying utilitarians would also have interest in this project.
Consequences matter, according to any plausible moral theory. Utilitarianism takes the concern for consequences to the
limit, and it is generally of interest to see where pure versions of various doctrines wind up leading us.
Moreover, I believe that the great traditions in moral philosophy should be viewed as more like research
programs than as finished theories that underwrite or imply particular catechisms. For this reason it is
interesting to see how successfully a moral tradition can cope with problems that were not envisioned by
its progenitors.
util good – value to life
Util is key to value of life – it maximizes happiness for the most people – making it the best
framework for the policymaker and those whom are affected
[Smith 1997. Book Review: Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth and The Abolition,
www.tc.umn.edu/~smith097/articles/L%2011.The%20Fate%20of%20the%20Earth%20.pdf]
Utilitarianism begins by generalizing the hedonistic pleasure principle in terms of
happiness. Then what is moral or good is that which brings an agent happiness. This thesis is further generalized to say that
happiness should be secured for as many agents in the community as possible. Every action, therefore, should be
motivated in terms of trying to maximize as much happiness for as many agents as possible within the given
community. The use of happiness in this thesis is in relation to the overall consequences of all the agents in the given community.
The basic argument is that individual good is maximizing individual happiness. Morality though, involves the common
good of all the agents in the community. The common good, therefore, is maximizing every ones happiness. I think the
most promising variation of utilitarianism is rule utilitarianism where emphasis is placed on the consequences of every agent in the community adopting
a particular action as a rule. Implicit within rule utilitarianism is a strong consistency thesis which places necessary constraints on the basic utilitarian
argument.
util good – deont requires sacrifices too
Conflicting moral claims are inevitable – this necessitates utilitarianism.
Mulholland, prof. of philosophy at the University of Newfoundland, 1986 (Leslie, Journal of Philosophy, June, p. 328)
For many, the persuasiveness of utilitarianism as a moral theory lies in its power to provide a way out of
difficulties arising from the conflict of moral principles. The contention that utilitarianism permits people to
override rights in case of conflict of principles or in those cases where some recognized utility requires that a
right be disregarded, is then not an internal objection to utilitarianism. Nor does it even indicate a plausible alternative to the
convinced utilitarian. For him, utilitarianism has its force partly in the coherence and simplicity of the principle in
explaining the morality of such cases.
util good – solves conflicting values
Only consequentialism can resolve conflicting moral values
Bailey, 97 (James Wood 1997; “Oxford University Press; “Utilitarianism, institutions, and Justice” pg 9)
A consequentialist moral theory can take account of this variance and direct us in our decision about whether a
plausible right to equality ought to outweigh a plausible right to freedom of expression. 16 In some circumstances the
effects of pornography would surely be malign enough to justify our banning it, but in others they may be not malign enough to justify any interference in
A deontological theory, in contrast, would be required either to rank the side constraints, which forbid
agents from interfering in the free expression of others and from impairing the moral equality of others, or to
admit defeat and claim that no adjudication between the two rights is possible. The latter admission is a grave
failure since it would leave us no principled resolution of a serious policy question. But the former conclusion is hardly
freedom. I?
attractive either. Would we really wish to establish as true for all times and circumstances a lexical ordering between two side constraints on our actions
without careful attention to consequences? Would we, for instance, really wish to establish that the slightest malign inegalitarian effect traceable to a
form of expression is adequate grounds for an intrusive and costly censorship? Or would we, alternatively, really wish to establish that we should be
prepared to tolerate a society horrible for women and children to live in, for the sake of not allowing any infringement on the sacred right of free
expression?18 Consequentialist
accounts can avoid such a deontological dilemma. In so doing, they show a certain
healthy sense of realism about what life in society is like. In the world outside the theorist's study, we meet
trade-offs at every tum. Every policy we make with some worthy end in Sight imposes costs in terms of
diminished achievement of some other plausibly worthy end. Consequentialism demands that we grapple with
these costs as directly as we can and justify their incurrence. It forbids us to dismiss them with moral
sophistries or to ignore them as if we lived in an ideal world.
Morals and questions of human dignity will constantly conflict making deontological policy
making impossible
Kateb 92 – William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, Princeton University (George, Cornell University Press; “The Inner Ocean:
Individualism and Democratic Culture” pg 14-15)
Let us say that a society of rights-based individualism encourages these and other crepuscular activities to become topics for open and popular
discussion; that that
fact can be taken as a paradoxical sign of the moral grandness of such a society, for practically
every desire can be honestly admitted and talked about despite shame or without shame; that a society devoted
to rights has no absolutely compelling arguments, in every case, to prohibit them and that, nevertheless, civilization (democratic or
not) so we are trained to understand it commits us to continue to condemn and prohibit them. The issue must be raised in dismay, and I am not able to
deal with it adequately. Can rights conflict? It
is not agreeable to admit that a particular right of one person may apparently
conflict with a different right of someone else. Familiar antagonisms include that between the rights to a fair trial
unprejudiced by excessive publicity and the right of press to report a story and its background fully, or that
between the right to privacy again, the right of the press to do what it thinks is its work. Though I believe, as I
have said, that some rights (including freedom of the press) are more fundamental than others, in some conflicts no
clear priority is likely to be established and only ad hoc adjustments are desirable. To be sure, although these
conflicts may be less frequent or stark than is claimed by those who are impatient with the rights in question,
conflicts nevertheless take place. This is a fact of life which no appeal to an elaborated theory of rights can eliminate. If it is a shortcoming in
the theory of rights, it is also a shortcoming that no supplementary principle such as utilitarianism can make good.
util good – best for policy making
The impossibility to attain knowledge of every outcome or abuse leaves utilitarianism as the
only option for most rational decision-making
Goodin 95 – Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the Australian National University (Robert E., Cambridge
University Press, “Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy” pg 63)
My larger argument turns on the proposition that there
is something special about the situation of public officials that makes
utilitarianism more plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes them adopt a form of utilitarianism that we would find more acceptable)
than private individuals. Before proceeding with that larger argument, I must therefore say what it is that is so special about public officials and their
situations that makes it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of
utilitarianism. Consider, first the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under
uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices-public and private alike- are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course.
But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of
their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public
officials, in contrast, at relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals,
one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will
happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices. But that is all. That is enough to
allow public policy makers to use the utilitarian calculus – if they want to use it at all – to choose general rules of conduct. Knowing
aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each alternative possible general rule. But they cannot be
sure what the payoff will be to any given individual or on any particular occasion. Their knowledge of
generalities, aggregates and averages is just not sufficiently fine-grained for that.
Not knowing conditions for each individual or ramifications forces us to adopt utilitarianism.
Policy makers must use in their decision making
Goodin 95 – Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social Sciences at the Australian National University (Robert E., Cambridge
University Press, “Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy” pg 63)
Furthermore, the argument from necessity would continue, the
instruments available to public policy-makers are relatively
blunt. They can influence general tendencies, making rather more people behave in certain sorts of ways rather more often. But perfect compliance is
unrealistic. And (building on the previous point) not knowing particular circumstances of particular individuals, rules and
regulations must necessarily be relatively general in form. They must treat more people more nearly alike than
ideally they should, had we perfect information. The combined effect of these two factors is to preclude public
policy-makers from fine-tuning policies very well at all. They must, of necessity, deal with people in aggregate,
imposing upon them rules that are general in form. Nothing in any of this necessarily forces them to be
utilitarian in their public policy-making, of course. What it does do, however, is force them- if they are inclined
to be utilitarian at all-away from direct (act) utilitarianism. The circumstances surrounding the selection and
implementation of public policies simply do not permit the more precise calculations required by any decision
rule more tailored to peculiarities of individuals or situations.
util good – at: racist
It is racist not to consider consequences – the only moral stance is to consider link turns and
long-term effects.
Marc Trachtenberg is professor in the department of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He also teaches political science courses. Source:
Ethics, Vol. 95, No. 3, Special Issue: Symposium on Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (Apr., 1985), pp. 728-739 Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381047
No one today would defend slavery, of course; but the more I thought about it, the clearer it seemed that before
the Civil War one should have indeed tried to balance all the relevant considerations: that the institution of
slavery was not so absolute an evil that it was morally imperative to do whatever was necessary to eradicate it
immediately, without regard to any other consideration. In fact, if it was obvious that it would take a war-as it turned
out, a long and gruesome war-to abolish slavery, the suffering and anguish that that war would produce should
certainly have been taken into account. And one should have given some thought to what would happen to the
ex-slaves, even in the event that the North were to win: if one could predict that there was a good chance that
slavery would be replaced by another brutal and repressive system-by in fact the kind of system that took root
in the South after Reconstruction- then this too should have been entered into the balance. And it also would have
made sense to look at just how brutal the slave system was: there are different degrees of loathsomeness, and this could have made a difference in one's
assessments. (Questions of degree are of course crucial if we are interested in striking a balance.) Finally, arguments about peaceful alternatives -the
bidding up of the price of slaves by the federal government, for instance, to make the institution economically irrational in comparison with free laborwould certainly have had a place; historical experience-an analysis of the peaceful way slavery had in fact been ended in the British Empire is the most
obvious case-might also have played a central role. Why shouldn't these things all be taken into account? Are we so convinced of the
rightness of our personal moral values that we can turn a blind eye to the kinds of considerations that might moderate the force of our commitment?
One wonders even whether it can ever be truly moral to simply refuse to weigh these sorts of factors seriously.
One can take the argument a step further by means of a hypothetical example. Suppose, in this case, that the Southerners had told the
abo- litionists that, if the North did come down to free the slaves, before they arrived the slaves would all be
killed. Certainly at this point considerations other than the moral impermissibility of slavery would have to be taken into account. In such a case,
an absolutist position-that the institution of slavery was so great an evil that it had to be rooted out without
regard to consequence-reveals itself as inhuman and, indeed, as morally pre- posterous. There has to be some
point where issues of balance become morally salient; and thus in general these basic moral issues have to be
approached in nonabsolutist-and by that I mean more than just non- deontological-terms.
util good – at: intervening actors
Their ethics can rationalize every evil—all actions can be described as having "good intent".
Porter '96 (Jean, U of Notre Dame, "'Direct' and 'indirect' in Grisez's moral theory," Theological Studies, Dec., 57(4), ProQuest)
Nonetheless, Grisez's reformulation is more than a clarification. The relationship between the agent's intention and the causal structure of the act did
play a crucial role in traditional moral theology, because it provided an objective basis for assessing the intention of the agent. Without some such basis,
the agent's intention could be described in terms of whatever could be said to be the agent's purpose or motive in acting. In that case, it would be difficult
to see how the doctrine
of double effect would rule anything out, since any act can be said to be
directed to some good or other, in terms of which the agent's intention could be described. As Elizabeth Anscombe remarks: For after
all we can form intentions; now if intention is an interior movement, it would appear that we can choose to have a certain intention and not another, just
by e.g. saying within ourselves: "What
I mean to be doing is earning my living, and not poisoning the
household"; or "What I mean to be doing is helping those good men into power; I withdraw my intention from the act of poisoning the household,
which I prefer to think goes on without my intention being in it." The idea that one can determine one's intentions by making such a
little speech to oneself is bosh.(45) The question that arises is: Does Grisez's interpretation of the direct/indirect distinction similarly
provide an objective criterion for determining what the agent's intention is? Or does it leave open the possibility of describing the agent's intention in
terms of whatever good purposes motivate the act in question? If the latter is the case, then Grisez cannot really distinguish between those acts which
attack an instance of a basic good, and other, similar acts which merely allow damage to some instance of a basic good, simply on the basis of an analysis
of the structure of the act. In that case, we must suspect that his distinction between direct and indirect harms actually reflects prior moral evaluations,
which rest on other considerations. In order to address these questions, it will be helpful to take each of the two considerations which Grisez puts
forward in turn. Hence, we will first examine the criterion of goodness of intention, and then the criterion of indivisibility of performance. GOODNESS
OF INTENTION AND THE DESCRIPTION OF AN ACT What does it mean to say that an act may be morally justified, if the agent's intention is morally
good, and the bad effect is not necessarily included in the attainment of the intended good? As we have already indicated, Grisez does not hold that the
necessity in question is causal. Rather, in these cases, the bad effect is not necessary to the attainment of the good end because it is not necessarily
included in the very idea of the good end. In such cases, the good and bad effects may be said to flow indivisibly from the agent's action, and the moral
character of the action is determined by the good outcome at which he aims rather than by the bad outcome which he permits. And so, for example, a
woman who shoots her would-be rapist in self-defense does not intend his death; she intends to stop his attack, and only accepts his death as a side effect
(in the moral, not the causal sense) of her act. (This assumes, of course, that it is really necessary to kill the assailant, and also that the woman's purpose
is good, in the sense that she is not using the necessity for self-defense as a pretext to kill out of hatred or a desire for revenge.) On the other hand, if the
proposal which the agent chooses, and which therefore determines his will, necessarily includes bringing about a death, then the act is ipso facto ruled
out: On this analysis, choosing to kill is adopting a proposal precisely to kill or to do something understood in such a way that its meaning includes
bringing about death. For example, people who choose to shoot someone in the heart or to administer a lethal dose of opiates ordinarily understand what
they choose as ways of ending life, and when a proposal is so understood, its very meaning includes bringing about death.(46) What is the distinction
between a proposal for action which necessarily includes the intention to kill, and a proposal which does not? Grisez rules out the traditional answer, that
the distinction lies in the causal relation between the victim's death and the good sought by the agent, and he does not offer any alternative criterion in
the physical order, Thus, when Grisez says that an action with both good and bad effects is not defined by the bad effect unless it is necessarily included
in the agent's intention, the kind of necessity in question would appear to be logical necessity. In support of this interpretation, consider the following: If
an action's description, however limited, makes plain that such an action involves a choice to destroy, damage, or impede some instance of a basic human
good, the wrongness of any action which meets the description is settled. Additional factors may affect the degree of wrongness, but further descriptions
of the act cannot reverse its basic moral quality. So, moral norms derived from this mode of responsibility can be called "moral absolutes."(47) If this
interpretation is correct, then Grisez would be relying on a familiar feature of the logic of action descriptions, namely, the fact that any action may be
described correctly in an indefinitely large number of ways. Thus, the action of the woman who stops her assailant by cutting his throat can be described
as stopping an attack, or as stopping an attack by killing one's attacker, or as killing an attacker, or as killing a person, or as cutting a person's throat, or
as making slashing motions with a knife. Clearly, each of these descriptions conveys something different about the action; but it is equally clear that none
of them is incorrect as a description of the act and, correlatively, none is logically necessitated by the facts of the case. Thus nothing prevents Grisez from
fixing on the first of these descriptions as the agent's "proposal," that is to say, the description under which her will is determined. Nothing prevents this,
but nothing requires it either. Herein lies the difficulty in Grisez's analysis. Supposedly, the fact that an act's description clearly indicates that it involves
a choice to "destroy, damage, or impede" some instance of a basic good serves to distinguish it from an act which indirectly brings about the same effect.
But as we noted above, an act which involves indirect killing in Grisez's terms can also be described in terms of the killing which it brings about. To
continue with his own example, the action of a woman who stops her attacker by cutting his throat can be described as an act of self-defense by killing, or
even just as an act of killing. By the same token, an act which is a direct act of killing in Grisez's terms could be redescribed in terms of the good sought,
in such a way as to omit any mention of the killing itself. How, then, can Grisez distinguish between forbidden acts of killing and permissible acts which
have deadly side effects on the basis of the description of the act alone? Perhaps the key to Grisez's response can be found in a remark immediately
preceding the passage quoted above: "Descriptions of actions adequate for moral evaluation must say or imply how the agent's will bears on relevant
goods."(48) Following this line of analysis, Grisez could admit that there are indefinitely many correct descriptions for every act, and yet still hold that
only one of these is morally relevant, namely, that which describes the act in terms of what the agent does in fact intend. Yet this argument does not
resolve the difficulty. If one accepts the Thomistic principle that every action is directed knowingly towards the attainment of some good (as Grisez does),
then it follows that every
action can be described in terms of some good which the agent is voluntarily
seeking. Why should the agent not describe his intention in terms of that good, relegating the
harms which he [or she] brings about to foreseen but not chosen aspects of the act? This brings us to
the position which Anscombe described as "bosh," namely, that the agent can determine his intention simply by focusing on the good at which he aims.
***Edited for gendered language
util good – at: principles first
Principles must be verified by policy analysis—looking at the principle in a vacuum has no value
Minteer 2004 (Ben, et al, Human Dimensions of Biology Faculty, ASU School of Life Sciences,
JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS, v!7, p. 139-140)
In sum, Dewey argued that moral principles should operate very differently than the way most contemporary environmental ethicists employ them in
discussions regarding environmental policy making and problem solving Ethical
theories are, in this opinion, critical instrumentalities - tools
— for analyzing and interpreting particular social problems and conflicts, not fixed ends to which we owe any son of
special treatment or obedience. As a result, the "rightness" of moral claims depends on their ability to contribute to
the resolution of specific problematic situations - an ability determined through intelligent appraisal and inquiry —
not On the intrinsic nature Of the principle itself (Dewey. 1989, p. 280). In making this move, Dewey significantly shifted discussions
of moral theory and argument away from a preoccupation with the ontological status and justification of general moral principles and moved it toward
the refinement of the process of intelligent inquiry and the development of better and more effective methods of deliberation, cooperative problem
solving, and conflict resolution. It is important to note that in arguing for the instrumental and experimental role of moral principles in problematic
situations, Dewey
did not deny the existence of Such principles, nor did he reject their role within moral deliberation and
decision-making. He only Sought to put them in their proper place. Historically successful moral principles promoting the good and
the right were not to be uncritically accepted before experimental inquiry, just as I hey were not to be cast aside simply because they trafficked in
generalities or presumed to hold a universal currency. Instead, they should be understood as potentially useful resources for comprehending and
ultimately transforming particular unstable and disrupted moral contexts: In moral matters there is ... a presumption in favor of principles that have had
a long career in the past and that have been endorsed by men of insight.... Such principles are no more to be lightly discarded than are scientific
principles worked out in the past. But in one as in the other, newly discovered facts or newly instituted conditions may give rise to doubts and indicate
the inapplicability of accepted doctrines (Dewey, 1989, p. 330). Still, in Dewey's way of thinking, the conceptual and practical demands placed on
previously held moral principles by the
emergence of new experiences and evolving factual circumstances required an
adaptive moral system, one in which standards, rules, and principles would necessarily undergo various
degrees of revision and reinterpretation in order to meet new socio-historical conditions and changing individual
desires Often, this process led to the formulation of entirely new principles as moral inquirers responded to the dynamic and evolving quality of human
experience: In fact, situations into which change and the unexpected enter are a challenge to intelligence to create new principles. Morals must be a
growing science if it is to be a science at all, not merely because all truth has not yet been appropriated by the mind of man, but because life
IS a
moving affair in which Old moral truth Ceases to apply Principles are methods of inquiry and forecast which require
Verification by the event: and the time honored effort to assimilate morals to mathematics is only a way of bolstering up an old dogmatic
authority, or putting a new one upon the throne of the old. But the experimental character of moral judgments does not mean complete uncertainty and
fluidity. Principles exist as hypotheses with which to experiment (Dewey, 1959, p. 221).
util good – at: moral
Transcendental obligations cannot guide actions - a) There is dispute over the principles b) No
method for applying universal principles to particular cases
Caputo '93 (Against Ethics. John D„ Viljanova University, p. )
For how are we ever to get as far as a principle? How an» we to get a consensus on the principle? That is the first
problem. If Judgment is unable to start out from the Principle, unable to proceed from on high, then how are
we to judge, how are we to ride out and absorb the shocks and jolts of tactical life? Suppose we never have the advantage of knowing what universal
schema to bring to bear upon the singularity of the event? Suppose we are always already caught up in the thicket of factkal life, in the density of events,
without a sure guide or firm guardrails, and we are forced to proceed from below? What men? But
even granted that. we are able to
attain some stable principle, how are we to "apply" the universal to the particular, to close fee distance between the
universal and the particular? This would come down either to finding the application for the principle or finding the principle for the case. But that
always involves a leap and always costs mote than metaphysics is prepared to pay. At
some point foe transition from the generality of
principles to the singularity of event); must be made, but that can occur only as a leap Into an abyss , a plunge into
the density and impenetrability of the event, the novelty and the surprise of singularity. Such a leap 1$ never quite safe. The doctrine of judgment reveals
a breach in the surface of metaphysics, a fissure in which deconstructive analysis makes its nest. That is the second problem. Metaphysical
ethics
founders on judgments as it founders on proper names and obligations. It harbors a doctrine of judgment that it
cannot contain. Judgments are on more bit metaphysics has swallowed but cannot " digest; more metaphysical indigestion.
Events are what happens, what "is." Heidegger said that the event is the "and" in "Being 'and' Time" or "Time 'and' Being." I have no idea. I will take
Heidegger's word for it. He spent his whole life thinking about that But the word I will not take is Ereignls, if Erdgnis, as Derrida showed, is drawn into
the metaphysics of propriety and allowed to grow into a great Greco-Germanic metanarrative. I am trying not to be lured into "appropriation." Heidegger
did better, in my view, when he spoke of the anonymous, impersonal, improper "it gives" (Esgibt), although "it happens" (es geschiekt) would have been
still better, and when he did not burden "It" with the myth of Being's primordial beginning and next coming. He did better just to say "it gives" but he did
the very best of all, on my accounting, when he said "it plays" and that it just plays, playing "without why." Heidegger is at his best when he says it just
plays, just gives—without purporting to be Being's ticketmaster, to know Being's schedule of arrivals and departures. That
makes judging a
matter not of applying principles but of staying In play with the play, knowing now to cope with the play in what happens. It is
always necessary for me to act, to do something, to decide what .Is happening in me midst of considerable
undecidability. What's happening? I am not sure, but I must decide. Even if the way to judgment is blocked, I must still judge. The question is how?
How am I to judge?
Moral obligations cannot guide actions - their claim ignores the genealogy of those principles
Caputo '93 (Against Ethics. John D„ Viljanova University, p. )
Principles, universals, laws are attempts on the part of thought to penetrate the density of events, to find the
secret formula of events, to provide guardrails that safeguard the subject through the most treacherous twists
and turns that events take. Events can be dangerous and principles try to make safe, to Keep us safe in the midst of dangerous events.
Principles are to supply the rule that governs the unfolding or happening of events, or to provide a guide through the maze of events. Principles axe so
many attempts to regulate or to find what regulates the a gibt, the sheer giving and coming to pass of events, the il y a or il arrive. Principles by to give us
a standpoint above what happens and thus to get beyond events. The difficulty with principles is that principles are
themselves caught up in
what happens. The reason for that is that the authors of principles are no less subject to what happens than is
anyone else, although they sometimes try to conceal this fart and to erase the genealogy of the principles they
champion. Otherwise you would have to say the principles fell straight from the sky and into our laps . That has
been said, and metaphysics often says something rather like that,3 but the onus probandi falls on those who lay claim to such heavenly gifts, not on us
who claim only to have suffered a disaster, to lead a damaged life, to be bereft of a heavenly guide, to begin where we are. From the standpoint of this
minimalist metaphysics of events, a disaster simply means that we are caught up in the maze of events and are unable to catch sight of a guiding star.
Events yield to other events, but they do not yield to principles. Events
follow other events, but they do not follow rules. The
transition from one event to the next is neither necessary nor capricious, neither rule-bound nor disconnected. The transition is always something of a
leap, a little chancy, perhaps, difficult but not impossible. The individual is always more or less on its own with this leap, always faced with more or less
unique and idiosyncratic circumstances in which to make its way. The subject is forced to wade into the complexity of events, to make a first cut into a
relatively dense thicket, a thicket that is (almost) impossible to clear. Clearings hardly happen. Philosophy,
which is metaphysics, has
conceived the question of the action that the individual takes in the midst of the singularity of an event as the
problem of "judgment." Judgment is a function of the "faculty" of "ap-plying "principles." On the traditional model,
the problem is to judge what happens with the aid of principles. If that is what judgment is, I must take a stand "against judgment." But judgment Is
in a much more difficult situation than that, much more radically menaced and on its own than traditional philosophy is prepared to
admit. Metaphysical ethics wants to make judgment safe, but judgment is not safe, and this for two good reasons.
***deontology bad***
deontology bad – frontline
Even deontological theories have to evaluate consequences to determine morality – utility is
best.
Hoekma -86 (Rights & Wrongs, St. Olaf, p 79)
than any alternative based on goals/But a great deal depends on the particular character of the theories in question, and
doubtless there are consequentialist- ethical theories which are preferable, perhaps on the very grounds I have mentioned, to
certain kinds of rights-based or deontological theories. Moreover, the difference between the two kinds of theories
should not be exaggerated. Their disagreement concerning the basic ground and source of moral judgments is
fundamental: and vet an emphasis on rights as the basis or morality does not entail that consequential matters
are morally irrelevant, or "vice versa. In particular, even a basically deontological theory must allow that the end
brought about by an action frequently has an important place in moral judgment.
Bad consequences can check out imperatives to help others – these imperative ignore the
option of partially fulfilling our duty.
Slote '85 (Common-Sense Morality and Consequcntialism. Michael. Prof, of Philosophy, p. 82)
The fact of widespread human suffering makes a moral claim us not only from the utilitarian or consequential point of view, but
on common-sense moral grounds as well. Even apart from any responsibility we may have for having made less fortunate
other people less well off than they could have been.4 the common-sense morality of benevolent action seems
to regard it as in general wrong never to do anything for those less fortunate people whom one is in a position
to help and as morally better to do more for such people rather than less, to sacrifice more of one's own wellbeing rather than less in order to give aid to the less fortunate. But this, of course, doesn't tell us how much one
must give in order to give what one morally ought to give, to fulfil one's (imperfect) duty of benevolence. It assumes that it is wrong
never to give aid to those worse off than oneself (when one can easily do so, etc.).5 And it. also assumes that it is morally acceptable and
morality hest (when this involves no violation of side-constraints, etc.) to give all one has to the less fortunate, or, at least, to reduce
oneself to the (presumably rising) level of well-being of those one should be trying to help. But these assumptions say nothing about the
wide spectrum of cases between giving nothing and giving, as it were, one’s all: and controversy, disagreement.
and indecision over where, in that spectrum, the (rough) dividing line between duties and supererogations of
benevolence should be drawn have featured time and time again in ethical discussions.
Total absolutism doesn't exist - morality can always be overridden in certain circumstances
Rescher 89 (Philosphy Prof. @ Pittsburgh) Nicholas, Moral Absolutes, p. 7-8
One cannot say simply and flatly that a certain wrong action (lying, stealing, etc.) is never to be done. For in difficult
situations virtually any sort of action can be the lesser of two "(moral) evils. When done solely on this basis (as "the
lesser evil”), an otherwise reprehensible act can be redeemed as verual. We cannot say that the good, man would, never Knowingly
do a wrong action, but only that he would not do so unwarranted!^ in the absence of appropriately extenuating circumstances, without overriding
reasons of appropriate moral bearing. Moreover, in
the overall economy of rational deliberation morality is just one good
among others (albeit a particularly important one)./Thus we cannot say that morality must always override all other considerations—that the
negativity of a minor moral transgression must (rationally) always outweigh, nonmoral positivities such as (say) the greater welfare
good of the community. The principle fiat moralitas mat caelum—"Let morality be done though the heavens fall!"—clearly has its problems.
Consequences must be evaluated because of difference between intentions and outcomes
Murray, '97 [Alastair, Lecturer @ University of Wales Swansea, Department of Political Science, PhD in International Relations from University of
Bristol, Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. ]
The establishment of the relationship of the two contending modes of human operation as a dialectic of absolutes thus led realism to advocate a strategy
to deal with the problems which this tension generates for the evaluation of human action. Whilst
retaining the judgment of action
against a standard provided by absolute and universal moral principles, this strategy acknowledged the
inevitable imperfection with which they are applied and, therefore, suggested an approach which supplemented
deontology with consequentialism - in order to take account of the dissonance between Intentions and
outcomes - and the obligation to evaluate with an obligation to humility -- in order to take account of the basic
dissonance between human duties and* human capabilities. Such a strategy is inevitably one of imperfect compromise: it does not
alter the moral requirements on individuals; it can only suggest how the tension between these requirements and practical necessities can best be dealt
with, how these moral requirements can better be realised It is this position which lays the groundwork for the realist approach to the problems posed by
the normative direction of action. Actors
remain under obligation to fulfil the prescriptions and proscriptions of
universal moral principles. hut the insertion of a Weberian emphasis on responsibility for the consequences of
action yields an insistence on a prudence in action, the attempt to adjust action to take account of the
dissonance between intention and outcome, and thus to ensure that unpleasant consequences are mitigated as
far as possible in practice. This leads once mote to an assertion of humility, here an insistence that individuals
and states recognise the limits of their right to act as judges over others, and the limits of their power to execute
any judgment so arrived at.
deontology bad – no absolutism
Absolutism doesn’t outweigh all consequences.
Rescher -89 (Philosophy Professor, Univ. Pittsburgh) 89 Nicholas, Mpral Absolutes: An Essay on the Nature and Rationale of Morality, p. 76-77
3. Are There Absolute Moral Rules? The controversy about absolute moral rules has been bedevilled—like many another philosophical controversy—by
the absence of agreement about what its salient term actually means. For "absolute" is a highly equivocal word, used by different discussants in
rather different ways. In particular, it has been used in the discussion of moral rules to mean that such a rule: is of unrestricted
and altogether universal application with respect to (potential) obligatees. (For example, honoring one's promises is a practice incumbent on everybody.)
is of- unrestricted and altogether universal application with respect to (potential) beneficiaries. (For example, not hurting people's feelings needlessly is a
practice from which everyone gains.) is objectively valid (as a moral rule); holding good as a matter of objectively determinable fact that can be
established as such by impersonal standards. is categorical in form apd devoid of any hypothetical or conditiona-lized qualifications of the sort present in
"Keep promises," that is, "Once you have given a commitment, honor it." (5) is
overriding and all-decisive in being of a weight that
sweeps all other considerations aside, overruling and outweighing all other factors. Our deliberations here have arrived
at rather mixed results in this regard. Absoluteness in senses (l)-(3) has been maintained for morality: it lies in the nature of the case that any
appropriate moral rule must, as such, be both obligatee-universal and beneficiary-universal, and that its inherent rationale (in terms of the protection of
people's interests) is such that its validity as a valid moral rule represents a genuinely objective issue. But, on the other hand, we
have rejected
flatly claims to absoluteness in senses (4) and (5). As regards (4), we have insisted on the conditional character of all lower-level moral
rules (even as "Help others in need" comes to "When someone needs your help, and you are so circumstanced as to be able to give it, then do so.") And
as regards (5), we have noted that lower level moral rules are never totally decisive because their violation may
be unavoidable, in content, to avert some yet greater misfortune. The upshot Is that while moral rules are indeed absolute in
some pertinent senses, they are not so in others.
deontology bad – moral evasion
The aff is moral evasion. Consequentialist decision-making is imperative, [this evidence is
gender-paraphrased)
Nielsen, 93 (Kai, Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary, Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics,
ed. Joram Graf Haber, 1993, p. 170-2)
Forget the levity of the example and consider the case of the innocent fat man. If there really is no other way of unsticking our fat man and if plainly,
without blasting him out, everyone in the cave will drown, then, innocent or not, he should be blasted out. This indeed overrides the principle that the
innocent should never be deliberately killed, but it does
not reveal a callousness toward life, for the people involved are caught in
a desperate situation in which, if such extreme action is not taken, many lives will be lost and far greater misery will
obtain. Moreover, the people who do such a horrible thing or acquiesce in the doing of it are not likely to be rendered more
callous about human life and human suffering as a result. Its occurrence will haunt them for the rest of their lives and is as likely as not to
make them more rather than less morally sensitive. It is not even correct to say that such a desperate act shows a lack of respect for persons. We are not
treating the fat man merely as a means. The fat man's person-his interests and rights are not ignored. Killing him is something which is undertaken with
the greatest reluctance. It is only when it is quite certain that there is no other way to save the lives of the others that such a violent course of action is
justifiably undertaken. Alan Donagan, arguing rather as Anscombe argues, maintains that "to use any innocent man ill for the sake of some public good is
directly to degrade him to being a mere means" and to do this is of course to violate a principle essential to morality, that is, that human beings should
never merely be treated as means but should be treated as ends in themselves (as persons worthy of respect)." But, as my above remarks show, it need
not be the case, and in the above situation it is not the case, that in killing such an innocent man we are treating him merely as a means. The action is
universalizable, all alternative actions which would save his life are duly considered, the blasting out is done only as a last and desperate resort with the
minimum of harshness and indifference to his suffering and the like. It indeed sounds ironical to talk this way, given what is done to him. But if such a
terrible situation were to arise, there would always be more or less humane ways of going about one's grim task. And in acting in the more humane ways
toward the fat man, as we do what we must do and would have done to ourselves were the roles reversed, we show a respect for his person. In so treating
the fat man-not just to further the public jgood but to prevent the certain death of a whole group of people (that is to prevent an even greater evil than his
being killed in this way)-the claims of justice are not overriden either, for each individual involved, if he is reasonably correct, should realize that if he
were so stuck rather than the fat man, he should in such situations be blasted out. Thus, there is no question of being unfair. Surely we must choose
between evils here, but is there anything more reasonable, more morally appropriate, than choosing the lesser evil when doing or allowing some evil
cannot be avoided? That is, where there is no avoiding both and where our actions can determine whether a greater or lesser evil obtains, should we not
plainly always opt for the lesser evil? And is it not obviously a greater evil that all those other innocent people should suffer and die than that the fat man
should suffer and die? Blowing up the fat man is indeed monstrous. But letting him remain stuck while the whole group drowns is still more monstrous.
The consequentialist is on strong moral ground here, and, if his reflective moral convictions do not square either with certain unrehearsed or with certain
reflective particular moral convictions of human beings, so much the worse for such commonsense moral convictions. One could even usefully and
relevantly adapt herethough for a quite different purpose-an argument of Donagan's. Consequentialism of the kind I have been arguing for provides so
persuasive "a theoretical basis for common morality that when it contradicts some moral intuition, it is natural to suspect that intuition, not theory, is
corrupt."" Given the comprehensiveness, plausibility, and overall rationality of consequentialism, it is not unreasonable to override even a deeply felt
moral conviction if it does not square with such a theory, though, if it made no sense or overrode the bulk of or even a great many of our considered
moral convictions, that would be another matter indeed. Anticonsequentialists often point
to the inhumanity of people who Will
sanction such killing of the innocent, but cannot the compliment be returned by speaking of the even greater
inhumanity, conjoined with evasiveness, of those who will allow even more death and far greater misery and then excuse
themselves on the ground that they did not intend the death and misery but merely forbore to prevent it? In such a
context, such reasoning and such forbearing to prevent seems to me to constitute a moral evasion. I say it is evasive because rather than steeling himself
to do what in normal circumstances would be a horrible and vile act but in this circumstance is a harsh moral necessity, he fit] allows, when he has the
power to prevent it, a
situation which is still many times worse He tries to keep his 'moral purity' and [to] avoid 'dirty hands' at
the price of utter moral failure and what Kierkegaard called 'double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in this morally
evasive way but this does not make it right, [it and to are my feminist editing. JAC]
deontology bad - inaction
There is no Utopia in which we can get rid of difficult moral decisions. Political inaction in
times of risks can only be for the worst
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs;
“Nuclear Ethics” pg. 25-26)
How do we reconcile rules and consideration of consequences in practice? One
way is to treat rules as prima facie moral duties and
to appeal to a consequentialist critical level of moral reasoning to judge competing moral claims . For example, in
judging the moral acceptability of social institutions and policies (including nuclear deterrence), a broad consequentialist might demand that the benefit
they produce be not only large but also not achievable by an alternative that would respect rules. 40 In
addition, to protect against the
basic difficulties of comparing different people's interests when making utilitarian calculations, a broad
consequentialist would require very substantial majorities; otherwise he would base his decisions on rules and
rights-based grounds. A consequentialist argument can also be provided for giving some weight to motives as
well as means. For example William Safire argues that "the protection of acting in good faith, with no malicious intent, is
what make decision-making possible. It applies to all of us. . . . The doctor who undertakes a risky operation, the lawyer who
gambles on an unorthodox defense to save his client, the businessman who bets the company on a new product."42 While such an argument
can be abused if good motives are treated as an automatic one-dimensional exculpation, it can be used by
broad consequentialists as a grounds for including evaluation of motives in the overall judgment of an act.
Whether one accepts the broad consequentialist approach or chooses some other, more eclectic way to include and reconcile the three dimensions of
complex moral issues,43 there will often be a sense of uneasiness about the answers, not just because of the complexity of the problems
"but
simply that there is no satisfactory solution to these issues-at least none that appears to avoid in practice what
most men would still regard as an intolerable sacrifice of value."44 When value is sacrificed, there is often the
problem of "dirty hands." Not all ethical decisions are pure ones. The absolutist may avoid the problem of dirty
hands, but often at the cost of having no hands at all. Moral theory cannot be "rounded off and made complete and
tidy." That is part of the modern human condition. But that does not exempt us from making difficult moral choices.
Political inaction to prevent further death is the greatest inhumanity one can commit.
Nielsen 93 – Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary (Kai, “Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics”, ed. Joram Graf Haber Pg 171-72)
Anticonsequentialists often point to the inhumanity of people who will sanction such killing of the innocent,
but cannot the compliment be returned by speaking of the even greater inhumanity, conjoined with evasiveness, of
those who will allow even more death and far greater misery and then excuse themselves on the ground that they did
not intend the death and misery but merely forbore to prevent it? In such a context, such reasoning and such
forbearing to prevent seems to me to constitute a moral evasion. I say it is evasive because rather than steeling himself to do what
in normal circumstances would be a horrible and vile act but in this circumstance is a harsh moral necessity, he allows, when he has the power to prevent
it, a situation which is still many times worse. He
tries to keep his 'moral purity' and avoid 'dirty hands' at the price of utter
moral failure and what Kierkegaard called 'double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in
this morally evasive way but this does not make it right My consequentialist reasoning about such cases as the case of the innocent
fat man is very often resisted on the grounds that it starts a very dangerous precedent. People rationalize wildly and irrationally in
their own favor in such situations. To avoid such rationalization, we must stubbornly stick to our deontological
principles and recognize as well that very frequently, if people will put their wits to work or just endure, such
admittedly monstrous actions done to prevent still greater evils will turn out to be unnecessary.
deontology bad – means/ends inevit
The means/ends distinction is inevitable and a moral cop out. There are no absolutes. You have
to weigh comparative risks, [gender paraphrased]
Alinsky, 71 (Saul D., Activist, Professor, and Social Organizer with International Fame, Founder of the
Industrial Areas Foundation, Rules for Radicals, -71, p. 24-27
We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by
taking thought. Alfred North Whitehead That perennial question. "Does the end justify the means?" is meaningless as it
stands: the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is. and always has
been. "Does this particular end justify this particular means?" Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends. The end is
what you want, and the means is how you get it. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views
the issue of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he
thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost;
of means, only whether they will work. To
say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the
immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the
time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. The practical
revolutionary will understand Geothe's "conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action"; in action, one does not always
eniov
the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of
Thulmankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual's personal salvation. He who
sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has peculiar conception of "personal salvation"; he doesn't care enough for people to be "corrupted"
for them. The men
who pile up the heaps of discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends—which with rare
exception is conspicuous for its sterility—rarely write about their won experiences in the perpetual struggle of life and change. They are
strangers, moreover, to the burdens and problems of operational responsibility and the unceasing pressure for
immediate decisions. They are passionately committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent
situation where man suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if
studying a navigational chart on land. They can be recognized by one of two verbal brands; "We agree with the ends but not the means," or "This is not
the time." The means-and-end moralists or non-doers always wind up on their ends without any means. The means-and-ends moralists,
constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In
fact, they are
passive—but real—allies of the Haves. They are the ones Jacques Man tain referred to in his statement, "The fear of soiling
nonrdoers were the ones who chose not
to fight the Nazis in the only way they could have been fought; they were the ones who drew their window blinds to shut out the shameful
ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue." These
spectacle of Jews and political prisoners being dragged through the streets; they were the ones who privately deplored the horror of it all—and did
nothing. This is the nadir of immorality. The most unethical of all means is the nonuse of any means. It is this species of man how so
vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences between defensive and
offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced from the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not to men.
The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it
should be. I present here a series of rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends: first, that one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies
inversely with one's personal interest in the issue. When we are not directly concerned our morality overflows; as La Rochefoucauld put it, "We all have
strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others." Accompanying this rule is the parallel one that one's concern with the ethics of means and ends
varies inversely with one's distance from the scene of conflict. The second rule of the ethics of means and ends is that the judgment of the ethics of means
is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment. If you actively opposed the Nazi occupation and joined the underground Resistance,
then you adopted the means of assassination, terror, properly destruction, the bombing of tunnels and trains, kidnapping, and the willingness to sacrifice
innocent hostages to the end of defeating the Nazis. Those who opposed the Nazi conquerors regarded the Resistance as a secret army of selfless,
patriotic idealists, courageous beyond expectation and willing to sacrifice their lives to their moral convictions. To the occupation authorities, however,
these people were lawless terrorists, murders, saboteurs, assassins, who believed that the end justified the means, and were utterly unethical according to
the mystical rules of war. Any foreign occupation would so ethically judge its opposition. However, in such conflict, neither protagonist is concerned with
any value except victory. It is life or death, [feminist editing is by me - CEG]
***calculations good***
calculations good – inevitable
Political calculations are inevitable and good – some people will always be wronged under any
policy
Frankel, 75 (prof. of philosophy and public affairs at Columbia University, 1975 Charles, “Morality and U.S. Foreign Policy”,
http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/media/v18_i006_a006.pdf)
What are we to make of statements like Professor Morgenthau’s to the effect that “the political act is
inevitably evil”? In the ordinary use of the word evil the ‘statement is false: political acts aren’t inevitably evil. A successful
negotiation staving off a bloody war, a nuclear test-ban treaty, an international agreement to combat malaria are none
of ‘them evil in the everyday language of everyday people. The only explanation for this otherwise puzzling statement is that
Professor Morgenthau is using the word in an esoteric way. He means, one must presume, that in negotiating an
end to a war or arriving at international agreements some people’s interests will be adversely affected, that forms of
bargaining will probably take place which would not be appropriate in a roomful of old friends, and that
some moral values will be treated as less important than other. In sum, choosing, weighing, balancing, and
blending take place. But to call this “evil” is to reserve the word “good” for only those kinds of behavior
where we know exactly what the right thing to do is, and don’t need to think about the matter at all. It
saves the word “good” for the behavior of gods.
calculations good – value to life
Our body counts are good – the alternative is a dehumanized world of endless bloodshed
without responsibility to the dead or the living
Chernus 03 (Chernus, 2003, (Ira, Prof of Religious Studies at UC boulder, “Bring Back the Body Count,” April 1,
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0401-12.htm)
"We don't do body counts," says America's soldier-in-chief, Tommy Franks. That's a damn shame.
During the Vietnam war, the body count was served up every day on the evening news. While Americans
ate dinner, they watched a graphic visual scorecard: how many Americans had died that day, how many South
Vietnamese, and how many Communists. At the time, it seemed the height of dehumanized violence. Compared to Tommy
Franks' new way of war, though, the old way looks very humane indeed. True, the body count turned human beings into
abstract numbers. But it required soldiers to say to the world, "Look everyone. I killed human beings
today. This is exactly how many I killed. I am obliged to count each and every one." It demanded that the
killers look at what they had done, think about it (however briefly), and acknowledge their deed. It was a
way of taking responsibility. Today's killers avoid that responsibility. They perpetuate the fiction so many
Americans want to believe-that no real people die in war, that it's just an exciting video game. It's not merely the
dead who disappear; it's the act of killing itself. When the victim's family holds up a picture, U.S. soldiers
or journalists can simply reply "Who's that? We have no record of such a person. In fact, we have no
records at all. We kill and move on. No time to keep records. No inclination. No reason." This is not just a matter
of new technology. There was plenty of long-distance impersonal killing in Vietnam too. But back then, the U.S. military at least went through the
No matter how
inaccurate the numbers were, though, the message to the public every day was that each body should be
counted. At some level, at least, each individual life seemed to matter. So It's much more likely that "we don't do body
counts" because Vietnam proved how embarrassing they could be. As the U.S. public turned against that war, the body count became a
symbol of everything that was inhumane and irrational about that war. The Pentagon fears that the same might happen
if the Iraq war bogs down. How much simpler to deny the inhumanity and irrationality of war by denying the
obvious fact of slaughter. What I fear is a world where thousands can be killed and no one is responsible,
where deaths are erased from history as soon as they happen. The body count was more than an act of
responsibility. It was a permanent record. It made each death a historical fact. You can go back and graph those
Vietnam deaths from day to day, month to month, year to year. That turns the victims into nameless, faceless abstractions.
But it least it confirms for ever and ever that they lived and died, because someone took the time to kill and
count them. In Iraq, it is as if the killing never happened. When a human being's death is erased from history, so is
their life. Life and death together vanish without a trace. The body count has one other virtue. It is enemy
soldiers, not civilians, who are officially counted. Antiwar activists rightly warn about civilian slaughter and watch the toll rise at
www.iraqbodycount.org. It is easy to forget that the vast majority of Iraqi dead and wounded will be soldiers.
Most of them were pressed into service, either by brute force or economic necessity. As the whole world
has been telling us for months, there is no good reason for this war, no good reason for those hapless Iraqi
foot-soldiers to die. They are victims of brutality-inflicted by their own government and by ours-just as
much as the civilians. They deserve just as much to be counted So let us bring back the body count. If we
must kill, let us kill as one human being to another, recognizing the full humanity of our victims. Without a
body count, our nation becomes more of a robotic killing machine. As we dehumanize Iraqis, we slip even
further into our own dehumanization. Let us bring back the body count. if only to recover our own sense of
responsibility to the world's people, to history, to our own humanity.
motions of going in to see what they had done. True, the investigations were often cursory and the numbers often fictional.