Affirmative
Coecrion High Now
Coercion high in Latin America now – the state marginzalies populations,
rendering them useless
DFPRW, Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, January 1st, 2005
(DFPRW, UN Organization, “Forced Labour in Latin America,” Cornell International Labour Office,
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=forcedlabor )//SG
In Latin America and the Caribbean today,
several governments are tackling forced labour in
earnest. Brazil has taken strong measures against forced labour in agriculture and in remote logging camps. The
government of Brazil officially acknowledged the existence of forced labour at the ILO in 1995. Since then, it has addressed
the problem with high visibility. A National Action Plan against Slave Labour has been implemented since March 2003.
Recently, a number of other Latin American governments have decided to confront forced labour, notably in their
agricultural sectors. Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay have taken important steps to develop, jointly with workers' and
employers' organizations, new policies to combat forced labour. KEY STATISTICS • There are an estimated 1.3
million forced labourers in Latin American and the Caribbean, out of a global total of
12.3 million; • 75% of forced labourers in Latin America are victims of coercion for
labour exploitation, while the remaining victims are either in state-imposed forced labour or in forced commercial
sexual exploitation; • 250,000 forced labourers, or 20% of the total number in the region, have been
trafficked, either internally or across borders; • The estimated profit derived in Latin American and the
Caribbean from trafficked forced labour is an estimated US$ 1.3 billion. FORMS OF COERCION AND RECRUITMENT
Substantial numbers of mainly indigenous agricultural workers are in conditions of debt
bondage, mostly as a result of wage advances made to workers by private labour
contractors. Factors which make indigenous peoples in remote areas particularly susceptible to
coercive recruitment and debt bondage include a weak state presence, low investment in
educational services, poor literacy and numeracy, slow implementation of land reforms
as well as the lack of official identity documents, rendering people "invisible" to national
authorities. ILO field research on forced labour and debt bondage in rural areas has documented the following
situations: • Agricultural "slave labour", mainly in the state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon region. The term "slave
labour" refers to degrading work conditions and the impossibility of leaving the farms
due to alleged debts and the presence of armed guards; • The enganche and habilitacion labour
systems, based on wage advances in Bolivia's agriculture, in particular in tropical areas of Santa Cruz, the northern
Amazon, and the Bolivian Chaco; • Forced labour in the Amazon basin of Peru, both with recruited
workers in logging camps and with isolated indigenous communities; • Discrimination and
employment conditions of indigenous people in the cattle farms of the Chaco region in Paraguay. Brazil's National Action
Plan against Slave Labour was adopted in March 2003. Components of the strategy include awareness-raising campaigns,
promotion of a new law with stronger sanctions against offenders such as confiscation of their property, greatly intensified
release of forced labour victims in remote areas through the interventions of mobile police units and other agents of
criminal and labour law enforcement. In Bolivia, the government created a National Commission for the Eradication of
Forced Labour in December 2004 with a mandate to develop and implement an effective strategy against forced labour
with the participation of workers and employers organizations. In Peru, the government is setting up a Multisectoral
Commission which is to design a national policy to eliminate forced labour and strengthen the rule of law in the regions
where forced labour occurs.
No Link—Generic
People disliking taxes doesn’t mean it’s coercive—two reasons
The Economist ’11 – (“Taxes, Justice, and Coercion,” Democracy in America blog, 1/27/11,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/01/liberaltarians)//SR
MY COLLEAGUE wrote a very good post on his own blog the other day outlining some of the fundamental disagreements
that make it difficult for liberals and libertarians to agree. I think he's right that liberals don't generally agree with quite a
number of the propositions he's laid out, but the one that caught my eye in particular was this one: Taxation is
coercive but imprisoning the guy who nicked your lawn gnome isn't. I found this proposition
ticklish in part because the libertarian emphasis on formulations like "taxation is coercive" really is a good example of
something that drives liberals nuts. I'll address why that is in a minute. But I also focused on it because it reminded me of
one of my favourite episodes of a superb 1990s Dutch documentary TV series called "Buren" ("Neighbours"), produced by
the deadpan telejournalist Frans Bromet, which actually centres on a dispute over lawn gnomes. The dispute in the
episode (which can be viewed here , if you're in the right country) doesn't involve larceny; there are two neighbours who
both sell lawn gnomes out of their homes, they make vague negative insinuations about each other and about the quality
of each others' gnomes, which they both import from Poland, and it turns out to be all bound up with one neighbour's
Polish girlfriend, whom the other neighbour had also imported from Poland. But unlike this one, most episodes of "Buren"
do involve legal disputes. In one episode , a man turns to the police after a pushy neighbour threatens to "cut his throat"
during an argument; the neighbour says it was a figure of speech, the man then says the neighbour's son threw a cherry
bomb in his yard, the son admits it but says it was in retaliation for the other guy's son dumping dog poop on their lawn,
and so forth. In another episode , a family complains because the neighbour's stove hood vents into their yard, and they
don't like the smell of her cooking. "Buren" aired in the years just before another Dutch TV producer, John de Mol, came
up with "Big Brother" and launched the modern reality TV era, and I think you can see the influence. So let me explain
what I think this has to do with the difference between my colleague's approach to taxation and lawn-gnome theft, and my
own. If the thread seems tenuous, I apologise. Anyway, here's what I understand my colleague to be getting at.
Taxation, presumably, is coercive because the government simply orders you to hand over
some portion of the goods you possess, on pain of imprisonment. You haven't signed a contract
regarding this transaction, and it's not punishment for your violation of someone else's rights; it's simply
forced upon you, regardless of whether or not you agree with it. Imprisoning someone who nicks
your lawn gnome, on the other hand, is retribution for their violation of your property rights. It's not coercive; the person
imprisoned has broken a rule with which they can be presumed to agree, the rule that people's possessions belong to them,
and punishing them is simply just. Liberals are likely to disagree with this formulation for two reasons.
liberals think of taxation as paying one's fair share for the collective goods that make
society feasible. Every society needs collective goods to function, including
transportation and infrastructure, education, the justice system itself, and so on; the more wealthy
a society wants to be, the more collective infrastructure it needs. Payment for those goods cannot be left
voluntary, as ultimately everyone would welch. So paying your taxes is a basic obligation of
citizenship, and collectively deciding on the level of taxation through democratic
government is the closest we can come to making this transaction consensual. Not paying taxes
means violating your obligations as a citizen; when the state punishes someone for not paying taxes,
it is acting in a fashion no more or less coercive than when it punishes someone for stealing someone
else's property. The second reason liberals would disagree, or why I would disagree, anyway, has to do
with those episodes of "Buren" about property disputes. Basically, in none of these episodes can it be simply
stated that one person nicked another's lawn gnome. How do we know who nicked whose lawn gnome? It's always
subject to dispute. When that first guy said he'd cut the other guy's throat, was that a legally culpable threat, or just
First,
a figure of speech? If one guy's kid tossed a cherry bomb and the other guy's kid dumped the poop, who pays restitution to
whom? Can someone get an injunction to stop their neighbour from cooking where they can smell it? In any case of stolen
lawn gnomes, dumped poop, stinky cooking, fences that may or may not be built on someone else's land, and so forth,
there is likely to be a factual dispute, a dispute at law, or both at the heart of things. If the case comes to trial, it
is the state that will adjudicate the rival claims and impose a decision on the parties. That
exercise of state authority feels just as coercive to people who think they have been
unjustly ruled against in court, as it does to people who don't want to pay the level of
taxation that a democratic society has decided is fair. It's one thing to argue that taxes
are too high, or are too high for some group of earners or for some type of economic
activity. But I feel that a broad libertarian claim that "taxation is coercive" is an attempt
to legitimise refusal to play by the rules, and to delegitimise the exercise of state
authority. The existence of the state involves a certain level of coercion to enforce the
law. But the existence of the state is a good thing, both because it provides the infrastructure of a
prosperous, safe and fair society, and because it enforces property claims such as deciding who has stolen whose lawn
gnome. It makes me happy to see the state providing a decent education to kids whose parents can't afford to buy them
one. It makes me happy to see the state administer justice in a fair and procedurally sound fashion. It makes me happy to
see the state build zoos. And yeah, we all have to pay our taxes for these things to happen. But when I read libertarians
focusing on the intrinsically coercive nature of taxation, I'm reminded of the way Marxists used to focus on the
intrinsically alienating character of wage labour. It just doesn't really get you anywhere.
No Internal Link—Generic
No internal link—coercion is confused with brute force
Byman & Waxman, Professor at Georgetown and a Professor at Columbia Law School, 2002, (Daniel and
Matthew, The Dynamics of Coercion ,Pub. Cambridge University Press Pg. 3-5)//JS
Coercion is not destruction. Coercive strategies are most successful¶ when threats need not
even be carried out. Although some destruction¶ is often part of coercion, coercion succeeds when the adversary
gives in¶ while it still has the power to resist.¶ Coercion is best understood in opposition to what Thomas Schelling¶
termed "brute force": "Brute force succeeds when it is used, whereas¶ the power to hurt is most
successful when held in reserve. It is the¶ threat of damage, or of more damage to come,
that can make someone¶ yield or comply. "1 Coercion may be thought of, then, as getting
the¶ adversary to act a certain way via anything short of brute force; the adversary¶ must still
have the capacity for organized violence but choose¶ not to exercise it.2¶ We define coercion as we do to emphasize that it
relies on the threat¶ of future military force to influence an adversary's decision making but¶ may also include limited uses
of actual force. The limited use of actual¶ force may form a key component of a coercion strategy if its purpose is¶ to
enhance credibility or demonstrate the type of price that continued¶ defiance will bring. Limited uses of force sway an
adversary not only¶ because of their direct and immediate destructive impact but because of¶ their effects on the
adversary's perceptions of future force and the adversary's¶ vulnerability to it. For example, military strikes against some¶
of an enemy's fielded forces might help induce the enemy to withdraw¶ the rest of its forces by making defense of a
particular territory harder and riskier, by reducing the enemy's ability to repel subsequent strikes,¶ and by demonstrating
one's willingness to resort to military means.¶ Coercion is about how those military strikes affect an adversary's
subsequent¶ decision making and policy moves.¶ The line between coercion and brute force is not always easy to discern.¶
Once an armed conflict begins, an adversary's behavior will always¶ be dictated by a combination of brute force and
threatened¶ (coercive) force. Nonetheless, pure or near-pure cases of coercion and¶ brute force do exist. In 1994, the
United States effectively coerced the¶ military regime in Haiti to step down by threatening an imminent military¶
invasion. No force was actually applied before the junta conceded,¶ although the United States did send forces to help
manage the transition.¶ The regime capitulated due to the credible threat of future U.S. action.¶ An example of brute force
is Nazi Germany's 1941 invasion of¶ Russia to conquer territory and seize resources (Operation Barbarossa).¶ German
forces conquered areas of western Russia without \i!ttempting¶ to elicit surrender.3 The Israeli demolition of
Iraq's nuclear reactor at¶ Osiraq in 1981 is another example of brute force.4 Although
destruction¶ of the reactor set back Iraq's nuclear program, it was not expected¶ to
change Iraqi policy-nor did it-and may even have increased Baghdad's¶ desire to acquire
nuclear weapons.¶ Those who reject the distinction between brute force and coercion¶ might respond that all state
behavior, especially surrender, is always volitional¶ to some extent. In no instance, the argument might go, has a¶ state
been so decimated in battle that it had a complete absence of¶ choice. But there are degrees of choice that must be
considered. Generally,¶ as an adversary absorbs more and more destruction, the proportion¶ of its decisions that are
motivated by the threat of future destruction¶ declines. This is because the destruction of more and more of the¶
adversary's assets narrows the adversary's range of options and, in some cases, leaves the adversary less and less to lose in
the future. Brute¶ force, by contrast, eliminates the adversary's options completely. Allied¶ operations against Nazi
Germany illustrate this point. Even in May¶ 1945, Nazi Germany was physically capable of continuing the war despite¶
Berlin's capture. But it certainly had fewer options than it had had¶ earlier in the war, at the commencement of the
Combined Bomber Offensive¶ in 1943, when it had yet to suffer serious damage to its homeland.¶ Understanding
the relative contributions that brute force and coercion¶ make to an adversary's actions
is critical to informing policy¶ about minimal uses of force and avoiding the need to
escalate actual¶ uses of force.¶ Most crises involving coercion fall along the continuum between¶ pure brute
force and coercion. The goal of the coercer is usually not¶ total destruction but the use of enough force to make the threat
of¶ future force credible to the adversary. Counterinsurgency campaigns,¶ for example, are typically designed to dislodge
and eradicate pockets of¶ resistance, but the government waging such a campaign usually will accept¶ the voluntary
disbanding and disarmament of rebels. Some conflicts¶ may ultimately be resolved through brute
force because one side's¶ attempts at coercion may be met by refusals to negotiate. It is
only in¶ rare cases-such as campaigns of genocide-that one side will not settle¶ for the
other side's surrender.
Freedom and coercion are one-sided words that reflect inaccurate concepts
– in reality neither of them are inherently good or bad
Westen 85 - Professor of Law, University of Michigan. B.A. 1964, Harvard University; J.D. 1968,¶ University of
California, Berkeley (Peter, “"FREEDOM" AND "COERCION"- VIRTUE WORDS AND VICE WORDS”, Duke Law Journal,
June-September 1985, http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2914&context=dlj&seiredir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar%3Fq%3Dcoercion%2Bbad%26btnG%3D%26hl%3Den
%26as_sdt%3D0%252C23#search=%22coercion%20bad%22) // JA
Unfortunately, the
capacity of freedom and coercion to express descriptive as well as prescriptive
relationships, though linguistically useful,¶ is also rhetorically treacherous. It causes us to blend
the two kinds of relationships unthinkingly. Instead of recognizing that prescriptive freedoms
are good because they are defined to be good, 141 and that descriptive freedoms themselves are neither good
nor bad, 142 we carelessly come to believe that all freedoms are presumptively good. 143
Instead of remembering that prescriptive coercion is bad because it is defined to be¶ bad, 144 and that
descriptive coercion itself is neither good nor bad, 145 we carelessly assume that all coercion
is presumptively bad. 146 Rather than¶ demand moral argument in favor of particular freedoms, and moral
argument against particular kinds of coercion, we come to believe that freedom is itself something to favor and coercion
itself something to oppose.¶ I do not mean to say that no freedoms are presumptively good, or¶ that no coercions are
presumptively bad. I mean, rather, that there is¶ nothing in their being "freedoms" and "coercions" that makes them
presumptively good or bad. 147 A person who advocates a particular freedom should give reasons for believing that a
particular X ought to be¶ unhindered by a particular Y to pursue a particular Z. Calling it free-¶ dom is either a neutral
description or a question-begging conclusion; it is¶ not, however, a reason for believing X ought to be unrestrained by Y
to¶ pursue Z. Likewise, a person who opposes a particular coercion should¶ give reasons for believing that a particular
proposal leaves X worse off¶ than X ought to be left for refusing to do X's bidding. Calling the proposal coercive is either a
neutral description or a question-begging conclusion, but it is not a reason for believing that X1 proposes to leave X¶
worse off than X ought to be left for refusing to do Xj's bidding. The¶ danger with words like freedom and
coercion is that by mixing descriptions with prescriptions, they tend to persuade not
through the giving of reasons but through tricks of language. They possess rhetorical
force not by facilitating argument, but by bypassing it. 148 They are words that lay¶ claim to virtues
they do not deserve, and to vices they do not possess.
AT: Taxes Unethical
Taxes are ethical
Kangas, 99—Graduate student in Political Science (Steve, “Myth: Taxes are theft,” 3/19,
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-taxestheft.htm)//MY
Many conservatives and libertarians make the following populist argument: "If you don't
pay your taxes, men with guns will come to your house, arrest you, and seize your
property." The implication here is that you are being extorted to pay taxes, and this theft
amounts to a violation of your rights. Although the events described are technically correct -- you should
expect such a response from any crime you commit -- the implication that the government is aggressing
against you is false, and not a little demagogic. Taxes are part of a social contract, an agreement
between voters and government to exchange money for the government's goods and
services. Even libertarians agree that breach of contract legitimates a police response. So
the real question is not whether a crime should be met with "men with guns," but whether or not the social contract is
valid, especially to those who don't agree with it or devote their allegiance to it. Liberals have two lines of
argument against those who reject the idea of the social contract. The first is that if they
reject it, they should not consume the government's goods and services. How they can
avoid this when the very dollar bills that the economy runs on are printed by the
government is a good question. Try to imagine participating in the economy without
using public roads, publicly funded communication infrastructure, publicly educated
employees, publicly funded electricity, water, gas, and other utilities, publicly funded
information, technology, research and development -- it's absolutely impossible. The
only way to avoid public goods and services is to move out of the country entirely, or at
least become such a hermit, living off the fruits of your own labor, that you reduce your
consumption of public goods and services to as little as possible. Although these alternatives may
seem unpalatable, they are the only consistent ones in a person who truly wishes to reject the social contract. Any
consumption of public goods, no matter how begrudgingly, is implicit agreement of the social contract, just as any
consumption of food in a restaurant is implicit agreement to pay the bill. Many conservatives and
libertarians concede the logic of this argument, but point out that taxes do not go
exclusively to public goods and services. They also go for welfare payments to the poor
who are allegedly doing nothing and getting a free ride from the system. That, they claim, is
theft. But this argument fails too. Welfare is a form of social insurance. In the private sector
we freely accept the validity of life and property insurance. Obviously, the same validity
goes for social insurance like unemployment and welfare. The tax money that goes to
social insurance buys each one of us a private good: namely, the comfort of being
protected in times of adversity. And it buys us a public good as well (although tax critics are loathe to admit
this). If workers were allowed to unnecessarily starve or die in otherwise temporary setbacks, then our economy would be
frequently disrupted. Social insurance allows workers to tide over the rough times, and this
establishes a smooth-running economy that benefits us all.
2AC Perm
Perm solves—complete rejection fails—the government is required for
some regulation
Glaeser, 7—the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University
(Edward, “Coercive Regulation and the Balance of Freedom”, Cato Unbound, http://www.catounbound.org/2007/05/11/edward-glaeser/coercive-regulation-and-the-balance-of-freedom/)//MY
There is a recent wave of scholarship suggesting that the government can help individuals be happy by reducing their
choices. While happiness may be a very nice thing, it is neither the obvious central desiderata for private or public
decision-making. On a private level, I make decisions all that time that I expect to lower my level of happiness, because I
have other objectives. On a public level, I can’t imagine why we would want to privilege this emotion over all other goals. A
much better objective for the state is to aim at giving people the biggest range of choices possible, and then let people
decide what is best for them. But putting freedom first doesn’t mean abandoning the state. At the
very least, we
rely on the government to protect our private property against incursions by
others. Even most libertarians think that it is reasonable for the state to enforce
contracts. This enforcement increases the range of contractual options and this is, in a
way, expands liberty.
2AC Alternative Fails
Accepting total individualism will devastate society—coercion is justified
Galston,05—Professor of Civic Engagement and the Director of the Institute for
Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland (William, “The Case for Universal
Service,” http://www.ppionline.org/documents/AmeriBook/AmeriBook_Chap6.pdf)//MY
Classical liberals will object, of course, on the grounds that it would be an abuse of state
power to move toward mandatory universal service. It is worth noting, however, that one of the high
priests of classical liberalism disagrees. Consider the opening sentences of Chapter 4 of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty,
titled “Of the Limits to the Authority of Society Over the Individual”: “[E]veryone who receives the protection of society
owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be bound to observe
a certain line of conduct toward the rest. This conduct consists, first, in not injuring the interests of one another, or rather
certain interests which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights; and
secondly, in each person’s bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable principle) of the labors and sacrifices incurred
for defending the society or its members from injury and molestation. These conditions society is justified in enforcing at
all costs to those who endeavor to withhold fulfillment.” It is not difficult to recast Mill’s position in the vocabulary of con
temporary liberal political thought. Begin with a conception of society as a system of cooperation
for mutual advantage. Society is legitimate when the criterion of mutual advantage is
broadly satisfied (versus, say, a situation in which the government or some group systematically coerces some for
the sake of others). When society meets the standard of broad legitimacy, each citizen has a
duty to do his or her fair share to sustain the social arrangements from which all benefit,
and society is justified in using its coercive power when necessary to ensure that this
duty is performed. That legitimate societal coercion may include mandatory military
service in the nation’s defense, as well as other required activities that promote broad
civic goals. Brookings scholar Robert Litan has recently suggested that citizens should be
“required to give something to their country in exchange for the full range of rights to
which citizenship entitles them.” Responding in a quasi-libertarian vein, Bruce Chapman, founder and
president of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, charges that this proposal has “no moral justification.” Linking rights to
concrete responsibilities, he says, is “contrary to the purposes for which [the United States] was founded and has
endured.” This simply isn't true. For example, the right to receive GI Bill benefits is linked to the
fulfillment of military duties. Even the right to vote (and what could be more central to citizenship
than that?) rests on being law-abiding; many states disenfranchise convicted felons during their period of
incarceration and probation. As Litan points out, this linkage is hardly tyrannical moralism. Rather, it
reflects the bedrock reality that “the rights we enjoy are not free” and that it takes real
work—contributions from citizens—to sustain constitutional institutions. If each
individual’s ownership of his or her own labor is seen as absolute, then society as such
becomes impossible, because no political community can operate without resources,
which ultimately must come from someone. Public choice theory predicts, and all of human
history proves, that no polity of any size can subsist through voluntary contributions
alone; the inevitable free riders must be compelled by law, backed by force, to do their
part.
2AC Extinction First
Extinction is a prerequisite to morality
Bok, 88- Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis (Sissela, Applied Ethics and Ethical Theory, Ed. David
Rosenthal and Fudlou Shehadi, JSTOR)//MY
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 not intend such a catastrophe, but that one merely 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.
Life should come first
Schwartz, 2- (Lisa, Medical Ethics, http://www.fleshandbones.com/readingroom/pdf/399.pdf)//MY
The second assertion made by supporters of the quality of life as a criterion for decision- making is closely related to the
first, but with an added dimension. This assertion suggests that the determination of the value of the
quality of a given life is a subjective determi-nation to be made by the person
experiencing that life. The important addition here is that the decision is a personal one that,
ideally, ought not to be made externally by another person but internally by the individual
involved. Katherine Lewis made this decision for herself based on a comparison between two stages of her life. So did
James Brady. Without this element, decisions based on quality of life criteria lack salient information and the patients
concerned cannot give informed consent. Patients must be given the opportunity to decide for
themselves whether they think their lives are worth living or not. To ignore or overlook
patients’ judgement in this matter is to violate their autonomy and their freedom to
decide for themselves on the basis of relevant informa- tion about their future, and comparative con- sideration
of their past. As the deontological position puts it so well, to do so is to violate the imperative that we
must treat persons as rational and as ends in themselves.
2AC Consequentialism
Combining consequences and rights-based principles is key to effective
policy
Machan ’10 – PhD, professor emeritus of philosophy at Auburn University, adjunct
scholar at the Cato Institute (Tibor, “A Misguided Distinction-or Not?” A Passion for Liberty, 9/28/10,
http://tibormachan.rationalreview.com/tag/deontology/)//SR
When working out what should guide public institutions and policies in our lives and human
communities, those who chime in from ancient to contemporary times have advanced various proposals and they
have often been divided into two groups. Members of one of these advance certain basic
principles that ought to ground the institutions and policies, while those of the other suggest that the way to
decide is by focusing on the anticipated consequences, never mind any purportedly firm principles (which
tend, in any case, to become obsolete or misapplied). In the United States and in other developed countries the former
group is called deontologists while the latter consequentialists. (In the history of political ideas
Immanuel Kant is deemed to be the quintessential deontologist while John Stuart Mill the most prominent
consequentialist.) Deontologists try to identify principles by which we ought to live and
guide our
public affairs–for example, a set of basic rights everyone supposedly has and which may never be violated; this will,
argues the deontologist, insure justice and other good things in community affairs. For the consequentialist the
idea that should govern is whether some policy most effectively promotes what is desirable–
for example, spend whatever is necessary so as to eliminate poverty and sickness, never mind if anyone’s rights are
violated in the process since those rights mostly tend to be obstacles to what needs to be done. Is this a good, useful
distinction? I have my doubts. For one, no one can tell for sure what the result or consequence
of a course of action or public policy will be down the line, not certainly in any detail. And when it is possible to
tell, it is because we have discovered that following some principle is likely to bring forth a given
result. The actual actions or policies are not available for inspection until after they have been tried. So if we are to be
guided by anything, it cannot be the results, which lie in the future and are mostly speculative. It would have to be certain
rules or principles that we have found to be helpful in the past when we deployed them. On the other hand, principles
are always limited by the fact that they were discovered during the past that may not quite be
like the present and future or, even more likely, the scopes of which are limited by what we know so far. Thus, for example,
take the U. S. Constitution that contains a set of principles (especially in the Bill of Rights). It is
subject to amendments in part so as to update these principles in light of new knowledge and new
issues in need of being addressed. Once amendments are seen as possible, even necessary, strict reliance on the
principles is admittedly hopeless. So then what about the two kind of approaches, deontological versus
consquentialist? Neither is really adequate to what human beings need to guide their lives. Yes, they will
have to identify certain ethical, political, legal and other principles–e.g., in medicine, engineering, or
automobile driving–but once they have done so they will still need to keep vigilant so as to make sure they
aren’t missing some good reason for updating these. However, focusing entirely on the consequences
of their actions and policies will not do the job either since those are not yet here to deal with. They will have to ease up to
them with the help of the principles, more or less complete, that they have found to be soundly based on their knowledge
of the past. Fortunately, although our knowledge is rarely complete–and never final–about anything that surrounds us in
the world, the world itself tends to be fairly steady and predictable (once one has studied it carefully, without bias or
prejudice such as wishful thinking). It is not possible to escape the need to balance reasonably well
established principles and expected consequences. With these in hand, many of our tasks and challenges are
likely to be managed pretty well although we need also to be prepared for surprises. There is no substitute for paying close
attention.
Deontological criticisms of consequentialism are wrong-they can both be
good or bad
Vuletic ’94 – PhD in Philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago (Mark,
“Deontological Objections to Consequentialism,” The Secular Web, 1994,
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/objection_to_consequentialism.html)//SR
One can imagine a deontologist attacking a consequentialist with the following invective: It is
you, not we, who are concerned with your own moral purity. Your position has the effect of
absolving you of all personal responsibility for the things you do. There's no element of
personal decision; you simply calculate, and do what the numbers tell you to do, as if you were a machine.
You tell your victim, 'Sorry, it's not me, you understand, I'm just an instrument of the greater good.' Moreover, if you've
done some horrible thing in pursuit of some supposed greater good, and it turns out to have terrible
consequences, you shrug your shoulders and say, "I'm not to blame, it just turned out that way." In
essence, you try to transform yourself into a kind of unquestioning slave of utility maximization, and
thereby try to escape all personal responsibility by blaming your decisions and actions on your master. [Hypothetical
criticism written by Andrew Cross.] The deontologist uttering these words raises three main questions: (1)
do consequentialist systems of ethics absolve their adherents of all personal responsibility? (2)
Do consequentialists in fact select their system of ethics in order to absolve themselves of all
personal responsibility? (3) Are deontological systems of ethics and their adherents innocent on both
charges? I will examine each of the first two questions in turn - the answer to the third question will become clear in
the process. Consequentialism as Absolution of Responsibility? Our hypothetical deontologist claims that
consequentialism absolves its adherents of all personal responsibility for three presumed reasons: (a) consequentialism
removes all personal decision, as the consequentialist simply turns himself into a "slave of utility maximization"; (b)
consequentialism allows an agent to rationalize away atrocities such as the injury of one person for the benefit of the
many; (c) consequentialism allows one to shrug off disastrous states of affairs that are brought about when one's
consequentialist moral calculus advises a course of action that turns out to be wrong. To reason (a), one may respond that
if the consequentialist makes himself a "slave of utility maximization," then the deontologist
makes himself a slave of a set of rules. Is there any a priori reason why a commitment to utility
maximization should be morally inferior to a commitment to a set of absolutist rules? It does not seem that there is, unless
one begs the question by approaching it from a deontological viewpoint. For reason (a) to stand would necessitate an
indisputable argument showing a non-consequentialist system of ethics to be the right system, as Kant tries to formulate but judging from the depth of controversy in moral philosophy today, it seems rather doubtful that such an argument
exists. Reason (a) also ignores the existence of rule-of-thumb-utilitarianism, in which the element of
personal decision certainly is present. The rule-of-thumb-utilitarian has no grand moral calculator to churn out
a spreadsheet commanding him to a certain course of action, nor does he have a set of inflexible rules to constrain him to a
single course of action, as the deontologist does. The rule-of-thumb-utilitarian consults the collective utilitarian wisdom of
the centuries, but the ultimate decision as to what course of action he takes - even while remaining within the framework
of consequentialism - is the agent's personal responsibility. To reason (b), one may respond that the consequentialist
believes the sacrifice of one for the benefit of the many to sometimes be the morally correct thing to do - the
consequentialist would no doubt argue that the ethical systems of consequentialism's deontological critics allow an agent
to rationalize away the atrocity of not injuring one person for the greater good. Briefly speaking, the exact nature of an
"atrocity" is a matter of perspective. Granting this, the deontologist may reply that, indeed, one person must sometimes be
sacrificed for the greater good, but that at least the deontologist will recognize the sacrifice of the one person to be morally
distasteful, whereas the consequentialist will simply drop the ax on the poor man and go merrily along his way. But such
an objection is not without problems. In the first place, if we mean by "morally distasteful" that the action should evoke a
sense of guilt in the perpetrator, then there is no reason to assume that the consequentialist, simply in
virtue of his system of ethics, will not find his actions morally distasteful. Even if the consequentialist
believes that he is "right" to choose the lesser of two evils, what is to prevent him from inwardly longing for a non-existent
third alternative that makes everyone happy? There are clearly independent psychological grounds from which guilt
springs, such that a person can believe what he did to be right - given the options available to him at the time - yet
nevertheless suffer nightmares due to a plagued conscience. It is not clear that an agent must even be in part a
deontologist for this to happen to him. But if by "morally distasteful" we mean that the action is in fact not right, how are
we to say this in any meaningful way? In the first place, it seems silly to presume that given two actions,
one of which is better than the other, and better than doing nothing at all, that performing that action
is wrong - even if it is conducive to guilt. Secondly, to insist steadfastly upon this position
would amount to question-begging, as it starts off with the assumption that the
deontological notion of rightness and wrongness. It is especially simple to see that consequentialism does not
imply a sacrifice of responsibility when one considers rule-of-thumb-utilitarians once again. The rule-of-thumbutilitarian, while as much concerned with utility maximization as any good consequentialist, is personally responsible for
how he evaluates each particular situation. If, through a misevaluation of the situation, he performs actions that produce a
very bad state of affairs, he cannot say "I was just following orders." The deontologist may insist that the
rule-of-thumb-utilitarian can always say "oh well, I tried my best," but the deontologist who
produces bad states of affairs can clearly say the same thing - in fact, the ability to shrug off
negative consequences so long as one's motives or intentions were pure is one of the luxuries commonly
associated with deontological ethics. To the consequentialist, it would seem that it is deontological ethics that
frees one from personal responsibility, not consequentialist ethics. To (c), the consequentialist responds in the same way
as the did to (b) - there are grounds independent of one's ethical system from which guilt springs, and from which the
consequentialist might perhaps even encourage guilt to spring so as to discourage other consequentialists from being lax
with their calculations. The consequentialist, no less than the deontologist, is concerned with doing the right thing, even if
he has a different analysis of what the right thing is. And once again, if the consequentialist can shrug off disastrous results
that result from following his moral calculus, the deontologist can certainly shrug off disastrous results that result from
following his rules - in fact (once again) this ability is even more pronounced for the deontologist, since it is with actions,
and not consequences, that the deontologist is concerned. The accidental performing of an act with disastrously wrong
consequences could easily be more morally damaging to the consequentialist, who cares about results, than to the
deontologist, who cares about motivations. Consequentialism as a Refuge for the Morally Irresponsible? It has been
established that devotion to a consequentialist system of ethics does not necessarily entail a shunting of personal
responsibility onto a moral calculus of utility. The question remains whether those who choose consequentialism in fact do
so in order to avoid personal responsibility. The answer to this question is very brief: there is no reason to
assume that consequentialists wish to avoid responsibility. Rather, it is clear that many choose a
consequentialist system of ethics because they perceive it to be the right one. Such people may well view deontology as
blind "rule worship" - as the blatant discarding of personal responsibility of which the deontologist accuses the
consequentialist. For those who assert that consequentialists make themselves into unthinking, mechanical extensions of
the principle of utility maximization, there is the response that the deontologists make themselves
extensions of a set of perhaps arbitrary rules. If someone adopts a system
of ethics in order to absolve himself of moral responsibility, then that person is reprehensible on
almost every account. Granted, such a person could fit into a consequentialist scheme (excluding rule-ofthumb-utilitarianism) quite well, but he could fit into a deontological system equally well. Throwing around
simple mechanical
charges about which system the irresponsible flock to is pointless. As J.J.C. Smart points out, "it may well be that there is
no ethical system which appeals to all people, or even to the same person in different moods"[1], and no doubt it is also the
case that consequentialists and deontologists can each be sincere in believing their system to embody "goodness and
niceness"[2] and the other's to embody "evilness and rottenness"[3]. In this light, assertions by deontologists about
consequentialists denying their true moral obligations by voluntarily becoming extensions of some impersonal calculus,
are seen to be without merit. We can say that the principle of utility maximization and the rules of deontological ethics can
each be employed to absolve oneself of personal responsibility, but that people operating within both frameworks are
likely to be trying their utmost to be decent, moral human beings.
AT: Ethics
Ends justify the means—turns their ethics claims
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)//MY
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.
AT: Objectivism
Their objectivist view of morality is itself immoral and egotistical—fails to be
rational and impartial
Barry and Stephens 13 (Bruce and Carroll U., “Objections to an Objectivist Approach to Integrity,” The
Academy of Management Review, JSTOR)//MY
Rand's philosophy is decidedly un-postmodern, which may in small part account for her pariah status within
contemporary academe. However, the exclusion of Rand from the academic mainstream of moral philosophy seems to
reflect dissatisfaction less with the focus or ide-ology of her analysis than with its execution. Critics (see especially
O'Neill, 1971, and Rob-bins, 1974; see also several essays contained within Den Uyl & Rasmussen, 1984) have
effectively documented numerous logical contradictions and inconsistencies within her
writings and have taken issue with the ideological stricture with which she has defended
her views and dismissed her critics. Moreover, critics note (and amply document) that Rand
constructs false dichotomies, placing her views in opposition to (and, ultimately, above)
factitious assessments of the sorry state of human nature and social institutions. For
example, according to Rachels, Rand depicts any degree of altruism as so self-abnegating that
nobody, with the possible exception of certain monks, would find it congenial. As Ayn Rand
presents it, altruism implies that one's own inter-ests have no value, and that any demand
by others calls for sacrificing them. If that is the alternative, then any other view,
including [objectivism], will look good by comparison. But this is hardly a fair picture of
the choices. (1986: 71; emphasis in original) With a penchant for straw-man argumentation, Rand's analysis
often appears to take the form of a solution in search of a problem. Rachels (1986)
classifies Rand's philosophy in the broad category of ethical egoism, which fails to meet
at least one-and arguably both-of his criteria for the moral minimum. Briefly stated, Rachels
assumes that most theories of economics, and, by inference, of commerce, rely on a
model of self-interest. To advance one's own interests is to be pragmatic and (often)
hedonistic; ethics come into play only when the interests of others are incorporated into
the calculus of personal and business decision making. The moral minimum consists of
two components: rationality and impartiality. At first glimpse, Rand's objectivism, with its emphasis on
rationality and goal orientation, appears to fulfill the initial criterion. However, Hobbes' (1651/1950) argument
that unalloyed pursuit of self-interest does not result in maximization of individual or
social-system utilities casts the rationality of such a strategy into some doubt. And the
Randian insistence on the primacy and the moral superiority of personal goals clearly
violates the impartiality criterion, since it privileges the self above others. Thus, Rand's theory
of objectivism has met with disapprobration within the discipline of philosophy, not on
the basis of its ideology but because of its failure to meet the basic standards of rigor in
the field. According to Rachels, an ethicist of no discernible ideological bent, "Theories that reject the
minimum conception encounter serious difficulties because they do so. Most
philosophers have realized this, and so most theories of morality incorporate the minimum conception, in one form or another. They disagree not about [the parameters of]
the minimum, but about how it should be expanded" (1986: 11). Becker acknowledges the existence of
alternative approaches to ethics, but he makes no attempt to reconcile them with objectivism. Rather, he asserts that the
intention behind his objectivist focus is to present a perspective that has not received attention in the business ethics
literature. A tacit assumption lurking behind this statement is that Rand's objectivism is a legitimate theory of moral
philosophy that has simply escaped the parochial purview of business ethicists. On the contrary, objectivism is a
school of thought whose coherence and value have escaped the legitimation of essentially
the entire discipline of moral philosophy.
Ayn Rand was wrong and her philosophy is used to justify greed-cap can’t
solve and altruism is real and good
Bekiempis ’11 – (Victoria, “Confessions of a Recovering Objectivist,” The Guardian, 6/10/11,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/10/confessions-recovering-objectivist-ayn-rand)//SR
Ayn Rand is one of those people whom you just want to go away, but won't. I say this not with hate or ignorance, but with
deep familiarity. When, as a self-absorbed college freshman, I first came across the Russian emigre author of The
Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she seemed like the coolest thinker ever – what selfish person doesn't want to hear that
being selfish doesn't just feel good, but actually is good, too? I quickly devoured nearly all of her atrocious tomes with a
sort of blind hunger – that ferocious pseudo-intellectual reading you do only to confirm your beliefs, if you will. Indeed, I
devotedly hung on her every word, even becoming an officer of my university's Objectivist club. At one point, I may even
have been president. Much to the lament of my philosophy classmates, I was that girl who frequently (and loudly!) argued
in favor of Rand's illogical claims that altruism doesn't exist; that selfishness is a virtue; and that "rational egoism" is the
only right way to live. Thankfully, I grew out of that phase. Not surprisingly, but a few years of minimum-wage work
cleaning up cat faeces, without benefits, and other thankless, unstable odd jobs made me question Objectivism's
foundations and rekindled an earlier interest in anarcho-syndicalism. Eventually, leaving Rand was no more different or
difficult than, say, leaving a friend who had grown to annoy me over time – sure, I was very intimate with her ideas, but
that just gave me more insight into their outright dysfunctionality, and the strength to say "sayonara!" What's scary is that
so many Americans have not grown out of that mentally puerile phase. Instead, this contingent – now largely comprised of
Tea Party radicals – remains mired in her pop philosophy. (Only now has Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, perhaps
realizing that supporting an atheist adulterer might hurt his veep chances,changed his tune from Objectivist fanboy to
follower of Thomas Aquinas.) Granted, it's doubtful that any political group so suspicious of the intelligentsia would
actually read Rand's 1,200 page magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, but her ideas are clearly being used to justify
inequality, giving credence to institutionalized wealth-based elitism. This has to stop, and stop
now. But not just for the reasons that typically get brought up. Anti-Rand commentators have long pointed
out both the pragmatic and personal problems with Rand. As evidenced by the Great Recession, for example,
anything even remotely close to the unfettered capitalism advocated by Rand plainly does not
work. Also, as evidenced by her personal life, she was more a hypocritical, questionable character than
a moral role model. As a teenager in Russia, "she watched her family nearly starve while she treated herself to the theater."
She railed against government benefits but cheerfully collected social security and Medicare . She championed integrity,
but bastardized Nietzsche's best ideas. And her writing skills aren't just mediocre; if anything, her penchant for 200-page
monologues and wooden characters suggests that they're non-existent. And she has this thing for rapey scenes; and her
approach to BDSM goes for a Mad Men-esque chauvinist chic – not healthy sex positivism. Of course, all that doesn't
actually say anything about her "philosophy"; it just makes the case that she's a jerk and a hack. That said, her theory –
and summarily, its corollaries – are belied by the abject sketchiness of their most basic premise: rational egoism . Far
smarter, more articulate people than me have pointed this out, but what needs to be emphasized is that Rand conflates
descriptive psychological egoism (people act in their self-interest) with normative ethical egoism (acting in self-interest is
the right thing to do). Part of this "ought-from-an-is"-type assumption is that altruism does not exist – very much the
backbone of her belief system. West Valley College's Sandra LaFave does a great job following this line of thought and
pointing out why it doesn't work. The basic claim of egoists, LaFave notes, is that people "always and invariably act in their
self-interest". However, most moral codes call for altruism, which, in egoists' account, is "demanding the impossible".
Moral codes, so egoists' thinking goes, should not demand "the impossible", so we should take up a "more realistic" system
such as – ta-da! – ethical egoism. To accept this conclusion, you have to accept the premise that psychological egoism is a
given fact in the first place. To date, neither Rand nor anyone else has been able to prove definitively that the proverbial
soldier who dives on a grenade acts selfishly, not altruistically. Even if, for the sake of argument, we accepted that all acts
were selfish, there certainly seem to be a great many unselfish-looking selfish acts (diving on the grenade to save your
comrades), as well as selfish-seeming selfish acts (blowing your kid's college tuition money on a shopping spree.) LaFave
points out that this "empirical distinction" renders across-the-board selfishness more of a semantic trick than something
that meaningfully describes ethics. Go ahead and claim all human acts come from self-interest, fine. This seems kind of
silly, however, when the morality of said selfish acts will still be measured by how altruistic they seem. Another key
concern is that psychological egoism might not be final stage of an individual's ethical development. We start off selfish,
say some theorists, but we must move beyond convention and toward post-conventional social contract and conscience for
true moral growth. Even if we were to concede that these foundational problems do not deal a death-blow to Objectivism –
which would be very generous of us (yet generous in a selfish way, of course) – it still seems perverse to peg so much on so
shaky a foundation. The kernel of this belief system is nothing more than a philosophically hollow shell. It should
absolutely not play a role in policy-making – especially when the end result would be disastrous. I outgrew
Rand; now I wish America would, too.
Objectivism fails in the real world
Milanovic ’10 – (Nikola, “Denying Objectivism,” Stanford Progressive, March 2010,
http://www.stanford.edu/group/progressive/cgi-bin/?p=183)//SR
Determining one’s political, social, and economic beliefs, if done right, is a difficult affair, and one that many Stanford
students undoubtedly grapple with. In my own pursuit for developing the best outlook on life, I came across the peculiar
philosophy of an author named Ayn Rand as a sophomore in high school. Her ideas, entitled “Objectivism,” have enjoyed a
recent intellectual resurgence on Stanford’s campus. This movement brings to mind my own trajectory as an objectivist,
which began with scholarly infatuation but ended with bitterly realistic rejection. Rand’s principles are, like so
many doctrines, attractive on paper but inapplicable to the real, modern world. Objectivism strives to
provide a comprehensive answer to questions of metaphysics, politics, morality, and epistemology. This article is not an
effort to unravel the rationale behind the philosophy. Instead, it is a comprehensive look at what the objectivist viewpoint
means in everyday life. How does Rand’s philosophy play out in practice? The central tenet of the movement is that there
is a non-subjective reality that can be accessed through reason, and that when we access it, it becomes clear that rational
pursuit of self-interest is the best way to lead one’s life. Based on Rand’s aggrandizement of self-interest, her followers
believe in libertarian politics, centered around capitalism and the rights of the individual. The world is in a period of
economic recession. Inequality is a pervasive fact for the international community. Systematic
discrimination, unjust wars, and insurmountable barriers to opportunity still impact many
people. It’s these facts that make objectivism an unrealistic worldview. The objectivist
standpoints on universal healthcare, government welfare programs, progressive or redistributive taxation, and economic
stimuli are all the same: they contend that these programs are unjust. But in a country where businesses
are declaring bankruptcy, homes are foreclosing at alarming rates, and people are falling below the poverty line and into
the unemployment line, can objectivism be a rationally ethical view? One that doesn’t violate our
intuitions about morality? The answer is no, it can’t be. Rand’s intellectual roots can be traced back to
Adam Smith, the famous 18th century economist who championed self-interest. The prevailing system before Smith was
feudalism, which is now universally abhorred because it held that entitlements were God-given. In feudalism, some people
were born into luxury while others were born into poverty, and this was seen to be the natural, and therefore right, order
of things. Much like the insurmountable caste system that creates a birthright hierarchy of some over others, feudalism
arbitrarily justified inequalities due solely to coincidence of birth. Smith, rebelling against the feudal mindset, argued that
through capitalism order, self-interest, and personal liberty could all coexist. Markets are amazing man-made institutions
in that they provide incentives to maintain order. For instance, if I try to cheat people by charging an exorbitant amount
for something I produce, other vendors will enter the market with lower prices, and I will be punished by losing
customers. Markets also allow for personal liberty; I can buy from who I want, and am not tied to one creed or a single
employer. In this way, markets eliminate hierarchies by creating horizontal, instead of vertical relationships; I am not
dependent on any one vendor, just as they aren’t dependent on any one customer. Smith, like Rand, argued that this was
all possible because people pursue their own rational self-interest. This pursuit harmonizes liberty and order by bringing
people into a network of anonymous, mutually beneficial exchanges. This is the central concept of objectivism: reciprocal
self-interest creates a motivation that allows us to avoid depending on altruism (in the words of economist Albert
Hirschman). For example, if I had to depend on a doctor’s beneficence to receive a life-saving treatment, I might be out of
luck. But because the capitalist system allows me to pay him (in his interest) in exchange for the treatment (in my
interest), we both win. Smith, though Rand’s intellectual heirs all idolize him, came to different conclusions
than the founder of objectivism. He
did not support laissez-faire capitalism or even mention it in his
because he realized that markets could create dependency and subordination due to the
equivalency of money to power. Smith, in his utilitarian analysis of capitalism, understood that markets engender
inequality to an extent that is bad for society, and that they create an inflexibility of options in which
people lose their equality of opportunity based on the conditions they’re born into or the
writings
paths they take. For this reason, he (unlike the libertarian objectivists) supported some government intervention in the
economy. The reason Rand’s viewpoint is so dangerously misguided in the modern world is because it
rests on the faulty underlying assumption that the state people are born into is justified. In his
paper, Altruism in Philosophical and Ethical Traditions, Will Kymlicka argues that people today are seen by the
Western world as free and equal, and that they therefore deserve equality of opportunity. This being
the case, any inequalities that result in the world should be due to people’s own choices and decisions. Like Thomas
Jefferson asserted in the Declaration of Independence, certain beliefs are held to be true: “that all men are created equal”
with the rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But these rights are meaningless in the
objectivist’s world. Without the opportunity or tools to improve their social position, a
right to the pursuit of happiness is hollow to people disadvantaged by inequality. Kymlicka
holds that people’s fates should be determined by their choices, not by the circumstances that they are
born or thrust into. This is not how the world works, however. Consider four people: one born in a war-torn region of
Africa, one born into a poor family in inner-city New York, one born into a middle-class home in Florida, and one born
into wealth in Beverly Hills. These people all have the same right to pursue their own happiness, but they are not born
equal. They lack equality of opportunity. This inequality is not the result of their decisions, but is instead the
result of systematic injustice. To deny that this is injustice would be to deny that people
should be born with equal opportunity. This is what objectivists ignore: that pursuit of our rational selfinterest is meaningless if we are born without tools to pursue it. A popular philosopher in the
objectivist tradition, Robert Nozick, equated tax to theft because he considered it an unjustified sequestration of
money, the same as a robber stealing one’s wallet at gunpoint. Famed economist Milton Friedman agreed in his
classification of such taxes as charity through violence. But this, like objectivism, assumes that the conditions
we are born into are justified, exactly what feudalism assumed centuries ago. The fact of the matter is that our
birthright entitlements are not justified. I was born into an upper-middle class family, but this wasn’t my
right. So how can I get upset when some of the taxes I pay go to support the poor autoworker in Detroit or the luckless
homeowner in East Palo Alto? If people are born in worse situations than I am, it’s luck of the draw, but not a justified luck
of the draw. The reason they were born with less opportunity than I is because of systematic, institutional injustices that
exist in our society and create inherent inequality. That is why policies like redistributive taxation,
are justified: they serve to level the uneven
playing field we are born into. I loved objectivist libertarianism because it made me feel comfortable about my
government-funded education, and unemployment insurance
privilege. I read just about all of Rand’s work and attended seminars on her philosophy. It was easy to accept my
abundance of opportunity as a right, but it didn’t quiet a nagging thought in the back of my head: I shouldn’t feel so
deserving of being privileged. Like Kymlicka assesses, it’s easy to accept gross inequalities without batting an eye when
they are viewed as natural. Objectivists accept them the same way feudalists accepted serfdom, the way Sharia law accepts
the subjugation of women, the way India accepted castes. Viewed as the natural order of things, objectivism justifies
inequalities that are the result of systematic injustice in how our societies and economies are organized today. Rand
sought to defend inequalities that were not the result of merit, providing no fairness in the available processes of acquiring
property or the resultant distribution. In her best-known collection of essays, The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand affirmed
that compassion is a vice, selfishness a virtue, and that good people should not respond altruistically to others’
predicaments. This doctrine only makes sense to those who believe the inequality of birthright to be naturally justified.
Objectivism is a good way to make yourself feel intellectually comfortable with being born into privilege. It is a reassuring
self-justification for many that they shouldn’t feel insecure about their luck. Maybe they should. Inequality is a natural fact
of life, but it’s one that can be reduced and marginalized by the right political and economic systems. We need to pursue
these systems, instead of ignoring inequality the way objectivism would have us do.
2AC Latin America Turn
Their impacts don’t apply in this scenario – State control in Latin America
has improved quality of life—in fact, citizen on citizen violence is less
frequent
Pereira, associate professor of political science at Tulane University, 2000
(David, “New Patterns of Militarized Violence and Coercion in the Americas,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol.
27.2)//SG
One possible reaction to this complex reality would be to assert that vio-lence and coercion have always been part of the
region's social fabric. From this perspective, Latin American history is an interminable series of civil
wars, revolutions, and coups in which soldiers, bandits, and guerrillas shoot it out for the
control of territory, resources, and state power. The atrocities of the Guatemalan military in the1980s, the
war of Peru's Sendero Luminoso, the massacres carried out by Mexican authorities and drug traffickers or Brazilian police,
and the maneuvering of Colombia's paramilitaries, guerrillas, and army merely represent new moves in an old game.
However, this view is misleading. First, it ignores the considerable success of state-builders
in Latin American imposing their own vision of "order" in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century and thereafter. Many places experienced long periods of relative
nonviolence, even peace, although such tranquility was ultimately backed up by coercion.
And at least when it comes to international war, Latin American in the past two centuries has been
one of the most pacific regions on earth, with fewer deaths in war than South east and South Asia, the
Middle East, Europe, and the United States (Centenon,.d.).If there is a historical legacy to Latin American violence, its
contours and vicissitudes are not yet fully understood. Second, the argument that "violence has always
been with us" ignores several significant recent changes in the form and level of violence
in Latin America. For example, a recent study shows that since the late 1970s homicide rates have
increased sharply in much of the region (including the Carib- bean), meaning that in many places
citizen-on-citizen violence is becoming as pressing a problem as state-directed violence.
While the rate was stable or declining in the United States, Costa Rica, and Paraguay and very low and slightly increasing
in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, rates have risen to become the highest in
the region - all more than 15 per 100,000, with Colombia's at almost 100. 1As police forces have become
mired in inefficiency, corruption, and crime, moreover, the lines between citizens and
the state have become ever more permeable. 2 Militaries have taken on new internal security missions
prompted in part by the U.S. military's search for new enemies in the post-cold war era. 3These new missions are
sometimes conducted directly for organizations in the pri- vate sector, and drug
trafficking and gang-related and other kinds of crime have increased, often with the direct
participation off-duty (or even on-duty) police. All this has made the peripheries of many large cities zones of lowintensity warfare and increasing anarchy and social disintegration. One report examining these and other statistics on
violence and crime calls Latin America and the Caribbean "the most violent region in the world"(Ayres,1998:3).
2AC Freedom Turn
Their claims are flawed – even if coercion is usually bad, redistributing
income increases freedom
Glaeser 7 - the Fred and Eleanor Glimp professor of economics at Harvard University. He serves as the director of
the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and as director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at the
Kennedy School of Government. (Edward, “Coercive Regulation and the Balance of Freedom”, Cato, 5/11/7,
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/05/11/edward-glaeser/coercive-regulation-balance-freedom) // JA
Ed Glaeser responds to an essay "Economics and the Distinction Between Coercive and Voluntary Action," by Daniel Klein
by looking at how the coercive power of the state relates to the minimum wage. This is part of a longer essay:¶ Coercive
Regulation and the Balance of Freedom, by Edward Glaeser, Reaction Essay, Cato Unbound: Daniel Klein has written an
elegant essay arguing that minimum wage laws are coercive. He is obviously right. ... Minimum wage laws ... are enforced
with the power of the state. Coercion lies at the core of almost all government policies. Rarely is
voluntary participation a reliable tool for enforcing rules. If
we could count on voluntary participation,
we probably wouldn’t need the government involved in the first place.¶ But, as Klein notes, just
because something is coercive, doesn’t mean that it is wrong. The coercive power of the
state is useful when it protects our lives and property from outside harm. If we think that statesponsored redistribution is desirable, then we are willing to accept more coercion to help the less
fortunate. We also rely on state-sponsored coercion regularly when writing private contracts. The ability of creditors to
collect depends on the power of the state to coerce borrowers.¶ The great difficulty is that coercion is both necessary and
terrifying. For millenia, governments have abused their control over the tools of violence. The historical track record
insists that we treat any governmental intervention warily. What principles help us decide on the appropriate limits to
government-sponsored coercion? Are minimum wage laws acceptable coercion or do they fall outside of the pale?¶ I start
with the view that individual freedom is the ultimate goal for any government. The ultimate job of the state is
to increase the range of options available to its citizens. To me, this is ... justified by both philosophy
and history. ...¶ A belief in the value of liberty flows strongly through mainstream neoclassical economics. Economists
frequently speak about an aim of maximizing utility levels, and this is often mistranslated as maximizing happiness.
Maximizing freedom would be a better translation. The only way that economists know that utility has increased is if a
person has more options to choose from, and that sounds like freedom to me. It is this attachment to liberty that makes
neoclassical economists fond of political liberty and making people richer, because more wealth means more choices...¶
But putting freedom first doesn’t mean abandoning the state. At the very least, we rely on the
government to protect our private property against incursions by others. Even most libertarians
think that it is reasonable for the state to enforce contracts. ...¶ While these forms of state action are
readily defensible, many of the thorniest questions involve tradeoffs between the liberty of one person and the liberty of
another. Taking wealth from Peter and giving it to Paul increases the choices available to Peter and decreases the choices
available to Paul. Governmental coercion to redistribute income cannot be opposed purely on
the grounds that it restricts liberty. Certainly, redistribution reduces the freedom of the
taxpayer but it increases the options of the recipient of governmental largesse.
2AC Binary Turn
The “America First” mentality comes from a desire to agree with the state—
creates us/them binaries and kills individualism
Beres 99 – Professor of political science and international law at Purdue University (Louis Rene, “Death, the Herd,
and Human Survival,” International Journal on World Peace, JSTOR)//MY
The threat of the Other is grounded upon a profound and universal human need. It is
intrinsic to human bonding. We cannot define whom "we" are without also defining
"them” — those who are not "us.” "They” need not be perceived as threatening: they may be
seen only as different from "us”—from our family, our community, our nation: "they” are
others who do not "belong.” But if "they” are seen as threatening to us, then our own internal
bonding will be all the stronger.... Rome required barbarians, Christendom required
pagans, Protestant and Catholic Europe required each other. Patriotism is love of one's own
country; but it is also hatred or fear or suspicion of others.... Today the Western hemisphere has
been divided into two parts, each of which sees itself as threatened by the Other; yet at the
same time this continuing threat has become necessary to provide internal bonding and
social discipline within each part. Moreover, this threat of the Other has been internalized
within both Soviet and American culture, so that the very self-identity of many American and
Soviet citizens is bound up with the ideological premises of the Cold War. To a very real extent,
the individual American supported permanent rivalry with the Soviet Union largely out
of fear of being alone, outside the herd. That individual thus found the existence of an "Evil
Empire” absolutely necessary. Small matter that the Soviet Union was essentially a state like his or her own,
comprised of people like himself or herself. Driven to devalue reason at the outset, this American
was impervious to logic, responding only to the strong emotional benefits of belonging.
Why such a desperate need to belong? The answer lies in our marked incapacity to find self-worth
within ourselves. This incapacity, in turn, is nurtured by a society that ruggedly despises
individualism. Offering a cornucopia of "things” to those who would maintain proper faith, this society is
determined to positively cancel the individual.