SCFI 09-10
Rationality Review Aff
Chase
1
Dandridge v. Williams Aff
Important Background: The Dandridge Case and Constitutional Review .......................................................... 3
Explanation – Rational Basis Standard............................................................................................................................. 4
Plan Texts ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 5
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 6
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 7
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 8
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 9
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 10
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 11
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 12
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 13
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 14
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 15
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 17
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 18
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 19
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 20
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 21
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 22
1AC............................................................................................................................................................................................... 23
Court DA Link Uniqueness ................................................................................................................................................. 24
AT Activism / Dandridge = Bad Law .............................................................................................................................. 25
AT Activism/Dandridge = Bad Law ................................................................................................................................ 26
AT Activism / Judicial Tyranny ........................................................................................................................................ 27
AT Bork/Winter (Conservative Apologism)................................................................................................................ 28
AT Bork/Winter (Conservative Apologism)................................................................................................................ 29
Dandridge Key ......................................................................................................................................................................... 30
AT Poverty Inevitable........................................................................................................................................................... 31
Activism Good ......................................................................................................................................................................... 32
Activism Good ......................................................................................................................................................................... 33
Framework ............................................................................................................................................................................... 34
Framework ............................................................................................................................................................................... 36
Predictions/DA Work – Class ............................................................................................................................................ 37
No GPW ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 38
Had to Happen: Tetlock Ev ................................................................................................................................................. 39
Left Field: Kritik of ‘The Future’ ....................................................................................................................................... 40
State Exclusion Impacts Turn Disads ............................................................................................................................. 42
Topicality – SS Def ................................................................................................................................................................. 43
Topicality – ‘Increase’ 2AC ................................................................................................................................................. 44
****NEGATIVE**** ................................................................................................................................................................. 45
Conservative Legal Defense / Dandridge = Good Law ............................................................................................ 46
Conservative Legal Defense / Dandridge = Good Law ............................................................................................ 47
Conservative Legal Defense / Dandridge = Good Law ............................................................................................ 48
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SCFI 09-10
Rationality Review Aff
Chase
2
Conservative Legal Defense / Dandridge = Good Law ............................................................................................ 49
Congress CP Evidence .......................................................................................................................................................... 50
Congress CP Evidence .......................................................................................................................................................... 51
Defense of Consequences.................................................................................................................................................... 52
Defense of Consequences.................................................................................................................................................... 53
Defense of Consequences.................................................................................................................................................... 54
Defense of Consequences.................................................................................................................................................... 55
Defense of Predictions ......................................................................................................................................................... 56
Defense of Predictions ......................................................................................................................................................... 57
A2 Tetlock Arg ......................................................................................................................................................................... 58
Yes GPW ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 59
FURTHER CITES FOR CAMP .............................................................................................................................................. 60
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SCFI 09-10
Rationality Review Aff
Chase
3
Important Background: The Dandridge Case and Constitutional Review
AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was a Federal and State program (it was replaced with TANF
in 1996) giving aid to children whose families were in poverty. Under the program, the states were responsible
for computing the “standard of need” (how much assistance was appropriate). In 1969, recipients in Maryland
brought suit against the state for placing a hard cap of $250/month on assistance, regardless of the computed
standard of need. Petitioners argued that the cap violated the Social Security Act and the Equal Protection
Clause of the 14th amendment.
It was generally found that the petitioners’ claim about the Social Security Act was incorrect. However, a
District Court held the Maryland regulation unconstitutional for overreaching legitimate bounds. This aff is
concerned with the Supreme Court ruling overturning the district court, holding that the Maryland regulation
did not overreach the 14th amendment. SCOTUS found the following about the cap:
“(b) The regulation is rationally supportable and free from invidious discrimination, since it furthers the State's legitimate interest in
encouraging employment and in maintaining an equitable balance between welfare families and the families of the working poor.”
In otherwords, they found that it was perfectly rational to deny needy families assistance in the name of
legitimate financial interests such as encouraging employment.
This is significant because it set precedent for applying the Rational Basis Review, also known as the
rationality review, to claims for social services made by persons in poverty. In US law, there are a number of
tests that constitutional issues are subjected to. You have probably heard of some of these – strict scrutiny,
for example. The rationality review is the lowest level of review and does not apply in situations where “a
fundamental right is implicated” – applying it to claims by families in poverty for social services is thus very
significant.
The rationality precedent set in Dandridge has been used to legally justify laws that prevented starving
individuals from receiving food aid, and other denials of essential services. It has lead to deaths, which were
found legally justified under the standard applied in Dandridge. This aff makes the argument that SCOTUS
should reverse the ruling in Dandridge, which would increase social services to persons in poverty by finding
that they have a right not to be denied them (i.e., things like the Maryland cap on them are unconstitutional).
Seems pretty topical. The advantages all revolve around a pretty simple claim: when a federal judge says it’s
perfectly fine that an American starved to death because the program that deprived him of food was
“rational,” something is very, very wrong.
Some additional reading:
Dandridge case overview: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0397_0471_ZS.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_n116/ai_15657951/
The Rationality Review and Culture Conflict: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_n116/ai_15657951/
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SCFI 09-10
Rationality Review Aff
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4
Explanation – Rational Basis Standard
This is an in-depth explanation of what the Rationality Review, or Rational Basis Standard, is
Linder, Law @ UMKC, ‘7 (Doug, Exploring Constitutional Law,
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/epcscrutiny.htm)
Introduction
Legislation frequently involves making classifications that either advantage or disadvantage one group of persons, but not another. States
allow 20-year-olds to drive, but don't let 12-year-olds drive. Indigent single parents receive government financial aid that is denied to
millionaires. Obviously, the Equal Protection Clause cannot mean that government is obligated to treat all persons exactly the same--only, at
most, that it is obligated to treat people the same if they are "similarly circumstanced."
Over recent decades, the Supreme Court has developed a three-tiered approach to analysis under the Equal Protection Clause.
Most classifications, as the Railway Express and Kotch cases illustrate, are subject only to rational basis review. Railway Express upholds a New York
City ordinance prohibiting advertising on commercial vehicles--unless the advertisement concerns the vehicle owner's own business. The ordinance, aimed at reducing distractions to drivers, was
underinclusive (it applied to some, but not all, distracting vehicles), but the Court said the classification was rationally related to a legitimate end. Kotch was a tougher case, with the Court voting 5 to 4 to
uphold a Louisiana law that effectively prevented anyone but friends and relatives of existing riverboat pilots from becoming a pilot. The Court suggested that Louisiana's system might serve the legitimate
purpose of promoting "morale and esprit de corps" on the river. The Court continues to apply an extremely lax standard to most legislative classifications. In Federal Communications Commission v
Beach (1993), the Court went so far as to say that economic regulations satisfy the equal protection requirement if "there is any conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the
classification." Justice Stevens, concurring, objected to the Court's test, arguing that it is "tantamount to no review at all."
Classifications involving suspect classifications such as race, however, are subject to closer scrutiny. A rationale for this closer scrutiny was
suggested by the Court in a famous footnote in the 1938 case of Carolene Products v. United States (see box at left). Usually, strict scrutiny
will result in invalidation of the challenged classification--but not always, as illustrated by Korematsu v. United States, in which the Court
upholds a military exclusion order directed at Japanese-Americans during World War II. Loving v Virginia produces a more typical result when
racial classifications are involved: a unanimous Supreme Court strikes down Virginia's miscegenation law.
The Court also applies strict scrutiny to classifications burdening certain fundamental rights. Skinner v Oklahoma considers an Oklahoma law
requiring the sterilization of persons convicted of three or more felonies involving moral turpitude ("three strikes and your snipped"). In Justice
Douglas's opinion invalidating the law we see the origins of the higher-tier analysis that the Court applies to rights of a "fundamental nature"
such as marriage and procreation. Skinner thus casts doubt on the continuing validity of the oft-quoted dictum of Justice Holmes in a 1927
case (Buck v Bell) considering the forced sterilization of certain mental incompetents: "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."
The Court applies a middle-tier scrutiny (a standard that tends to produce less predictable results than strict scrutiny or rational basis scrutiny)
to gender and illegitimacy classifications. Separate pages on this website deal with these issues.
Levels of Scrutiny Under the Three-Tiered Approach to Equal Protection Analysis
1. STRICT SCRUTINY (The government must show that the challenged classification serves a compelling state interest and that the classification
is necessary to serve that interest.):
A. Suspect Classifications:
1. Race
2. National Origin
3. Religion (either under EP or Establishment Clause analysis)
4. Alienage (unless the classification falls within a recognized "political community" exception, in which case only rational basis scrutiny will be
applied).
B. Classifications Burdening Fundamental Rights
1. Denial or Dilution of the Vote
2. Interstate Migration
3. Access to the Courts
4. Other Rights Recognized as Fundamental
2. MIDDLE-TIER SCRUTINY (The government must show that the challenged classification serves an important state interest and that the
classification is at least substantially related to serving that interest.):
Quasi-Suspect Classifications:
1. Gender
2. Illegitimacy
3. MINIMUM (OR RATIONAL BASIS) SCRUTINY (The govenment need only show that the challenged classification is rationally related to serving
a legitimate state interest.)
Minimum scrutiny applies to all classifications other than those listed above, although some Supreme Court cases suggest a slightly closer scrutiny
("a second-order rational basis test") involving some weighing of the state's interest may be applied in cases, for example, involving classifications
that disadvantage mentally retarded people, homosexuals, or innocent children of illegal aliens. (See "Should the Rational Basis Test Have Bite?")
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SCFI 09-10
Rationality Review Aff
Chase
5
Plan Texts
The United States Supreme Court should grant certiorari to a relevant test case and rule that the application of
the rational basis standard in Dandridge v. Williams was unconstitutional
The United States Supreme Court should overturn Dandridge v. Williams
**The United States Supreme Court should grant certiorari to a relevant test case and rule that the rational
basis standard may not be applied to claims for social services by persons living the United States
The United States Supreme Court should rule that the rational basis standard is unconstitutional
The United States Supreme Court should grant certiorari to a relevant test case and rule that the rational basis
standard is unconstitutional
The United States Supreme Court should rule that poverty is a suspect classification which triggers
heightened judicial scrutiny
**my personal recommendation, but pick what you think is best, or write your own…
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Rationality Review Aff
Chase
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1AC
Contention one is the rationality review
The rational basis test is extreme judicial deference – it allows any state interest to overwhelm individual
rights under the equal protection clause
Linder, Prof. law @ UMKC, ‘9
( doug, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rationalbasiswbite.htm)
The traditional rational basis test, as applied in cases such as Williamson v Lee Optical, is extremely deferential--some would call it a total
abdication of judicial responsibility. Under this traditional test, a state law must be upheld if it (or the classification it contains) is rationally
related to any legitimate interest of the state. Moreover, the legitimate interest of the state need not be one that actually motivated legislators
to enact the legislation. It is enough if the interest is now advanced and that it is "conceivable." If attorneys for the state lack the creativity
to come up with a conceivable interest, some justices are willing to help out and supply one themselves.
In Dandridge v. Williams, the supreme court ruled claims to social services would be assessed under the
rationality review – the result is the death of persons resulting from denial of basic services such as food
stamps
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
In the winter of 1987, M. A., a homeless man in poor health challenged the constitutionality of a federal law that barred him from receiving food
stamps because he slept in a city-run shelter.2 The shelter did not provide Mr. A. with the meals that his medical condition required and it often
ran out of food altogether so that he frequently went hungry.3. After repeated hospitalizations, Mr. A. died of renal failure brought on by
malnourishment and dehydration.4 A federal district court found nothing irrational about a legislative classification that withheld food
assistance from a starving man.5
Two decades ago, the Supreme Court held that the constitutional claims of poor people would be assessed under the so-called rationality
review.6 The judiciary must broadly refer to political outcomes in the area of “economics and social welfare,” the Court declared, even when
they deny “the most basic economic needs of impoverished human beings.”7 The reasoning that led to this result is by now familiar.
First, since the Constitution does not expressly guarantee material subsistence,8 the claims of people like Mr. A. implicate no fundamental
right or interest that commands special judicial protection. Second, since the Court does not regard poverty as a suspect classification, even
explicit legislative discrimination against poor people does not trigger heightened judicial scrutiny.9 Rather, the Court will tolerate even
inhumane treatment of poor people because “[u]nder our structure of government” courts ought to defer to democratic decisionmaking,
especially on ordinary distributional matters.10 By justifying its poverty cases in this manner, the Court places considerable weight on a bare
assumption that poor people have fair access to the political process. Yet the Court has never paused to consider whether the political process
is in fact “democratic” with respect to the poor. For the millions like Mr. A., though, having their claims remitted to “the democratic
process” usually means no process at all.
(insert a plan text)
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SCFI 09-10
Rationality Review Aff
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1AC
Contention two is the animal in man
The Dandridge ruling treated the poor as privileged, denying young children social services and condemning
them to starvation in the name of “rationality.” The court made a mockery of the fourteenth amendment.
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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SCFI 09-10
Rationality Review Aff
Chase
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1AC
This precedent created a legal system that allows extreme stratification of wealth while simultaneously
creating a myth that this separation has no political consequences – the result is the destruction of
democracy by oligarcich forces
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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SCFI 09-10
Rationality Review Aff
Chase
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1AC
We must resist this colonization of democratic politics – it leads to the extermination of all human society
Lakeland ’93 Paul , professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, Winter , “Preserving The Lifeworld,
Restoring the Public Sphere, Renewing Higher Education,” Cross Currents, Vol. 43 Issue 4, p488,
http://www.crosscurrents.org/lakeland2
How did we get from a democratic society in which the citizens--no matter how small a minority of the total community
they constituted--truly felt they owned it, to one in which so many are alienated from the political process? One reason
is that in the earlier years the expansion of citizenship and the subsequent increase in educational opportunities did
not lead to the admission of these newly educated classes into the dialogue. Educational reform and improvement in
the standard of living took place within European societies whose class, gender, and race-based social constraints
underwent no serious change; a little learning did not a gentleman make. Another, more recent reason is that
democratization was accompanied by capitalization, so that the passive consumption of culture and commodities with
its attendant apolitical sociability was the path preferred by, or at least open to, the vast majority. In other words, there
are just a lot more citizens; but many of these citizens are the victims of structural oppression, and all are lured by the
blandishments of material ease. Again, to return to Habermas's forms of expression, all this amounts to the
progressive colonization of the lifeworld by the system. If, in the past two hundred years, the public sphere has so
completely failed to fulfill its promise as a market-place for the discourse of a free society, the project must be to
restore it through the revival of true communicative action, that is, to persuade people to talk to one another with
respect, to listen fairly, to argue cleanly, and to move towards consensus on norms for action. That way lies a
democratic future. Any other way leads to one or another form of totalitarianism, including the totalitarianism of mass
consumption culture whose victims are so easily persuaded to pursue its spurious salvation and ersatz heaven.
However, the character of our modern world requires that steps taken to transform the public sphere respect and
reflect the complexity of modern society. We are not just so many individuals sorted into different social classes. We
are rather members of a number of sub-groups, perhaps defined by race, class, gender or religion, as well as
members of the larger body politic. What will be needed is a confluence of these autonomous publics or distinct
interest groups coming together in common concern for the preservation of democratic life. The public sphere will have
to include many more voices than it did in the time of Samuel Johnson, and the consensus on social goods may seem
even more elusive; but the dynamics of the process, so argues Habermas, will help ensure the preservation of a
human society.
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Rationality Review Aff
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1AC
Economic shifts are insufficient – it has become legal doctrine in the United States that profit is more
important than life
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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Rationality Review Aff
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1AC
Legislative acts against the poor condemn them to exclusion from politics in the absence of judicial review –
only a judicial stand with respect to the lives and rights of poor persons can end stereotyping and
stigmatization in American society
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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Rationality Review Aff
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1AC
American democracy is inevitably violent and exclusionary without corrective review
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
(CONTINUES BELOW)
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Rationality Review Aff
Chase
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1AC
(LOFFREDO CONTINUED FROM ABOVE, NO TEXT OMITTED)
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Rationality Review Aff
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1AC
Deliberation in debate forums strengthens democracy and counteracts the exclusion of marginalized groups
from the political process.
Eric Fretz, Director of the Service-Learning Center at Naropa University, Winter 2004 , “Teaching Liberty and
Practicing Deliberative Democracy in the Classroom,” The Campus Compact Reader,
http://www.compact.org/reader/winter04/article2-1.html
A strong democracy is contingent upon informed, active citizens
who can act on public judgment rather than public opinion. Daniel Yankelovich defines public judgment as an
enlightened opinion that is arrived at through dialogue, engagement and the consideration of
multiple perspectives (Coming to Public Judgment 5). For Yankelovich, the “struggle for the soul of America” is being fought between the forces of the
Practicing Deliberative Democracy
market economy and the promise of a Civil Society. Both sides, which Yankelovich sees as mutually exclusive, attempt to renew the culture, but through fundamentally
different means. The market side argues that new directions in technology and a spreading global economy will foster democratic cultures worldwide. The Civic Vision of
America is rooted in a belief that the best way to promote democracy is to encourage public deliberation of controversial issues, foster strong families and communities and
help promote citizens’ civic, rather than professional identities.
One of the ways to shore up America’s Civic Vision is to practice deliberative democracy in our classrooms.
Habermas offers a critical theory of public deliberation in The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere. For Habermas, a robust democracy is contingent upon the existence of a public
sphere where citizens can participate in civic life and debate controversial public issuesii. One of
Jurgen
Habermas’ students, James Bohman defines public deliberation as a “cooperative activity” where individuals with competing opinions
use the art of dialogue to resolve controversial problems (2). Bohman continues to explain that a nation is as democratic as
it practices deliberation; in other words, deliberation is a way to measure the value and
effectiveness of a particular democratic order.
As James Fishkin explains, deliberation is a way to
engage citizens in local and federal issues: “The public can best speak for itself when it can
gather together in some way to hear the arguments on the various sides of an issue and then,
after face to face discussion, come to a collective decision” (4). Deliberative democracies involve
ordinary citizens in the public discourse and decision making of local and federal issues—it uses the opinions and judgments of
experts without simply defaulting to what James Bohman calls “strategic rationality” (5).
Spaces of public
deliberation in contemporary America are difficult to find. As Deborah Tannen has explained in The Argument Culture, ours
is a culture of argument where public discourse is characterized by verbal contests, choosing sides, trotting out facts, and espousing
ideology. Surf through television channels, spin the dial of your radio, walk through the halls of our universities or attend public
meetings--you would have to look long and hard to witness public acts of deliberation where individuals mull over solutions to
problems, engage in civil conversation, reason together, search for common ground and weigh consequences of actions.
Critics
argue that deliberative democracy is untenable or idealistic. They explain that cultural pluralism, social complexity and deep
economic inequalities preclude deliberative democracy from being an effective means of
conducting public policy and solving public problemsiii. The nation, they argue, has become too heterogeneous,
too complex and too fragmented for citizens to effectively deliberate about public issues. Moreover, deliberation never
happens on a level playing field—the voices of individuals with more education, income and
power will inevitably ring louder (not necessarily truer) than citizens with less privilege (Bohman 3,
Fraser 109-142). For a good example of this dynamic, see PBS’s Store Wars, a documentary about Walmart’s (successful) attempt to open a contested site in Virginia. Jane
Mansbridge explains some of the pitfalls of deliberation when she argues that “the transformation of ‘I’ into ‘we’ brought about through political deliberation can easily mask
Subordinate
groups sometimes cannot find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, and when
they do, they discover they are not heard” (qtd. in Fraser 119). On the other hand, in a place as pluralistic,
diverse and open as the United States, democratic deliberation can be seen as an effective way to
mend a balkanized nation. A deliberative democracy strives for a shared vision that gets beyond individual and group
subtle forms of control. Even the language people use as they reason together usually favors one way of seeing things and discourages others.
interests, not by sacrificing them, but by incorporating competing visions and ideas into a consensual sphere. Public deliberation is not
an effort to create a forced consensus and ignore cultural, ethnic, racial and religious differences. Rather, deliberation is a tool to
acknowledge difference and attempt to build dialogue and understanding through discussion, storytelling and explanation.
Through the development of what Nancy Fraser calls “subaltern counterpublics,” marginalized
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groups (e.g. blacks, gays, students, fast food workers) can organize to develop strong, public voices that can become a part
of the public sphere. Creating spaces for citizens to discuss and dialogue is one of the best ways
to recognize differences and use them as a way to create a shared vision of how we want our communities to
operate and what we choose to value and support.
1AC
Allowing the state to abandon its obligations of social services empowers extremists to subvert democratic
governance and sentences the poor to being disposable objects of the neoliberal police state. We must resist
this takeover of the pubic sphere at all costs.
Henry Giroux, GTN Chair Professor at McMaster University in Canada, 8/7/2004, “Neoliberalism and the
Demise of Democracy: Resurrecting Hope in Dark Times”, http://dissidentvoice.org/Aug04/Giroux0807.htm
The liberal democratic vocabulary of rights, entitlements, social provisions, community, social
responsibility, living wage, job security, equality, and justice seem oddly out of place in a country where the
promise of democracy has been replaced by casino capitalism, a winner-take-all philosophy, suited to lotto players and day traders alike. As
corporate culture extends even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political society, buttressed daily by a culture industry largely in the hands of concentrated capital, it is reinforced even further by the pervasive fear and insecurity of
there is no vocabulary for
progressive social change, democratically inspired visions, or critical notions of social agency
to expand the meaning and purpose of democratic public life. Against the reality of low wage
jobs, the erosion of social provisions for a growing number of people and the expanding war against young people of color at
home and empire-building abroad, the market-driven juggernaut of neoliberalism continues to mobilize desires in the
interest of producing market identities and market relationships that ultimately sever the link between education and social
change while reducing agency to the obligations of consumerism. As neoliberal ideology and corporate culture extend even deeper into the
the public that the future holds nothing beyond a watered down version of the present. As the prevailing discourse of neoliberalism seizes the public imagination,
basic institutions of civil and political society, there is a simultaneous diminishing of non-commodified public spheres —those institutions such as public schools, independent bookstores, churches, noncommercial public broadcasting stations,
libraries, trade unions and various voluntary institutions engaged in dialogue, education, and learning–that address the relationship of the individual to public life and foster social responsibility and provide a robust vehicle for public
In the vacuum left by diminishing democracy, religious zealotry, cultural
chauvinism, xenophobia, and racism have become the dominant tropes of neoconservatives and other
extremist groups eager to take advantage of the growing insecurity, fear, and anxiety that result
from increased joblessness, the war on terror, and the unraveling of communities. As public space is increasingly
participation and democratic citizenship.
commodified and the state becomes more closely aligned with capital, politics is defined largely by its policing functions rather than an agency for peace
and social reform. As
the state abandons its social investments in health, education, and the public welfare. It
increasingly takes on the functions of an enhanced police or security state, the signs of which
are most visible in the increasing use of the state apparatus to spy on and arrests its subjects,
the incarceration of individuals coincided disposable (primarily people of color), and the
ongoing criminalization of social policies. Examples of the latter include anti-begging ordinances and anti-loitering that fine or
punish homeless people for sitting or lying down too long in public places. [11] An even more despicable example of the barbaric nature of
emphasis on profits over people and its willingness to punish rather than serve
the poor and disenfranchised can be seen in the growing tendency of many hospitals across the country to have patients arrested and jailed if they cannot pay their
neoliberalism with its
medical bills. The policy, right out of the pages of George Orwell’s 1984, represents a return to debtors prisons, which is now chillingly called “body attachment,” and is “ basically a warrant for... the
is not simply an economic policy designed to cut government spending, pursue
it is also a political philosophy and ideology that
effects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical economic, political, and experiential shift that now largely defines the citizen as a
consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism
portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values , and
reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized and provides the conditions for an emerging form of protofascism that must be resisted at all costs. Neoliberalism not only enshrines unbridled individualism, it also destroys
any vestige of democratic society by undercutting its “moral, material, and regulatory
moorings,” [13] and in doing so it offers no language for understanding how the future might be grasped outside of the narrow logic of the market. But there is even more at stake here than the obliteration of public concerns,
patient’s arrest.” [12] Neoliberalism
free trade policies, and free market forces from government regulations;
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the death of the social, the emergence of a market-based fundamentalism that undercuts the ability of people to understand how to translate the privately experienced misery into collective action, and the elimination of the gains of the welfare
As democracy becomes a
burden under the reign of neoliberalism, civic discourse disappears and the reign of unfettered social Darwinism with its
state. There is also the growing threat of displacing “political sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market, as if the latter has a mind and morality of its own.” [14]
survival-of-the-slickest philosophy emerges as the template for a new form of proto-fascism. None of this will happen in the face of sufficient resistance,
nor is the increasing move toward proto-fascism inevitable, but the
conditions exist for democracy to lose all
semblance of meaning in the United States.
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1AC
And, the rationality review was used to heavily cut back social programs and increase impoverishment –
harsh economic conditions can be directly tied to the idea that government imposition on the poor should be
unchecked
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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1AC
The Dandridge decision is perceived as settling questions of law regarding poverty; the result is waning
academic interest and research in legal poverty issues. The plan revitalizes poverty jurisprudence, creating a
renewed legal civic engagement
Loffredo, Prof Law @ CUNY, ‘7
(Stephen, Poverty, Inequality, and Class, 34 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1240)
Although poverty and economic inequality continue to be salient national issues with distinct constitutional dimensions, explanations for the
declining presence of poverty-law issues in constitutional scholarship and teaching are not hard to conjure. Perhaps the pri- mary factor is
the sense that the Supreme Court in the early 1970s settled the “big issues” at the intersection of constitutional law and poverty law (i.e.,
whether a right to subsistence inheres in the Con- stitution and whether wealth constitutes a suspect or quasi-suspect classification)39 and
that the prospects for doctrinal movement are remote given the conservative judicial climate. Of course, doctri- nal stability is not in itself
sufficient reason for halting scholarly inquiry and critique, as the work of constitutional conservatives through the 1970s and 1980s and their
elaboration of a “constitu- tion-in-exile” ultimately illustrated.40 The difference may be in the perception that constitutional scholarship
addressing poverty and class is no longer taken seriously, is not quite respectable, or is eas- ily dismissed as “advocacy scholarship,” and
that the path to suc- cess in academia and beyond lies elsewhere. On the other hand, at least some constitutional scholars have criticized
the waning aca- demic attention to the constitutional implications of wealth, pov- erty, and class.41 Whatever one concludes about the
content and direction of con- stitutional scholarship, the argument for addressing issues of eco- nomic inequality, poverty, and class in the
constitutional curriculum seems unanswerable. Law schools have an obligation to train their students not only as technical practitioners but
also as “lawyer-citizens,” many of whom will assume positions of public power and responsibility. A natural and indispensable venue for this
broader training is the constitutional law course. As Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson have argued, teachers designing a constitutional law
course should bear in mind that “lawyers per- form a special ‘citizenship’ role in a democracy” requiring that they understand not only the
fundamental workings and history of the American legal system, but also its shortcomings, so that they may “participate in and contribute to .
. . discussions about . . . whether America is in fact well served by particular aspects of its law and whether certain radical changes might not
be desirable.”42 Balkin and Levinson note, correctly I think, that constitutional law courses are uniquely situated to serve this function and
that the standard curriculum reflects a general orientation in that direction.43 The principal justification for the basic constitutional law course
cannot be the preparation of students to litigate open constitutional ques- tions, since most of the curriculum addresses decidedly settled
questions and most students will never litigate a constitutional is- sue. Rather, the central goal must be an education in our constitu- tional
system, its history, structure, and evolution and how it generates, interacts with, and responds to the challenges facing the country. By this
metric, poverty-law issues—including the treatment of poverty as a constitutional category, state responsibility for the dis- tribution of wealth,
opportunity, and power, state obligation to see to the material well-being of its citizens, and the impacts of poverty and radical economic
inequality on our social structures, legal sys- tem, and political processes—all deserve a place in the constitu- tional law curriculum. These
issues embody some of the most pressing social, political, and moral questions of our time and sharply pose the question of whether settled
constitutional doc- trines have served the nation and its underlying constitutional val- ues well. In addition, attending to questions of poverty
and economic inequality in a course on constitutional law in particular highlights the gravity of those issues, illuminates the role of law and
legal institutions in creating or alleviating economic injustice and distress, and may even reinforce the idea that the legal profes- sion bears
an obligation to counteract the translation of economic inequality into inequality of citizenship and inequality before the law.44
***regarding footnote 39: in the text, Lofreddo references the Dandridge decision as finding there is no
constitutional right to subsistence
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1AC
And, the integration of poverty into increased scrutiny classifications causes a rethinking of the legal system
by the next generation
Hershkoff, Prof of Law at NYU, ‘7 (Helen, “Poverty Law and Civil Procedure: Rethinking the First-Year Course,
Fordahm Urb. L.J. Sept. 2007 )
Litigation is not just a contest between two opposing private parties. It also is a state-sanctioned process that uses public money
and is subject to constitutional constraints.13 Within this public law
framework, at least three important constitutional values animate
civil procedure: due process, equality, and rights to association and
expression.14 Nevertheless, the civil procedure canon includes very
few constitutional decisions and of these only a handful accords
any significance to the effect of wealth disparities on dispute resolution processes. This absence of “constitutional civil procedure”15
comports with the Court’s general unwillingness to treat poverty as
a suspect trait or to accord heightened scrutiny to wealth classifications.16 Introducing issues of poverty and inequality into the standard course broadens students’ conceptual framework and allows
them to evaluate not only the operation of specific procedural
rules, but also the overall design and assumptions of the civil justice system.
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1AC
The plan is necessary to destroy the myth that the marginalization of the poor is an inevitable and desirable
facet of American political life. We must enable social progress.
Loffredo, Prof Law @ CUNY, ‘7
(Stephen, Poverty, Inequality, and Class, 34 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1240)
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1AC
This class-based understanding institutionalizes the view that ‘those who own the country ought to run it.’
The plan is a necessary legal deconstruction of oligarchy in America. Politics and law must be accessible for
more than the super-rich.
Loffredo, Prof Law @ CUNY, ‘7
(Stephen, Poverty, Inequality, and Class, 34 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1240)
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1AC
Recent decisions open the door to the breakdown of exclusionary politics – but the rationality review’s regime
of scapegoating and marginalization must end. The affirmative is necessary to complete transitions away from
elitism.
Loffredo, Prof Law @ CUNY, ‘7
(Stephen, Poverty, Inequality, and Class, 34 Fordham Urb. L.J. 1240)
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1AC
The role of the ballot is to endorse the ideal of justice in opposition to rational calculation – the guarantee of
justice to come. Policy simulations are an attempt to reduce the irreducible; you should ignore risk
calculations in favor of the absolute risk of justice
Doty 6 (roxanne lynn, Associate Professor Department of Political Science Arizona State University Tempe,
Arizona, “fronteras compasivas and the ethics of unconditional hospitality”, millenium- journal of international
studies 2006; 35; 53, http://mil.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/35/1/53)
The concept of unconditional hospitality is located in the now sizeable body of Derrida’s writings on justice and ethics and is inextricably
intertwined with his ideas on numerous other ‘undecidable quasi-concepts’ such as democracy, forgiveness, friendship and
cosmopolitanism.23 Derrida explicitly addressed issues of justice and ethics, beginning with The Other Heading, but they have arguably
always been present in his project of deconstruction, hence the statement, ‘deconstruction is justice’. The concept of hospitality figures
prominently in these discussions as illustrated in his claim that ‘ethics is hospitality’.24 Derrida finds an implosion or self-deconstruction at work
in the very core of the concept of hospitality, the same aporia he discovers in the concept of justice which he articulated in his now classic
essay, ‘Force of Law’.25 In this much-discussed essay, he examined the relationship between law and justice arguing that justice requires an
experience of the impossible, an experience of aporia. However, ‘experience’ is itself contradictory because experience is ‘something that
traverses and travels toward a destination for which it finds the appropriate passage. The experience finds it way, its passage, it is possible.’26
But, aporia does not allow passage. It is a non-road. Still, there is no justice without this experience of aporia, however impossible such an
experience may be. ‘A will, a desire, a demand for justice whose structure wouldn’t be an experience of aporia would have no chance to be
what it is, namely a call for justice.’27 Such an experience may be law, but law is not justice. ‘Law is the element of calculation, and it is just
that there be law, but justice is incalculable.’28 In contrast to law, justice requires absolute risk, not certainty. One must avoid good conscience
as subjective certainty because it ‘is incompatible with the absolute risk that every promise, every engagement, and every responsible decision
– if there are such – must run’.29 To buttress a promise, an engagement, a decision by the certainty of being right, of being on the side of
reason, the side
of conscience, the side of science, the side of truth is to transform the experience into a deployment of a programme or the application of a
rule. These things might seem to offer protection, a guarantee that responsibility has been carried out and Derrida does not suggest we
completely abandon them. Such certainties nevertheless remain heterogeneous to the experience of the aporia inherent in responsibility’s
call.30 So, the fulfilment of responsibility, whether to justice, democracy, or hospitality, must always take the form of a promise, a promise that
is always ‘to come’. Justice, hospitality, democracy are all experiences ‘of the impossible’, though this does not mean they cannot occur.31 We
do, in fact, sometimes experience justice, hospitality, and democracy, but such experiences are of the impossible because the concepts
themselves with which we name the experiences are imbued with undecidability. We construct these concepts in the attempt to capture, to
translate what cannot be translated and the risk is ever present of reducing the experience to the language-dependent concept and/or to a
mechanized technique or programme. The insistence on undecidability is to guard against such a reduction. Given this, one could never come
up with a body of specific laws or rules pertaining to such concepts. One could never list with any certitude the conditions under which
experiences of these things might happen. One could never define with any exactitude a set of objective social scientific indicators that would
attest to the presence of these impossible experiences, which might nevertheless happen. Justice, hospitality can only be poetic in
the sense that they, like so many other experiences, are untranslatable through language. They push against the limits
of language and perhaps of comprehension itself. Like a poem, we must allow these things to ‘come close to a silence
around which discourse is ordered and that a poem sometimes discovers, but always pulls itself back from unveiling in
the very movement of speech or writing’.32
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Court DA Link Uniqueness
Rhenquist court precedent puts rationality review into a grey area – either the plan affirms recent rulings and
isn’t activism or the link to the disad is non-unique
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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AT Activism / Dandridge = Bad Law
The plan is a constructionist decision adhering to strict constitutional frameworks
Loffredo, Prof Law @ CUNY, ‘93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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AT Activism/Dandridge = Bad Law
Hershkoff, Prof of Law at NYU, ‘7 (Helen, “Poverty Law and Civil Procedure: Rethinking the First-Year Course,
Fordahm Urb. L.J. Sept. 2007 )
The requirement of equal protection likewise provides opportu- nities for discussing the effect of wealth disparities on the opera- tion of civil
procedure. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observes: “Equal Justice Under Law” is etched about the U.S. Supreme Court’s grand entrance. It is
an ideal that remains aspirational. Thanks in part to efforts by lawyers, race, gender, and other in- cidents of birth no longer bar access to
justice as they once did. It remains true, however, that the poor, and even the middle class, encounter financial impediments to a day in court.
They do not enjoy the secure access available to those with full purses or political muscle.32 Inequality as an economic term embraces a
variety of concepts that point to different constitutional concerns. Some commenta- tors equate inequality with impoverishment and focus on
the ways in which resource insufficiency might bar or impede a poor person from participating in the market, in politics, and in court. 33 For
others, inequality refers to income differences that distort demo- cratic life by generating comparative advantages for the
wealthy.34 As with due process, equal protection in the procedural context stands for a number of discrete but overlapping
concerns: the pro- vision of formal opportunities to access the courts; the availability of resources needed to make meaningful
use of the adjudicative system; and the need for consistency in the decisions of judges and other legal decision-makers.35
Disparate or inadequate resources impact a party’s competitive position relative to an opponent. 36 They also may make it
impossible to hurdle state-imposed filing fees, to retain a lawyer, or otherwise to access the civil justice sys- tem.37 The
phenomenon of “repeat players” in the court system creates still other troublesome concerns.38 Yet even during the heyday of
the Warren Court, the Equal Protection Clause was rarely deployed to remediate problems of inequality in the civil liti- gation
setting;39 the Court’s use of rationality review is famously fatal to any claim of unconstitutionality regarding economic classification.40 With rare exceptions, constitutional doctrine thus em- braces rule formalism, criticized by some as “a legal equality
that conceals practical domination.”41 Consistent with this view, proce- dural rules that exclude, burden, or otherwise
disadvantage indi- viduals on the basis of wealth are accepted as constitutional, despite the practical denial of equal access or
equal outcomes.42 By introducing issues of poverty and inequality into the discussion, students can better explore the differing
conceptions of equality that motivate procedural justice and the ways in which the current system conforms or diverges from a
principle of “equality before the law.”43
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AT Activism / Judicial Tyranny
Their judicial tyranny claims are ironic paranoia – history is littered with major court revisions of legislation;
we control uniqueness and this is a bad excuse for the marginalization of poor citizens
Loffredo, Prof Law @ CUNY, ‘93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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AT Bork/Winter (Conservative Apologism)
Poverty kills an American child every fifty three minutes – the market apologist idea that since conditions
have improved from the dark ages the poor should just stop complaining is full of callous disregard for life
and obliviousness to the realities of poverty
Loffredo, Prof Law @ CUNY, ‘93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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AT Bork/Winter (Conservative Apologism)
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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Dandridge Key
Dandridge ruling was the “kiss of death” to economic equal protection in the United States
Winter, Prof of Law @ Yale, ’72 (Ralph K., Jr., Poverty, Economic Equality, and the Equal Protection Clause,
1972 Supreme Court Review. 41, p. 57).
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AT Poverty Inevitable
It doesn’t have to be an exclusionary and violent social construct
Lofreddo, Prof law @ CUNY, ’93
(Stephen, Poverty, Democracy, and Constitutional Law, 141 U. PA L. Rev. 1277)
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Activism Good
Judicial Activism is the last stand against tyranny and human rights abuses
Saikrishna Prakash, Professor of Law, University of San Diego. University of Colorado Law Review, “ARE THE
JUDICIAL SAFEGUARDS OF FEDERALISM THE ULTIMATE FORM OF CONSERVATIVE JUDICIAL ACTIVISM?”
Fall, 2002
As in Philadelphia, participants in the public ratification debates remarked that the courts would safeguard individual rights. At
the Virginia ratifying convention, John Marshall argued that the judiciary would provide succor to victims of federal brutality,
stating, "[to] what quarter will you look for protection from an infringement on the Constitution, if you will not give the power to
the Judiciary? There is no other body that can afford such a protection ... . Were a law made to authorize [brutality], it would be
void." n42 Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph made similar claims. He argued that even if Congress imposed excessive bail
and fines and mandated cruel and unusual punishments, "judges must judge contrary to justice" n43 for these punishments to
matter. Likewise, Randolph contended, if general warrants were authorized, [*1376] would not the federal judiciary "be
independent enough to prevent such oppressive practices? If they will not do justice to persons injured, may not they go to our
own State judiciaries and obtain it?" n44 At the Massachusetts ratifying convention, Theophilus Parsons denied that the absence
of a bill of rights would matter. He argued that because "no power was given to Congress to infringe on any one of the natural
rights of the people ... should they attempt it without constitutional authority, the act would be a nullity, and could not be
enforced." n45 Marshall, Randolph, and Parsons voiced the common view: If Congress violated the rights of the people, the
judiciary would ignore the statute. Each assumed the propriety and desirability of judicial review of federal legislation.
Judicial deference causes militarism – activism is key to check extinction
Kellman ‘89
(Barry, Prof – Depaul, Duke Law Journal, December, Lexis)
In this era of thermonuclear weapons, America must uphold its historical commitment to be a nation of law. Our strength grows from the resolve to subject
military force to constitutional authority. Especially in these times when weapons proliferation can lead to nuclear winter, when weapons production can cause
cancer, when soldiers die unnecessarily in the name of readiness: those who control military force must be held accountable under law. As the Supreme Court
recognized a generation ago, the Founders envisioned the army as a necessary institution, but one dangerous to liberty if not confined within its essential bounds. Their fears were rooted in
history. They knew that ancient republics had been overthrown by their military leaders. . . .. . . We cannot close our eyes to the fact that today the peoples of many nations are ruled by the military. We should not
break faith with this Nation's tradition of keeping military power subservient to civilian authority, a tradition which we believe is firmly embodied in the Constitution. 1 Our fears may be rooted in more recent
history. During the decade of history's largest peacetime military expansion (1979-1989), more than 17,000 service personnel were killed in training accidents. 2 In the same period, virtually every facility in the
nuclear bomb complex has been revealed [*1598] to be contaminated with radioactive and poisonous materials; the clean-up costs are projected to exceed $ 100 billion. 3 Headlines of fatal B-1B bomber crashes, 4
the downing of an Iranian passenger plane, 5 the Navy's frequent accidents 6 including the fatal crash of a fighter plane into a Georgia apartment complex, 7 remind Americans that a tragic price is paid to support the
military establishment. Other commentaries may distinguish between the specific losses that might have been preventable and those which were the random consequence of what is undeniably a dangerous military
program. This Article can only repeat the questions of the parents of those who have died: "Is the military accountable to anyone? Why is it allowed to keep making the same mistakes? How many more lives must be
lost to senseless accidents?" 8 This Article describes a judicial concession of the law's domain, ironically impelled by concerns for "national security." In three recent controversies involving weapons testing, the
judiciary has disallowed tort accountability for serious and unwarranted injuries. In United States v. Stanley, 9 the Supreme Court ruled that an Army sergeant, unknowingly drugged with LSD by the Central
Intelligence Agency, could not pursue a claim for deprivation of his constitutional rights. In Allen v. United States, 10 civilian victims of atmospheric atomic testing were
denied a right of tort recovery against the government officials who managed and performed the tests. Finally, in Boyle v. United Technologies, 11 the Supreme
Court ruled that private weapons manufacturers enjoy immunity from product liability actions alleging design defects. A critical analysis of these decisions
reveals that the judiciary, notably the Rehnquist Court, has abdicated its responsibility to review civil matters involving the military security establishment. 12
[*1599] Standing at the vanguard of "national security" law, 13 these three decisions elevate the task of preparing for war to a level beyond legal [*1600]
accountability. They suggest that determinations of both the ends and the means of national security are inherently above the law and hence unreviewable
regardless of the legal rights transgressed by these determinations. This conclusion signals a dangerous abdication of judicial responsibility. The very
underpinnings of constitutional governance are threatened by those who contend that the rule of law weakens the execution of military policy. Their argument -that because our adversaries are not restricted by our Constitution, we should become more like our adversaries to secure ourselves -- cannot be sustained if our
tradition of adherence to the rule of law is to be maintained. To the contrary, the judiciary must be willing to demand adherence to legal principles by assessing
responsibility for weapons decisions. This Article posits that judicial abdication in this field is not compelled and certainly is not desirable. The legal system can
provide a useful check against dangerous military action, more so than these three opinions would suggest. The judiciary must rigorously scrutinize military
decisions if our 18th century dream of a nation founded in musket smoke is to remain recognizable in a millennium ushered in under the mushroom cloud of
thermonuclear holocaust. History shows that serious consequences ensue when the judiciary defers excessively to military authorities. Perhaps the most
celebrated precedent for the deference to military discretion reflected in these recent decisions is the Supreme Court's 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United
[*1601] States. 14 Korematsu involved the conviction of an American citizen of Japanese descent for violating a wartime exclusion order against all persons of
Japanese ancestry. That order, issued after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, declared that "the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection
against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities." 15 Justice Hugo Black's opinion
for the Court, upholding the exclusion order and Korematsu's conviction, stressed the hardships occasioned by war and held that "the power to protect must be
commensurate with the threatened danger."
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Activism Good
Deference violates SOP – turns their strict constructionist claims
Hofstra Law Review ‘89
(Winter, Lexis)
First, critics have challenged the Court's core premise that deference is mandated by the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. 81 Indeed, critics
argue that the principle of deference undermines, rather than advances, the theory of separation of powers. 82 Since Marbury v. Madison, 83 it has been the
function of the judiciary and not the political branches to delimit the bounds of permissible governmental conduct and the scope of constitutionally protected
rights. 84 The principle of deference, however, is diametrically opposed to this tradition. 85 As a consequence, critics argue that the principle of deference does
not reflect a heightened respect for the political branches of government, but rather, a clear abdication of the traditional judicial function. 86 Moreover, while
critics acknowledge that it is Congress that has taken the initiative during this century in moving the military closer [*479] to civilian legal standards, 87 they
argue that this alone is not an adequate justification for relinquishing the judicial review function. 88 Since the political branches must necessarily accommodate
majority interests, subtler forms of constitutional deprivations affecting minority interests are likely to be glossed over. 89 For this reason, it was decided long
ago that the judiciary should be the final arbiter of the constitutionality of governmental conduct. 90
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Framework
Ethics precedes political outcomes: only ethical deliberation accedes to the highest responsibilities of politics
and makes the practice meaningful
Bernard-Donals, Prof. of English @ University of Wisconson, Madison, ‘5 (Michael, “Difficult Freedom:
Levinas, Language, and Politics” diacritics 35.3 62-77)
In a way reminiscent of Geoffrey Harpham's notion of ethics, as laid out in his essays in Getting It Right and Shadows of Ethics, Levinas's
moment of approach is the ethical moment par excellence: it's the moment at which all possible options for action are as yet unforeclosed, the
moment just prior to choosing what for better or worse might be called the proper course of action. The moment of proximity for Levinas, like
the ethical [End Page 63] moment for Harpham, is radically open, one in which no name has been supplied for either one's self or the other,
and in which the question of how one ought to act has not been definitively decided. Ideally, any utterance at such a moment attempts to hold
that moment open: it resists the temptation to name the other, to foreclose courses of action, or to describe the situation in which the speaker
finds herself. Of course, this isn't possible: choosing is inevitable, as is producing an utterance that will necessarily be at odds with the open
moment that compels it.
What such radical openness also makes clear, though, is that the individual—not to mention her interlocutor—is exceptionally vulnerable in
such an encounter. Exposure "identifies me as the unique one, not by reducing me to myself, but by stripping me of every [identity], and thus
all form, all investiture" [OTB 49]. Elsewhere Levinas writes that exposure—the moment of ethical openness—is a "giving," where the
individual gives up his or her name ("I am I") in favor of being responsible to and for the other with whom she has contact. The moment isn't
reciprocal—there are no guarantees that the other individual will respond with the same openness or willingness to engage—and with that
nonreciprocity comes vulnerability. The other could respond by foreclosing the encounter in any number of ways: for instance, by falling back
into what he already knows, the familiarity of names and of precedents, which for Levinas is a kind of violence. His has sometimes been called
a trauma theory of ethics, in which the speaker has to essentially empty herself of names, regularities, and knowledge at the moment of her
encounter with the other, a literal turning inside out (a denucleation or coring out). But this coring out of the self is the heart of Levinas's ethical
system: it is the only way in which individuals as subjects can catch a glimpse of what resides beyond the regularities of reason which restrict
human action and which foreclose the possibility of real contact between and among individuals one person (one "face") at a time.
One of the reasons Alain Badiou, in Ethics, rejects Levinas's notion of otherness is that it works against the possibility of establishing what he
calls "truths," the enactment of or engagement with the consequences of an event. For Badiou as for Levinas, knowledge is static, objective,
encumbered by institutions, names, and what Lyotard has called—in a different context—"the monopoly of the cognitive regimen of phrases"
[57]. The ethical imperative is to break with this monopoly by "identify[ing] in thought of singular situations. There is no ethics in general. There
are only—eventually—ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation" [Badiou 16]. To engage in the production of truths
is to "treat [the situation—the moment of engagement—] right to the limit of the possible," to "draw from the situation, to the greatest possible
extent, the affirmative humanity that it contains" [15]. For Badiou, the problem with an ethics of otherness is that it devalorizes the term
"humanity" as something essential, as part of the problem: it names individuals as a "we." The denucleation of the self—the notion that
individuals are defined by their suffering—is precisely what ethics should seek to avoid. Badiou provides the example of the doctor in a
national medical plan: because he is forced to work for the national Good, that doctor must refuse to treat the alien, who is "without legal
residency papers, or not a contributor to Social Security." In such a situation, the doctor ignores that he must work to alleviate the suffering of
the individual, regardless of the national Good, "using everything he knows and with all the means at his disposal, without taking anything else
into consideration" [15]. It is the doctor's ethical obligation to affiliate himself with the sick person, regardless of national or institutional
affiliation, and to engage with him "right to the limit of the possible."
But Badiou misunderstands, I think, the degree to which Levinas's notion of approach, and the radically open nature of the encounter with the
other (in this case, the patient), is ethical under criteria—Badiou calls them axioms—not unlike his own. "[E]very situation, inasmuch as it is, is
a multiple composed of an infinity of elements, each one [End Page 64] [Begin Page 66] of which is itself a multiple. Considered in their
simple belonging to a situation (to an infinite multiple), the animals of the species Homo sapiens are ordinary multiplicities." To put it another
way, "infinite alterity is quite simply what there is" [25]. When Levinas writes that responsibility should be unhitched from "logical deliberation
summoned by reasoned decision" [OTB 111] and instead should be reconfigured as a response anterior to knowledge of being, to the
"nakedness [of] a face" [TI 213], he's getting at much the same thing. This is the command that we engage with individuals, from one moment
to the next, without regard to the singularity of names, "to the limit of the possible." As Marie Baird puts it in an essay that accounts for the
theological dimension of Levinas's work as much as the political promise, "the ethical subject is held hostage by the human face"—the face of
the nonresident alien, who has fallen ill and is without papers or insurance—"and takes up responsibility for the life of the other—before being
for itself" [156]. Without thinking; without naming; without knowing; simply doing. Such an encounter, for both Badiou and for Levinas, is
resistant to knowledge precisely because "concepts suppose an anticipation, a horizon within which alterity is amortized as soon as it is
announced precisely because it has let itself be foreseen" [Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics" 95]. Both Levinas and Badiou are working to
ensure that "there is no circumstance under which we could declare that" human situations like that faced by the doctor, or crises like those in
Israel or in other parts of the world, "[are] not our concern" [Campbell and Shapiro 35].
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Ethics and Politics
The difficulty is that Levinas's ethics, like the doctor's encounter with the sick patient, takes place one individual and one situation at a time.
But "[i]n the real world there are many others" ["Ideology and Idealism" 247]. If we think of politics in its classical formulation as the art of
statecraft, then the radically individual nature of ethics on Levinas's terms seems to require an intermediate step between it and an the
formulation of consensus or the development of policy. If we think of politics in a more contemporary sense—the development of a
communitarian or national identity that can be deployed so that benefits may be accrued to its members—then Levinas's principle of
nonidentity (the idea that the pronominal "I" cannot name or substitute for the subject) seems to rule that sense of politics out of court as well.
But as with his approach toward language and ethics, Levinas's politics works against the orthodoxies of the classical (and even modern)
tradition. As Derrida puts it in Adieu, it "require[s] us to think law and politics otherwise" [20–21]. Derrida goes so far as to suggest that there is
a "hiatus" between ethics and politics in Levinas's work, which may well be true. But it's precisely that hiatus—the idea of a rupture or aporia
between that which can be known and that which compels us to know it—that lies at the heart of Levinas's political thought.
One of Levinas's principal notions in Totality and Infinity is that of hospitality or of welcoming, a notion that is closely connected to the idea of
proximity and approach in Otherwise than Being. Playing on the double meaning of the French hôte as both "host" and "guest," Levinas's
implication is that when an individual engages another in discourse—at the ethical moment—he acts at once as host and as guest. Derrida
glosses the term's double meaning this way: apropos Rosenzweig, there is a divine law "that would make of the inhabitant a guest [hôte]
received in his own home, that would make of the owner a tenant, of the welcoming host [hôte] a welcomed guest [hôte]" [42]. The
displacement involved here is not just a conceptual or epistemological one; it's also, potentially, a physical one. When the individual engages
the other, she resides in a kind of no-man's-land, in which she is both at home and in exile, neither completely apart from, nor completely a
part of, the community or the location from which she speaks. [End Page 66]
Derrida goes even further—the host is a not only a host or a guest; the host [hôte] is also a hostage [ostage]. He writes in Adieu, paraphrasing
Otherwise than Being [111–12] that
the host is a hostage insofar as he is a subject put into question, obsessed (and thus besieged), persecuted, in the
very place where he takes place, where, as emigrant, exile, stranger, a guest from the very beginning, he finds
himself elected to or taken up by a residence before himself electing or taking one up.
[56]
In ethical terms, the individual is vulnerable because she is troubled by the presence of that other. She is, in this sense, the other's hostage,
forced to put herself in the other's place with no way to know whether her (charitable) act will be returned in kind. In political terms, the subject
is noncoincident both with herself and with the location of her utterance: there is no place that she can comfortably call home, or domicile, or
community, or nation. Though she may speak from a location that is home, or domicile, or nation, her relation to that place is, like her relation
with the other, "thrown out of phase with itself": it isn't "natural," a point of origin from which everything else may be easily understood. The
state, not unlike biblical cities of refuge, should be seen as places for the exile—the individual "put into question"—to find respite; in that
respite, the individual becomes committed (or, in the case of the refugee, recommitted) to the possibility that what sent him into exile—what is
beyond being, beyond the utterance—might be redeemed [see Levinas, Beyond the Verse 38–47].
What allows ethics to become politics is what Levinas calls "the third." While the subject's relation to the other is always fraught and always
tenuous, what raises the stakes is the presence of a third party to whom both the speaker and the other are also responsible. The third—"the
neighbor and the one far off" [Isaiah 57: 19]—introduces the notion of justice. "The third introduces a contradiction in the saying. [. . .] A
question of conscience, consciousness. Justice is necessary, that is, comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling" [OTB
157]. Individuals must be responsible not only for one another but also for those they cannot see. This is different from the Kantian categorical
imperative, whereby one must assume that his actions would be determinative of the law for everyone else. Instead, Levinas's third acts as a
witness: anything I might do or say will be seen, even only potentially, by the third, and forces me to compare my individual, unique act with
other acts, other utterances, that might be carried out by someone I do not know. It forces, in Levinas's terms, "a weighing, a thinking, a
calculation, the comparison of incomparables, and consequently, the neutrality—presence or representation—of being" ["Peace and Proximity"
168]. And yet it is justice, ironically, that potentially corrupts ethics—the ethics in which the other's response might be violent and in which the
speaker's utterance itself may require a certain traumatic undoing (denucleation) of the self—but makes politics possible. It is this comparison
of incomparables that allows the ethical actor to think the radical individuality of his act as something other than solitary or unique, despite
(oddly) its uniqueness.
While saying and acting make evident an aspect of being that is beyond language and beyond action, the act and the utterance are made in
the context of "the calculations, knowledge, science, and consciousness that nonetheless condition it" [Adieu 116]. Acting in the context of
justice gives a "content" to what we do—meanings can be assigned to it by our neighbors in spite of whatever meaning or meaninglessness
we ourselves assign—though that content must always be acted upon in its turn ethically. For Levinas, ethics and politics occur in the same
act; one acts ethically, politics comes after ("whether in logical consequence or chronological sequence" [Adieu 83]): one acts toward
one individual at a time, knowing—given the presence of the third, the neighbor—that that act [End Page 67] takes place in a community of
other individuals who we can't see at the moment but on whom our action may have a palpable effect.
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Framework
Our moral and ethical reasons to unconditionally assist people are not an “advantage” which should be
weighed against the risks of the plan. It is a consequence of the infinite and obligation we have to all others
and a pretext to life itself - an unavoidable responsibility that is alone fills life with love and compassion
Brody 95, professor @ University of Essex
D.H., “Emmanual Levinas: The Logic of Ethical Ambiguity in Otherwise than Being and Beyond”, Research in
Phenomenology, 25
the structure of the psyche is the uniquness of “me” as other, an identity “behind” identification, beyond the refractive operations of
consciousness, beyond an Kantian arguments for a transcendental structure determining experience, and equally beyond any empirical induction. As responsibility, subjectivity “is structured as the one-for-the-other. It signifies
outside of all finality and every system.” Responsibility is in the imperative, not the denominative; it cannot be subject to any declension of thought. In other words, it
refuses access by an logos organizing the hermeneutic possibilities of discourse. Before the passing of information is the Other who bears the message in an offering without
reserve, utterly divested of all form, plasticity, or theme. The signifyingness of subjectivity is an in-formation, or a breathing of alterity into the giving of informration. Above me in a height which is forever
a heightening, a distance of metaphysical space whatever his spatial contiguity to me, his otherness yet “reverberates” within themes. This could be what Levinas means by
attesting that the one-for-the-other of signification “indeed shows itself in the said, but does so only after the event, betrayed, foreign to the
said of being, it shows itself in it as a contradiction.” The one-for-the-other has always already taken place even as it shows itself in the said of being. I have already given before I can give. Levinas writes
of the sense of signifyingness as a type of matrix of every thematizable relation, working in a way which “guides discourse beyond being.” The ethical is an inspiration, or pneuma, of being. Without
proposing that ethics is in any way the condition for the possibility of being itself, Levinas does seem to be saying that it alters the significance of
ontological significance, displaces essence from its very esse, injects being with ethical value, for “the psyche is not grafted on to a substance,
but alters the substantiality of this substance.” Going further, he remarks that ethics if the foundation of theory. Beyond commitment, it is the Goodness that justifies all
commitment. Beyond compassion, it is the source of all compassion, and in “God and Philosophy,” the infinite signifies “the condition – or the
unconditionality – of thought.” Further still, and in the same essay, “Love is only possible through the idea of the infinite.” If ethics is not the condition for the
existence of being, it certainly seems to condition the meaning that being can have for itself. The ethical “plot” with being functions rather as
though it were a species of Socratic midwifery, calling into question accepted views and pregnant with the sense of alterity, without ever finally
giving birth to a completed materiality. And one cannot refuse the gestation of otherness. As an unavoidable obligation, “signification as proximity is thus the latent birth of the
subject.” The subject is “born in the beginninglessness of anarchy and in the endlessness of obligation.” Not an “ethical aspect of being,” the ethical is rather
heard as the inaudible voice which “undoes” essence, perforating its differential resounding within itself as a persecuting summons to
responsibility. Levinas employs the term “hostage” to indicate the indeclinable assignation by the other/Other. One is, as it were, held in thrall and
transfixed alive like a butterfly pinned struggling in its showcase. But the neighbor is at once a visible, definable category of being and
simultaneously, anachronously, a unique undergoing of suffering in bondage to the psyche that compels him to responsibility. Responsibility
for others. And his alterity calls me into question; I am responsible for him and even his response to me, and even though I can know nothing
about him insofar as he is other. The relationship which is not a relationship gets more and more curious. Although the alterity of the saying other is not mine, and I cannot possess it nor even think it, has it not
already claimed me, beckoned to the otherness of infinity defining me as responsible subjectivity? As the other calls me into question, I have already been
called into question by the other-ness which interrupts my ego, that self which found and re-finds itself within the schema of reminiscence where Denken is Andenken. Responsibility is an inordinate
In Levinas
traumatism excessively overflowing the reach of my thought. Not as a surplus which would be governed by a correspondent lack, nor a contained within a container which it overruns, but as a nearness separated from my ability to find any
My
absolute exposure to you is, according to Levinas, pure saying. I give (myself) to you. I am here an an extradition from myself in a “saying
saying saying itself.” However this pure saying demands the esse of my being in a double-configuration, both to demand of it and to demand
my existence in order to demand of it. To distinguish an intersection in this way implies a dialectic between being and ethics; a space within
which one can analyze the movement of a transfusion, whereas for Levinas it is more of a fission, an unrecollectible elision in any movement
of being.
resources with which to align it as contact. Because my being is transpierced by alterity, I mean despite what I might mean or intend; proximity has a meaning despite the doxic thesis of being and despite concepts. Me voici.
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Predictions/DA Work – Class
Be skeptical about the disadvantages – their predictions are exaggerated and used a political tool – notice
who benefits and who suffers from the political result
Perlstein 1, Contributor to the New Republic
(Rick, “Pundits Who Predict the Future Are Always Wrong” THE NATION, April 23,
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010423/perlstein)
Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's
very architecture; it flows from that calcified image and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of
American progress. Punditry is what happens when the interests of ordinarily intelligent and extraordinarily ambitious men and women
coincide with a rarely mentioned flaw in the American character: our undying need to believe we inhabit a nation of constancy and good feeling
that is free of conflict, though we actually live in one of unceasing disputation, resentment and clashes of interest. Consider a paradigmatic
anthology, edited by the consensus sociologist Daniel Bell in 1967, called Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress. Among the developments
pronounced "likely in the next thirty-three years" are "control of weather or climate," "flexible penology without necessarily using prisons" and
"human hibernation for relatively extensive periods (months to years)." Now, there is no sin in making incorrect predictions. That's all that
conventional wisdom, which can only extrapolate future trends from present realities, knows how to do (the present reality in Bell's case being
the belief that man's ability to control his environment could not but continue to expand). The sin, however, is that such predictions are always
at the same time political--tools for seeding general consent about which kinds of actions are sensible and which are senseless; where social
emphasis can legitimately be placed and where it cannot; what is real and what is beyond the pale of imagination.
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No GPW
Structural and ideological shifts in the international system make great power war impossible
Fettweis 3 Professor at the University of Maryland
[Christopher J. “Revisiting Mackinder and Angell: The Obsolescence of Great Power Geopolitics”
Comparative Strategy, 22, p 109-129]
Mackinder can be forgiven for failing to anticipate the titanic changes in the fundamental nature of the international system much more readily than can his successors. Indeed, Mackinder and his contemporaries a century ago would hardly recognize the rules by which the world is run
the danger of major war has been removed, where World War III is, in Michael Mandelbaum’s words, “somewhere between
impossible and unlikely.”25 Geopolitical and geo-strategic analysis has not yet come to terms with what may be the central, most significant trend of international politics: great power war, major war of the kind that
pit the strongest states against each other, is now obsolete.26 John Mueller has been the most visible, but by no means the only, analyst arguing that the chances of a World War III emerging in the next century are next to
nil.27 Mueller and his contemporaries cite three major arguments supporting this revolutionary, and clearly controversial, claim. First, and most obviously, modern military technology has made major war too expensive to
contemplate. As John Keegan has argued, it is hard to see how nuclear war could be considered “an extension of politics by other means ”—at the very least, nuclear
weapons remove the possibility of victory from the calculations of the would-be aggressor.28 Their value as leverage in diplomacy has not been dramatic, at least in the last few decades, because
nuclear threats are not credible in the kind of disagreements that arise between modern great powers. It is unlikely that a game of nuclear
“chicken” would lead to the outbreak of a major war. Others have argued that, while nuclear weapons surely make war an irrational exercise, the destructive power of modern conventional
weapons make today’s great powers shy away from direct conflict.29 The world wars dramatically reinforced Angell’s warnings, and today no one is
eager to repeat those experiences, especially now that the casualty levels among both soldiers and civilians would be even higher. Second, the
shift from the industrial to the information age that seems to be gradually occurring in many advanced societies has been accompanied by a new definition of power, and
a new system of incentives which all but remove the possibility that major war could ever be a cost-efficient exercise. The rapid economic evolution that is sweeping much of the
world, encapsulated in the “globalization” metaphor so fashionable in the media and business communities, has been accompanied by an evolution in the way national wealth is accumulated.30 For millennia, territory was the main object of
war because it was directly related to national prestige and power. As early as 1986 Richard Rosecrance recognized that “two worlds of international relations” were emerging, divided over the question of the utility of territorial conquest.31 The intervening years have served only to
strengthen the argument that the major industrial powers, quite unlike their less-developed neighbors, seem to have reached the revolutionary conclusion that territory is not directly related to
their national wealth and prestige. For these states, wealth and power are more likely to derive from an increase in economic, rather than
military, reach. National wealth and prestige, and therefore power, are no longer directly related to territorial control.32 The economic incentives for war are therefore not as clear as they once may
have been. Increasingly, it seems that the most powerful states pursue prosperity rather than power. In Edward Luttwak’s terminology, geopolitics is slowly
being replaced by “geoeconomics,” where “the methods of commerce are displacing military methods —with disposable capital in lieu of
firepower, civilian innovation in lieu of military–technical advancement, and market penetration in lieu of garrisons and bases.”33 Just as
advances in weaponry have increased the cost of fighting, a socioeconomic evolution has reduced the rewards that a major war could possibly
bring. Angell’s major error was one that has been repeated over and over again in the social sciences ever since—he overestimated the “rationality” of humanity. Angell recognized earlier than most that the industrialization of military technology and economic interdependence
assured that the costs of a European war would certainly outweigh any potential benefits, but he was not able to convince his contemporaries who were not ready to give up the institution of war. The idea of war was still appealing—the
normative cost/benefit analysis still tilted in the favor of fighting, and that proved to be the more important factor. Today, there is reason to
believe that this normative calculation may have changed. After the war, Angell noted that the only things that could have prevented the war were “surrendering of certain dominations, a recasting of patriotic ideals, a revolution
today—most significantly, unlike their era, ours is one in which
of ideas.”34 The third and final argument of Angell’s successors is that today such a revolution of ideas has occurred, that a normative evolution has caused a shift in the rules that govern state interaction. The revolutionary potential of ideas should not be underestimated. Beliefs,
ideologies, and ideas are often, as Dahl notes, “a major independent variable,” which we ignore at our peril.35 “Ideas,” added John Mueller, are very often forces themselves, not flotsam on the tide of broader social or economic patterns . . . it does not seem wise in this area to ignore
“moral progress” that has “brought a change in attitudes about
international war” among the great powers of the world,37 creating for the first time, “an almost universal sense that the deliberate launching of
a war can no longer be justified.”38 At times leaders of the past were compelled by the masses to defend the national honor, but today popular pressures push for peaceful resolutions to
disputes between industrialized states. This normative shift has rendered war between great powers “subrationally unthinkable,” removed from
the set of options for policy makers, just as dueling is no longer a part of the set of options for the same classes for which it was once central to the concept of masculinity and
honor. As Mueller explained, Dueling, a form of violence famed and fabled for centuries, is avoided not merely because it has ceased to seem ‘necessary’, but because it has sunk from thought as a viable,
conscious possibility. You can’t fight a duel if the idea of doing so never occurs to you or your opponent.39 By extension, states cannot fight wars if doing so does not occur to
them or to their opponent.
phenomena that cannot be easily measured, treated with crisp precision, or probed with deductive panache.36 The heart of this argument is the
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Had to Happen: Tetlock Ev
Predictions are about as accurate as dart throwing monkies don’t sweat their uncertain doomsday scenarios
Menand 5, Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard
(Louis, “Everyone’s an Expert,” NEW YORKER
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/051205crbo_books1)
Tetlock also has an unscientific point to make, which is that “we as a society would be better off if participants in policy debates stated their
beliefs in testable forms”—that is, as probabilities—“monitored their forecasting performance, and honored their reputational bets.” He thinks
that we’re suffering from our primitive attraction to deterministic, overconfident hedgehogs. It’s true that the only thing the electronic media like
better than a hedgehog is two hedgehogs who don’t agree. Tetlock notes, sadly, a point that Richard Posner has made about these kinds of
public intellectuals, which is that most of them are dealing in “solidarity” goods, not “credence” goods. Their analyses and predictions are
tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good—more white swans for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an
exclamation point added to an analysis. Liberals want to hear that whatever conservatives are up to is bound to go badly; when the argument
gets more nuanced, they change the channel. On radio and television and the editorial page, the line between expertise and advocacy is very
blurry, and pundits behave exactly the way Tetlock says they will. Bush Administration loyalists say that their predictions about postwar Iraq
were correct, just a little off on timing; pro-invasion liberals who are now trying to dissociate themselves from an adventure gone bad insist that
though they may have sounded a false alarm, they erred “in the right direction”—not really a mistake at all. The same blurring characterizes
professional forecasters as well. The predictions on cable news commentary shows do not have life-and-death side effects, but the predictions
of people in the C.I.A. and the Pentagon plainly do. It’s possible that the psychologists have something to teach those people, and, no doubt,
psychologists are consulted. Still, the suggestion that we can improve expert judgment by applying the lessons of cognitive science and
probability theory belongs to the abiding modern American faith in expertise. As a professional, Tetlock is, after all, an expert, and he would
like to believe in expertise. So he is distressed that political forecasters turn out to be as unreliable as the psychological literature predicted,
but heartened to think that there might be a way of raising the standard. The hope for a little more accountability is hard to dissent from. It
would be nice if there were fewer partisans on television disguised as “analysts” and “experts” (and who would not want to see more foxes?).
But the best lesson of Tetlock’s book may be the one that he seems most reluctant to draw: Think for yourself.
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Left Field: Kritik of ‘The Future’
Dystopian representations depict the future as predetermined and fixed. This conception of the future
paralyzes political action by annihilating any future not contained in the past. It destroys the ability of
individuals to imagine alternative futures, and thus the agency to take the political action necessary to attain
those futures. We should reject traditional conceptions of the future and embrace it as a blank slate, a place
were everything is still to be won.
Dunmire ‘05
(Patricia L., Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon, Associate Professor at Kent State University, "Preempting the Future: Rhetoric and
Ideology of the Future in Political Discourse")
Using a systemic–functional linguistic approach, my analysis demonstrates the means by which the Bush Administration stakes a claim on the
future and implicates the public in its vision. Through the extensive use of the nominalization ‘threat’, the speech construes field in
such a way as to conflate present and future and to position Iraq/Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the future safety and
security of the United States. Ironically, the immediacy of this threat derives from a discursive context in which Iraq’s agency and actions have been obscured and displaced and in which ‘reality’ has been redirected away from animate
through its redefinition of imminent threat, the Administration
positions itself as experts who can read the future. Finally, systematic contrasts in the modal structure of the speech function to
stage a contest
over competing visions of the future, a contest in which the public is aligned with the Administration’s vision of the future and
alternative visions are dismissed. At a more general level, I would like to consider how are we to understand the future projected through President Bush’s speech in Cincinnati. From the Administration’s
actors acting at specific times and places and toward inanimate agents and non-directed actions. Moreover,
perspective, it is a vision in which a specified actor, Saddam Hussein, threatens the US and its allies through its possession and development of weapons of mass destruction. Gellner and Pincus (2003) see this as the centerpiec of the
Administration’s systematic campaign to win public support for waragainst Iraq, as they conclude that ‘To gird a nation for the extraordinary step of preemptive war . . . the administration described a growing, even imminentnuclear threat
to really
understand the Bush future, we need to understand Iraq as a temporary actor in that future. Indeed, in his declaration of the end of ‘major
combat operations’ on 1 May 2003, President Bush stated as much, ‘The Battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on’ (Bush, 2003b). This ‘war on terror’ is a
permanent war that must be waged even though, as Donald Rumsfeld notes, ‘The United States cannot predict who its
adversaries are going to be’ (Loeb, 2003). The long-term view of the Bush Administration projects a future dominated
and defined by ‘threats’ and ‘dangers’ that ‘gather against us’ which, if left unchecked, will lead us to a ‘future of fear’ and terror. Brookes
(2003) makes a similar assessment as she argues that Bush’s rhetoric projects a uniquely negative vision of the future. She
contends that the lexical composition of Bush’s discourse is rife with abstractions such as ‘threat’, ‘terror’, and ‘evil-doers’. This lexicon
comprises ‘negative frameworks’ which ‘instill an image of evil and darkness all around us’ and position the public in a particularly
debilitating way with respect both to the future and to their ability to affect that future (p. 21). Moreover, Brookes notes that
phrases such as ‘continuing threat’
and ‘dangers grow only worse with time’ extend the crisis into an indeterminate future, leaving the public ‘without hope that
the crisis will ever end’ (p. 22). To Brookes’ account I would add that this negative framework is manifested not only in the lexical structure
of Bush’s discourse, but also through the linguistic processes it enacts, namely nominalization and the attendant process of agency
displacement. Displacing agency from animate, specified actors to abstractions like ‘threat’, ‘terror’, and ‘danger’ helps shore up the negative
vision of the future: while we may currently be concerned with Iraq and Al Qaeda, our true enemies are threats and
terror. ‘Threat’ and ‘terror’ function here as placeholders:
today they are personified by the leaders of Iraq and Al Qaeda. Who will they be personified by tomorrow? In sum, Bush’s vision offers us
an Orwellian future in which the specific embodiment of the Threat may change, but the Threat is always there,
occasionally diminished but never fully defeated. Again, as
from Iraq’ (p. 3). Clearly, Iraq as an imminent threat has been an essential component of Bush’s vision of the future. At the same time, however, I contend that Iraq’s role should not be overstated; that is,
President Bush stated on 1 May, ‘The war on terror is not over, yet is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide . . .. Their
cause is lost. Free nations will press on to victory’ (Bush, 2003b). In Becomings: Explorations in Memory, Time and Futures Elizabeth Grosz (1999) posits that ‘to
know the future is to deny it as future, to place it as given, as past’ (p. 6). I find this statement compelling because it articulates
what is at stake in dominant political discourses and the futures they project. By reminding us of the opposition between ‘knowing’
and ‘futurity’ Grosz reminds us of the intrinsic potentiality of the future and the political importance of understanding the future not as the
inevitable progression of the past and present but as a real site of change and possibility. Moreover, Grosz contends that claims to knowledge of
the future produced through dominant political discourses need to be understood in terms of their ideological function of denying our agency with respect to the future while, at the
same time, implicating us in futures not of our making. That is, political discourses in which the future is represented as already known, as
predetermined, can function to ‘paralyze political action’ by undermining the future as a conceptual space for imagining
and working for political and social change (Levitas, 1993). As Grosz (1999) explains, such determinism ‘annihilates any
future uncontained in the past and present’ (p. 4). An important task for critical discourse analysis is to reclaim the agency
and potentialities that the future offers for social and political transformation. This task should focus in part on demonstrating
the linguistic and discursive means by which the future is claimed and appropriated by dominant groups and institutions. In addition,
analyses should work to disrupt and challenge these dominant futures with representations and conceptions of
‘antithetical futures . . . waiting
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for syntactic articulation’ and material realization’ (Hebdige, 1993: 275).18 In short, we need to reclaim the future ‘as a virtual
space – blank, colourless, shapeless, a space to be made over, a space where everything is still to be won’ (Hebdige, 1993:
278).
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State Exclusion Impacts Turn Disads
The Negatives justification of their disadvantage through the threat of an “apocalypse from now on” only
stoppable by state power is a politically motivated construction that ensures that Sovereign Powers
permeates all life.
Coviello, ‘00
PhD in English from Cornell, Queer Frontiers, p.40-41
Perhaps, but to claim that American culture is at present decisively post nuclear is not to say that the world we inhabit it in anyway post-apocalyptic. Apocalypse, as I began by
saying, changed-it did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and
everything with (in Jacques Derrida’s suitably menacing phrase) ‘remainderless and a-symbolic destruction,” then in the post nuclear world apocalypse is an affair whose
parameters are definitively local. In shapes and in substance, apocalypse, is defined now by the affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an other, people whose very
presence might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished “general population.” This fact seems to me to stand behind
Susan Sontag’s incisive observation, from 1989, that, “Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not ‘Apocalypse Now’ but “Apocalypse from Now on.” The decisive point here in
the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse (the point Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast
economy of power, it is ever useful. That is, through the perpetual threat of destruction-through the constant reproduction of the figure of apocalypseagencies of power ensure their authority to act to act on and through the bodies of a particular population. No one turns this point more persuasively
than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter or his first volume of the History of Sexuality addresses himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive,
less life-threatening than, in his words, “life administering: “Power”, he contends, “exerts a positive influence on life… [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it,
subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. In his brief comments on what he calls “the atomic situation,’ however, Foucault insists as well that the
productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as “managers of life and survival, of bodies and race,
“agencies of modern power presume to act on the behalf of the existence of everyone”: ‘whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this way
serves to authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive or, indeed potentially annihilating. “If genocide is indeed the dream of modern
power;’ Foucault writes, “this is not because of a recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the
species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population:’ For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but with a more
comprehensive power over the patterns and functioning of collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic
initiative that can scarcely be done without.
This Politics which attempts to Secure Life via the use of Sovereign Power ensures endless cycles of violence
which cause extinction.
Dillon 96
[Michael, Professor of International Relations at the University of Lancaster, “Security, philosophy and politics”, Politics of Security: Towards a
political philosophy of continental thought, Routledge] p. 27
<The same period also witnessed the exhaustion of the European State system's modern metaphysical resolution of the question of the political - its profoundly ambiguous and
deeply problematic inauguration as both a State of emergency and a certain kind of democratic project - through the very globalisation of the language, forms and practices of the
politics of security upon which it was based. The advent of the globalised industrial nuclear age exhibits not only the hollowness of that system's
foundational promises to secure order, identity and freedom - hence the reason why the disciplines which promise to tell the truth about the operation of its orders
and identities appear to be so peculiarly limited and unreal in their vaunted realistic representation of reality - but also, in the gulf that exists between what its
(inter)national political prospectus offers and what its (inter)national politics provides; the exhaustion of its political imagination. 33 For * i s was a
period, in which World War One was critical, when that (inter)national politics of security finally realised the full potential of the self-immolative dynamic
pre-figured in its very inception; the real prospect of human species extinction.34>
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Topicality – SS Def
Bush 02 (George, President, EO 13279 “Equal Protection of the Laws for Faith-Based and Community Organizations,”
http://www.religionandsocialpolicy.org/docs/legal/wh-20021212.pdf)
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 121(a) of title 40,
United States Code, and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, and in order to guide Federal agencies in formulating and developing
policies with implications for faith-based organizations and other community organizations, to ensure equal protection of the laws for faithbased and community organizations, to further the national effort to expand opportunities for, and strengthen the capacity of, faith-based and
other community organizations so that they may better meet social needs in America's communities, and to ensure the economical and
efficient administration and completion of Government contracts, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Definitions. For purposes of this
order: (a) "Federal financial assistance" means assistance that non-Federal entities receive or administer in the form of grants, contracts,
loans, loan guarantees, property, cooperative agreements, food commodities, direct appropriations, or other assistance, but does not include a
tax credit, deduction, or exemption. "Social service program" means a program that is administered by the Federal Government,
or by a State or local government using Federal financial assistance, and that provides services directed at reducing poverty,
improving opportunities for low-income children, revitalizing low-income communities, empowering low-income families
and low-income individuals to become self-sufficient, or otherwise helping people in need. Such programs include, but are not
limited to, the following: (i) child care services, protective services for children and adults, services for children and adults in foster care,
adoption services, services related to the management and maintenance of the home, day care services for adults, and services to meet the
special needs of children, older individuals, and individuals with disabilities (including physical, mental, or emotional disabilities); (ii)
transportation services; (iii) job training and related services, and employment services; (iv) information, referral, and counseling services; (v)
the preparation and delivery of meals and services related to soup kitchens or food banks; (vi) health support services; (vii) literacy and
mentoring programs; (viii) services for the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency and substance abuse, services for the prevention
of crime and the provision of assistance to the victims and the families of criminal offenders, and services related to intervention in, and
prevention of, domestic violence; and (ix) services related to the provision of assistance for housing under Federal law.
Just say you meet because the plan only says ‘social services,’ they’re just defining what the court ruling
means, not the plan, nbd.
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Topicality – ‘Increase’ 2AC
1. We meet – Lofreddo proves the Dandridge decision is used now to deny access to social services – the plan
changes constitutional law to mandate that these requests are met
2. C/I under title XX of social security law federal funds distributed in block grants by states are social
services
House Ways and Means Committee ’00 (Green Book, “Social Services Block Grants,” excerpted at
http://www.policyalmanac.org/social_welfare/archive/ssbg.shtml)
Title XX of the Social Security Act, also referred to as the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG), is a capped entitlement program. Thus, States
are entitled to their share, according to a formula, of a nationwide funding ceiling or ``cap,'' which is specified in statute. Block grant funds are
given to States to help them achieve a wide range of social policy goals, which include preventing child abuse, increasing the availability of
child care, and providing community-based care for the elderly and disabled. Funds are allocated to the States on the basis of population. The
allotments for Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands and the Northern Marianas from the national total are based on their allocation for fiscal
year 1981 adjusted to reflect the new total funding level. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) of 1987 (Public Law 100-203)
extended eligibility for title XX funds to American Samoa. The Federal funds are available to States without a State matching requirement.
3. this proves the increase in assistance can be distributed by state governments as long as it’s in the form of
block grants – lofreddo proves we meet this interpretation b/c the plan removes the ability for states to cap
ssa aid – first two pieces of 1ac evidence
4. Our interpretation is superior
a. context – congressional definitions relating to social services act are the most qualified and predictable
since it comes from the agent of the resolution – key to pre-round preparation and focused argument
resolution that creates meaningful debates
b. descriptive is better – even if their authors create a better case for why we should consider social services
something else, normative claims are unpredictable for purposes of topicality – default to descriptive ones
5. Competing interpretations creates a race to the bottom that penalizes substantive argument resolution. Our
counter interpretation is in-round abuse which can be objectively determined based on link spikes
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****NEGATIVE****
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Conservative Legal Defense / Dandridge = Good Law
First, the affirmative is legally mistaken – regardless of the touching justifications for welfare rights found in
moral philosophy, the constitution does not allow them. Representation is zero sum; and their representation
reinforcement arguments will become anti-democratic – turns the case
Bork, Prof of Public Law @ Yale, ’79 (Robert, The Impossibility of Finding Welfare Rights in the Constitution,
Wash U L. Q. 1979 No 3 Summer p. 695)
In the first place, not even a scintilla of evidence supports the argument that the framers and the ratifiers of the various amendments intended
the judiciary to develop new individual rights, which correspondingly create new disabilities for democratic government. Although we do not
know precisely what the phrase “privileges or immunities” meant to the framers, a variety of explanations exist for its open-endedness other
than that the framers intended to delegate to courts the power to make up the privileges or immunities in the clause.
The obvious possibility, of course, is that the people who framed the privileges-or-immunities clause did have an idea of what they meant, but
that their idea has been irretrievably lost in the mists of history. If that is true, it is hardly a ground for judicial extrapolation from the clause.
Perhaps a more likely explanation is that the framers and ratifiers themselves were not certain of their intentions. Although the judiciary must
give content to vague phrases, it need not go well beyond what the framers and ratifiers reasonably could be supposed to have had in mind. If
the framers really intended to delegate to judges the function of creating new rights by the method of moral philosophy, one would expect that
they would have said so. They could have resolved their uncertainty by writing a ninth amendment that declared: “The Supreme Court shall,
from time to time, find and enforce such additional rights as may be determined by moral philosophy, or by consideration of the dominant ideas
of republican government.” But if that was what they really intended, they were remarkably adroit in managing not to say so.
It should give theorists of the open ended Constitution pause, moreover, that not even the most activist courts have ever grounded their claims
for legitimacy in arguments along those lines. Courts closest in time to the adoption of the Constitution and various amendments, who might
have been expected to know what powers had been delegated to them, never offered argument along the lines advanced by Professor
Michelman. The Supreme Court, in fact, has been attacked repeatedly throughout its history for exceeding its delegated powers; yet this line of
defense seems never to have occurred to its members. For these reasons, I remain unpersuaded that the interpretivist argument can be
escaped.
For purposes of further discussion, however, let us assume that the interpretivist argument has been escaped; that the court may read new
rights into the Constitution. Even so, the welfare-rights thesis is a long way from home. Professor Michelman, so far as I can tell, rests the
argument for his thesis on two bases: first, on a cluster of Supreme Court decisions; and second, on Professor Ely’s discovery of a
transcendent value in the Constitution that vests courts with the power and function called “representation-reinforcement.” I think neither
argument supports the theory.
The most obvious problem with Professor Michelman’s argument from case law is one that he recognizes. The cases, as he admits, are
confusing and internally contradictory. This absence of a clear pattern is less suggestive of an emerging constitutional right to basic needs
than it is of a politically divided Court that has wandered so far from constitutional moorings that some of its members are engaging in free
votes. Moreover, even if a right to basic needs clearly emerged from the cases, the question would remain whether these decisions were
constitutionally legitimate.
That question brings us to Professor Michelman’s basic argument for the legitimacy of representation-reinforcement – the idea that people will
have better access to the political process if their basic needs are met. This argument raises at least two problems: one concerns justification
of representation-reinforcement as a value that courts are entitled to press beyond that representation provided by the written Constiuttion and
statutes; the other relates to the factual accuracy of the assertion that persons at the lower end of the economic spectrum need assistance to
be represented adequately.
It would not do to derive the legitimacy of representation-reinforcement from such materials as, for example, the one-man-one-vote cases
because those cases themselves require justification and cannot be taken to support the principle advanced to support them. Nor would it do
to rest the concept of representation-reinforcement on the American history of steadily expanding suffrage. That expansion was accomplished
politically, and the existence of a political trend itself cannot give the Court a warrant to carry the trend beyond its own limits. How far the
people decide not to go is as important as how far they do go.
The idea of representation-reinforcement, therefore, is internally contradictory. As a concept it tends to devour itself. It calls upon the judiciary
to deny representation to those who have voted in a particular way to enhance the representation of others. Thus, what is reinforced is less
democratic representation than judicial power and the trend toward redistribution of goods. If I were looking at the Constitution for a suffusing
principle that judges were entitled to enforce een though it was not explicitly stated, that principle would be the separation of powers or the
limited politically authority of courts. That principle, of course, would run the argument in a direction opposite to Professor Michelman’s. In
truth, the notion of representation-reinforcement finds no support as a constitutional value beyond those guarantees written into the document.
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Second, although constructionist legal analyses does allow for textual analysis and historical interpretation,
expansion of jurisprudence into philosophy destroys the very foundations of the law and turns the case
Bork, Prof of Public Law @ Yale, ’79 (Robert, The Impossibility of Finding Welfare Rights in the Constitution,
Wash U L. Q. 1979 No 3 Summer p. 695)
I represent that school of thought which insists that the judiciary invalidate the work of the political branches only in accordance with an
inference whose underlying premise is fairly discoverable in the Constitution itself. That leaves room, of course, not only for textual analysis,
but also for historical discourse and interpretation according to the Constitution’s structure and function. The latter approach is the judicial
method of McCulloch v. Maryland, for example, and it has been well analyzed by my colleague Professor Charles Black in his book, Structure
and Relationship in Constitutional Law.
Given these limits to what I conceive to be the proper method of constitutional interpretation, it is not surprising that I disagree with the thesis
that welfare rights derive in any sense from the Constitution or that the courts may legitimately place them there. The effect of Professor
Michelman’s style of argument, which has quite a number of devotees on the faculties of both Yale and Harvard, is to create rights by
arguments from moral philosophy rather than from constitutional text, history, and structure. The end result would be to convert our
government from one by representative assembly to one by judiciary. That result seems to me unfortunate for a variety of reasons.
The impossibility of the enterprise is but one reason that this development is unfortunate. There is a certain seductiveness to the notion of
judges gathered in conference and engaged in the sort of subtle philosophical analysis advanced by Professor Michelman. But the hard truth
is that this kind of reasoning is impossible for committees. The violent disagreements among the legal philosophers alone demonstrate that
there is no single path down which philosophical reasoning must lead. On arguments of this type, one can demonstrate that the obligation to
pay for welfare is a violation of a right as easily as that there is a constitutional right to receive welfare. Under these impossible circumstances,
courts – perhaps philosophers, also – will reason towards conclusions that appeal to them for reasons other than those expressed. Judicial
government, at best, will be government according to the prevailing intellectual fashion and, perhaps, government according to quite
idiosyncratic political and social views.
The consequence of this philosophical approach to constitutional law almost certainly would be the destruction of the idea of law. Once freed
of text, history, and structure, this mode of argument can reach any result. Conventional modes of interpretation do not give precise results,
but if honestly applied, they narrow the range of permissible results to a much greater extent than do arguments form moral philosophy. What
is at stake, therefore, in “The Quest for Equality” through the judiciary is the answer to the question of who governs. A traditional court must
leave open a wide range for democratic processes; a philosophical court in the new manner need not.
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Democratic advancement is an iterative process; but the courts are ill-equipped to speed it up – claims such
as welfare rights cannot be addressed by the court without serious damage to democratic liveliness and
inevitable exclusion of other groups
Bork, Prof of Public Law @ Yale, ’79 (Robert, The Impossibility of Finding Welfare Rights in the Constitution,
Wash U L. Q. 1979 No 3 Summer p. 695)
It might be useful to consider what a court would have to decide in a constitutional claim to a welfare right. Suppose a claimant represented by
Professor Michelman came to the Supreme Court, alleged that the state of X had just repealed its welfare statutes, and asked for an
authoritative judgment that he and all similarly situated persons are entitled to welfare so that they could better participate in the political
process. Because they would not have to devote all their energies to making a living, they not only would have a better opportunity for
participation in the political process, but also would not be stigmatized as a poor and powerless group. The justices might find this plausible.
Suppose, however, that the attorney general for the state of X then stands up and argues that the state, in repealing the welfare laws, acted
precisely for the purpose of reinforcing representation. The legislature had at last become convinced that welfare payments tend to relegate
entire groups to a condition of permanent dependency so that they are not the active and independent political agents that they ought to be;
moreover, these groups had lost political influence because they had been stigmatized as people on welfare. Experience had convinced the
legislature that it would be better for people of that class, and for their participation, to struggle without state support as other poor groups have
done successfully in our history.
What is the Court to do when faced with two arguments of this sort, neither of them obviously true or untrue? Is the Court to make a
sociological estimate of which actions will, in fact, reinforce representation in society? And what of the possibility that the payment of welfare
benefits today may reinforce representation, but ten or twenty years from now welfare payments will have the opposite effect? IN a judicial
context, the problem is hopeless. Courts simply are not equipped, much less authorized, to make such decisions. There are almost no limits to
where this concept of representation-reinforcement will lead the courts. If, for example, the concept of representation reinforcement justifies
the demand for welfare, why might it not also justify judicial invalidation of the minimum wage and the collective bargaining laws? Counsel
could show theoretically and empirically that those laws create unemployment, that they do so primarily among the poor and disproportionately
among the young black male population, and that unemployment harms these groups’ capacity to participate in the political process.
Representation-reinforcement could take us back to Lochner.
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Also, income inequality and poverty are inevitable
Winter, Prof of Law @ Yale, ’72 (Ralph K., Jr., Poverty, Economic Equality, and the Equal Protection Clause,
1972 Supreme Court Review. 41, p. 57)
And, the 14th amendment does not provide for economic equality
Winter, Prof of Law @ Yale, ’72 (Ralph K., Jr., Poverty, Economic Equality, and the Equal Protection Clause,
1972 Supreme Court Review. 41, p. 57)
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Congress CP Evidence
Basic needs and welfare rights questions must be dealt with by democratically elected representative bodies –
not the courts – only the counterplan avoids our judicial activism and anti-democraticism case turns
Bork, Prof of Public Law @ Yale, ’79 (Robert, The Impossibility of Finding Welfare Rights in the Constitution,
Wash U L. Q. 1979 No 3 Summer p. 695)
There are any number of difficulties with the welfare-rights theory. For instance, why should the Court or any other nondemocratic body define
basic needs? A welfare recipient might tell the Court that he would be better able to participate in the democratic process if the government
provided him with something better than the existing package of public housing, food stamps, and health insurance; that he would feel more
dignified or would be less stigmatized if he looked like everybody else; i.e., had disposable income. The solution is a negative income tax. How
could the Court legitimately tell the claimant either that he is wrong about himself or that, if he is right, he still has no case?
I will conclude with a consideration that is increasingly beneath the notice of the abstract, philosophical style of argument: the factual premises
of this constitutional position seem deficient. The premise that the poor or the black are underrepresented politically is quite dubious. In the
past two decades we have witnessed an explosion of welfare legislation, massive income redistributions, and civil rights laws of all kinds. The
poor and the minorities have had access to the political process and have done very well through it. In addition to its other defects, then, the
welfare-rights theory rests less on demonstrated fact than on a liberal shibboleth.
Perhaps we should be discussing not “The Quest for Equality,” but the question of how much equality in what areas of life is desirable. Equality
is not the only value in society; we must balance degrees of it against other values. That balance is preeminently a matter for the political
process, not for the courts.
Courts will fail to represent all interests – taxation and wealth redistribution questions must be handled by
legislaturesd
Winter, Prof of Law @ Yale, ’72 (Ralph K., Jr., Poverty, Economic Equality, and the Equal Protection Clause,
1972 Supreme Court Review. 41, p. 57)
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Elective politics is more accessible than judicial – turns the case
Gedicks, Prof of Law @ BYU, ‘93 (Frederick Mark, “The Poverty of Academic Rhetoric,” 44 mercer law rev. 54351)
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Defense of Consequences
The means/ends distinction is inevitable and a moral cop out. There are no absolutes. You have to
weigh comparative risks.
Saul D. Alinsky, Activist, Professor, and Social Organizer with International Fame, Founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation, Rules for
Radicals, 1971, 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
enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. 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 Maritain referred to in his
statement, “The fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue.” These non-doers 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 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.
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Defense of Consequences
The aff is moral evasion. Consequentialist decisionmaking is imperative.
Kai Nielsen, 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 good 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
[it] 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]
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Defense of Consequences
Ideal ethics don’t apply in the public sphere.
Charles Rustin, Department of International Relations, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Alternatives,
24, 1999, p. 175
Habermas's sensitivity to the constraints faced by philosophic- theory is preceded by Kant's recognition of man as a "legislative being." While
Kant hoped that [hu]mankind might one day act in an ideally ethical way "from the motive of duty,” he accepted that, in the
meantime, individuals require the imposition of positive justice in the form of a state's juridical and social laws in order to behave in a
moral, as distinct front an ideally ethical, manner. Habermas continues this Kantian tradition by giving priority to the public
sphere of legal justice over the private sphere of good and by continually emphasizing the modesty of his claims for discourse ethics. In
accordance with the above, Habermas's ethical project will now be considered both in relation to Kant, whose ideas he wishes to refine, and to
the defense that he has constructed for himself in face of criticism that his project has received.
Practical reason requires the death penalty. Universally, everyone should make consequentialist
decisions when catastrophe looms.
MARKUS DIRK DUBBER, Associate Professor of Law, State University of New York at Buffalo, 43
Buffalo L. Rev. 689 Buffalo Law Review Winter, 1995
For Bentham, punishment advanced the offender's rational interest because it advanced the utility of the community of which
the offender was also a member. For Fichte, punishment was in the offender's interest because it permitted her to reenter the community of
rational agents bound by the social contract. According to Fichte, she had excluded herself from the community of rational persons by acting
irrationally in violating the contract through her crime. It would, after all, have been in her rational interest to abide by the contract and thereby
enjoy the superior benefits that led to the contract's very establishment.
n11 For Hegel, punishment was also the offender's right
because the offender, as a rational agent, must be presumed to have intended the application of the destructive norm governing
her criminal act to all rational agents, including herself. Through the crime, the offender therefore already had judged herself in the
abstract. The punishment itself merely carried out that self-judgment. According to Hegel, the jury verdict represented the offender's indirect
self-judgment through members of her community.
n12 Again, this is not to suggest that the proponents of various versions of the rational
state agreed on what amounted to rational state action or even that they held a single notion of rationality. Beccaria, for example, argued
against the death penalty because no [*695] rational being could have contracted to have her life extinguished, no matter what she received in
return. In sharp contrast, Kant accused Beccaria of "sympathetic sentimentality" and argued for the death penalty on the ground that
the very universality of the categorical imperative of practical reason required no less.
n13 Whereas the consequentialists
rejected any concept of rationality that went beyond the means-ends relationship between a particular act and its utility, Hegel argued that the
social contract society (or the utility community) was--strictly speaking--no state at all since it did not reflect Reason but was held together
merely by the formal means-ends relationships characteristic not of Reason, but of the Understanding.
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Defense of Consequences
Catastrophic disad impacts require suspension of absolute morality.
Charles Fried, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics,
ed. Joram Graf Haber, 1993, p. 76
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.
Utilitarianism is essential to egalitarianism.
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 1977, p. 234
The utilitarian argument, that a policy is justified if it satisfies more preferences overall, seems at first sight to be an egalitarian argument. It
seems to observe strict impartiality. If the community has only enough medicine to treat some of those who are sick, the
argument seems to recommend that those who are sickest be treated first. If the community can afford a swimming pool or a new
theater, but not both, and more people want the pool, then it recommends that the community build the pool, unless those who want the
theater can show that their preferences are so much more intense that they have more weight in spite of the numbers. One sick man is not to
be preferred to another because he is worthier of official concern; the tastes of the theater audience are not to be preferred because they are
more admirable. In Bentham's phrase, each man is to count as one and no [one] man is to count as more than one.
These simple examples suggest that the utilitarian argument not only respects, but embodies, the right of each citizen to be treated as
the equal of any other. The chance that each individual's preferences have to succeed, in the competition for social policy, will depend upon
how important his preference is to him, and how many others share it, compared to the intensity and number of competing preferences. His
chance will not be affected by the esteem or contempt of either officials or fellow citizens, and he will therefore not be subservient or beholden
to them.
[one is feminist editing JAC]
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Defense of Predictions
Predictions are becoming more affective- Advanced early warning networks and independent verification of
knowledge is allowing us to see the future better than ever before.
Kurasawa ‘4
(Fuyuki, Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, and a Faculty Associate of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale,
Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight, Constellations, Volume 11, Number 4, pg. 459-460)[CarrLee,12/12/07]
Combining a sense of analytical contingency toward the future and ethical responsibility for it, the idea of early warning is making its way into preventive action on the global stage.
Despite the fact that not all humanitarian, technoscientific, and environmental disasters can be predicted in advance, the multiplication of independent sources of knowledge and detection
mechanisms enables us to foresee many of them before it is too late. Indeed, in recent years, global civil society’s capacity for early warning
has dramatically increased, in no small part due to the impressive number of NGOs that include catastrophe prevention at the heart of their
mandates.17 These organizations are often the first to detect signs of trouble, to dispatch investigative or fact-finding missions, and to warn the international community about impending dangers; to wit, the lead role of
environmental groups in sounding the alarm about global warming and species depletion or of humanitarian agencies regarding the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, frequently months or even years before Western governments or
What has come into being, then, is a loose-knit network of watchdog groups that is acquiring finely tuned antennae to
pinpoint indicators of forthcoming or already unfolding crises.
multilateral institutions followed suit.
The fact that the future is uncertain is precisely the reason we need to engage in predictions. This uncertainty
places an ethical burden on us to make predictions so as to predict catastrophe’s.
Kurasawa ‘4
(Fuyuki, Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, and a Faculty Associate of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale,
Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight, Constellations, Volume 11, Number 4, pg. 458-459) [CarrLee,12/12/07]
some intellectual circles is a deep-seated skepticism about the very value of the exercise. A radically postmodern
would lead us to believe that it is pointless, perhaps even harmful, to strive for farsightedness in light of the aforementioned crisis of conventional
paradigms of historical analysis. If, contra teleological models, history has no intrinsic meaning, direction, or endpoint to be discovered through human reason, and if, contra scientistic futurism, prospective
trends cannot be predicted without error, then the abyss of chronological inscrutability supposedly opens up at our feet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of chance. Therefore, rather than
embarking upon grandiose speculation about what may occur, we should adopt a pragmatism that abandons itself to the twists and turns of history; let us be content to formulate ad
hoc responses to emergencies as they arise. While this argument has the merit of underscoring the fallibilistic nature of all
predictive schemes, it conflates the necessary recognition of the contingency of history with unwarranted assertions about the latter’s total opacity and
indeterminacy. Acknowledging the fact that the future cannot be known with absolute certainty does not imply abandoning the task of trying to
understand what is brewing on the horizon and to prepare for crises already coming into their own. In fact, the incorporation of the principle of
fallibility into the work of prevention means that we must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for responses that
provoke unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in the final section of this paper). In addition, from a normative point of view , the acceptance of historical contingency and of
the self-limiting character of farsightedness places the duty of preventing catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present generations. The
future no longer appears to be a metaphysical creature of destiny or of the cunning of reason, nor can it be sloughed off to pure randomness. It
When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one is likely to encounter from
line of thinking, for instance,
becomes, instead, a result of human action shaped by decisions in the present – including, of course, trying to anticipate and prepare for possible and avoidable sources of harm to our successors
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Defense of Predictions
Deliberative debate solves all the reasons predictions are bad. Unplausible and unethical scenarios can be
weeded out by arguing against them in the particular.
Kurasawa ‘4(Fuyuki, Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, and a Faculty Associate of the Center for Cultural
Sociology at Yale, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight, Constellations, Volume 11, Number 4, pg.
471) [Carr-Lee,12/12/07]
Lastly, I contended that the work of preventive foresight can parry alarmist misappropriation or resignation by advocating a process of public
deliberation that blends the principles of precaution and global justice. A farsighted politics can function through the public use of reason and
the honing of the capacity for critical judgment, whereby citizens put themselves in a position to debate, evaluate, and challenge different
dystopian narratives about the future and determine which ones are more analytically plausible, ethically desirable, and politically effective in
bringing about a world order that is less perilous yet more just for our descendants. Many fora, ranging from local, face-to-face meetings to
transnational, highly mediated discursive networks, are sowing the seeds of such a practice of participatory democracy.
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A2 Tetlock Arg
Your New Yorker Evidence is just a book review of Philip Tetlock’s Book Expert Political Judgment- and
Tetlock concludes that even if predictions are difficult to make it is possible to make good predictions as long
as our predictions are based in empiricism, internally consistent, and responsive to real world phenomena.
Tetlock ‘5 (Phillip E., Mitchell Professor Leadership at the University of California @ Berkeley, Expert Political
Judgment: How good is it? How do we know?, p.6-7)[carr-lee12/12/07]
This book is predicated on the assumption that, even if we cannot capture all of the subtle counterfactual and moral facets of good judgment,
we can advance the cause of holding political observers accountable to independent standards of empirical accuracy and logical rigor.
Whatever their allegiances, good judges should pass two types of tests:
1. Correspondence tests rooted in empiricism. How well do their private beliefs map onto the publicly observable world? 2. Coherence and
process tests rooted in logic. Are their beliefs internally consistent? And do they update those beliefs in response to evidence? In plan
language, good judges should both “get it right” and “think the right way.”
And We are more accurate than dart throwing monkey’s- good predictions are made by proverbial ‘foxes’ who
look at the specific factors of a situation and drawn on multiple sources of evidence.
Tetlock ‘5 (Phillip E., Mitchell Professor Leadership at the University of California @ Berkeley, Expert Political
Judgment: How good is it? How do we know?, p.73-75)[carr-lee12/12/07]
The search for correlates of good judgment across time and topics became more successful when the spotlight shifted from what experts
though to how they thought. Table 3.3 represents the thirteen items used to measure cognitive style, as well as the results of a maximum
likelihood factor analysis. The low and high variable loadings on the first factor bear a striking resemblance to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction
between hedgehogs and foxes in the history of ideas. Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively
extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express
considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who
know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but
rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stiching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own
forecasting prowess, and-like the skeptis in chapter 2—rather dubious that the cloudlike subject of politics can be the object of clocklike
science.
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Yes GPW
Reliance on the obsolescence theory increases the probability of war—it causes states to neglect security
interests
Doran 99, Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, (Charles F., Survival,
“Is Major War Obsolete? An Exchange: The Structural Turbulence of International Affairs,” June, vol.41 no.2, p.139-142)
The conclusion, then, is that the probability of major war declines for some states, but increases for others. And it is very difficult to argue that
it has disappeared in any significant or reliable or hopeful sense. Moreover, a problem with arguing a position that might be described as
utopian is that such arguments have policy implications. It is worrying that as a thesis about the obsolescence of major war becomes more
compelling to more people, including presumably governments, the tendency will be to forget about the underlying problem, which is not war
per se, but security. And by neglecting the underlying problem of security, the probability of war perversely increases: as governments fail to
provide the kind of defence and security necessary to maintain deterrence, one opens up the possibility of new challenges. In this regard it is
worth recalling one of Clauswitz's most important insights: A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his entry into our
state unopposed. That is the underlying dilemma when one argues that a major war is not likely to occur and, as a consequence, one need not
necessarily be so concerned about providing the defences that underlie security itself. History shows that surprise threats emerge and rapid
destabilising efforts are made to try to provide that missing defence, and all of this contributes to the spiral of uncertainty that leads in the end
to war.
Lack of civilian control means states are more likely to strike preemptively and abandon nuclear discipline
Clark 97, associate professor of political science and director of the national security studies program at California State University, (Mark T.,
“Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age-book reviews: Neorealism versus Organizational Theory,”
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0365/is_n1_v41/ai_19238111)
Sagan's critique is a healthy antidote to Waltz's optimism. In his view, there are two principal arguments that suggest pessimism about any
future with a greater number of nuclear-armed adversaries. From his study of militaries, Sagan finds that their organizational behavior
inclines them towards deterrence failure. It is not that militaries want war but that, of all groups in a society, they are the most likely to
believe war is probable and are most inclined to adopt preventive or preemptive strategies. Military officers are more skeptical of
nonmilitary solutions to conflicts than are their civilian counterparts, according to Sagan. It also makes sense, in classical military terms, to
adopt preventive or preemptive strategies, since no military prefers to fight on its adversary's terms. Taking the offensive alleviates
some of these problems.
Secondly, Sagan argues that newly armed nuclear states will lack the positive mechanisms of civilian control. Here, Sagan's critique is
very strong. By examining the history of the U.S. nuclear safety record he is able to document many near accidents and bureaucratic
snafus that could have led to catastrophic accidents, and in this way he points out the weakness in Waltz's arguments. Sagan comments:
Waltz asked why should we expect new nuclear states to experience greater difficulties than did the old ones? The evidence of the number of
near-accidents with U.S. nuclear weapons during the Cold War suggests that there would be reason enough to worry about nuclear accidents
in new nuclear states even if their safety difficulties were "only" as great as those experienced by old nuclear powers (p. 80).
He adds six reasons why new nuclear powers are unlikely to compile the safety record of the United States. But if the problem is acute for
newly emergent nuclear powers that develop their programs indigenously, it will be doubly so for those that inherit or buy their programs.
They will lack even the discipline that a new nuclear nation will accrue by investing enormous amounts of time, talent, and treasure into
developing its nuclear program.
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FURTHER CITES FOR CAMP
Poverty = Powerless
Ralph Dolgoff & Donald Feldstein, Understanding Social Welfare 2d. ed. 1984,
Peter B. Edelman, The Next Century of Our Constitution: Rethinking Our Duty to the Poor, 39 Hastings L.J. 1, 2
(1987)
Environmental justice DA to the K alt:
H.R. Rep No 101-428 101st Cong 2d. Sess 41-42 (1990),
Regina Austin & Michael Schill Black, Brown, Poor & Poisoned: Minority Grassroots Environmentalism and
the Quest for Eco-Justice L Kan. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 69, 70 (1991)
Frank I Michelmann, Welfare Rights in a Constitutional Democracy, Wash U L Q 1979 No 3 Summer
Neg stuff
Winter, Prof of Law @ Yale, ’72 (Ralph K., Jr., Poverty, Economic Equality, and the Equal
Protection Clause, 1972 Supreme Court Review. 41, p. 57).
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