Download Cap Good – Food

China Bashing
China bashing bill coming now – Obama’s pol cap key to block it
Politico 9/3 (“WH message to Hu: Congressional action on currency reform coming”,
http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0910/WH_message_to_Hu_Congressional_action_on_currency_reform_coming.html)
But Mann said that despite his background, Geithner was unable to influence China’s long-standing resistance to allowing the value of
its currency to rise relative to the dollar. In the past 18 months, this administration’s relationship with China has followed the same
patterns of previous administrations. Weeks after Geithner’s surprise trip to Beijing in May, China announced that it would allow
more flexibility in its currency. But since then, the value of the yuan, its currency, has not budged. Meanwhile, the drumbeat on
Capitol Hill to chastise the rising superpower is growing loader. A bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) that could lead
to higher tariffs on Chinese imports is likely to be taken up in Congress this fall. And the administration is hoping to signal to
Chinese President Hu Jintao that it is running out of political capital to fight the bill. “People are frustrated — they’re impatient.
They do see U.S. trade policies as one of the key problems that’s led to loss of jobs,” said Thea Lee, policy director and chief
international economist at the AFL-CIO, a key labor constituency for congressional Democrats. “That’s something that we take very
seriously, and we’re going to be reaching out to members of Congress and making sure they understand how important the issue is.”
With the economic recovery appearing to plateau, concerns about the rising trade deficit and outsourced jobs will resonate even more
strongly with Democrats — many of whom have ties to labor unions and the manufacturing sector — ahead of the midterm elections.
Green cautioned that action on the bill will almost certainly further alienate China and steel its resolve against adjusting its currency in
a way that could damage its economy. But he said that the legislation could be an opportune bargaining chip during this weekend’s
talks. “You want the crazy gorilla in the cage when you’re negotiating,” said Green, who was senior director for Asian affairs at
the National Security Council under President George W. Bush. “On the other hand, if the crazy gorilla gets out, you have a
problem.”
Immigration is the death knell for Obama’s agenda
Tichenor, 2009 (Daniel - the Philip H. Knight Professor of Social Science at the University of Oregon and
Senior Faculty Fellow at the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, Navigating an American Minefield,
The Forum, Vol. 7, Iss. 13, p. 1)
Against this backdrop, most modern presidents and congressional leaders have approached the issue warily or dodged it altogether. President
George W. Bush was a determined exception, and he paid dearly. Not only did his efforts to engineer an overhaul fail to get through
Congress two years in a row, but the issue ultimately exploded his party and sounded the death knell for his broader
domestic agenda . No surprise, then, that Obama has backpedaled on his campaign pledge to make comprehensive immigration legislation a priority during his
first year in office. Obama won the presidency with 67 percent of the Latino vote, and he has tried to reassure Hispanic and immigrant groups that he is ready to lead
what he expects to be a “difficult” fight for reform in due time. Soon after entering office, Obama
officials explained that an immigration
initiative would have to come after more looming priorities such as health care, energy, and financial
regulatory reform.2 Yet they have learned that it is not so easy to change the subject. The claim that
undocumented immigrants would richly benefit from the president’s proposals has been a prominent feature of the
bruising battle over health care in vituperative town hall meetings, eliciting a strong rebuke in Obama’s speech to Congress that served as the impetus of Rep. Joe
Wilson’s infamous outburst, “You lie!” The notion that undocumented aliens have much of anything to do with the nation’s
health care challenges is only the latest hyperbole in a long tradition of blaming illegal immigrants for
everything from unemployment in the Great Depression, to disease and criminality in the 1950s, to an overtaxed welfare
state in the 1980s and 1990s, to terror threats before and after 9/11.3 The White House and members of Congress know well that they can
delay an acrimonious struggle over immigration reform for only so long.
This will collapse US-Sino relations, undermine global trade and cause prolonged economic decline
The Korea Herald, ‘8 ("Recession reopens China-U.S. rift," 12/30/2008, Factiva)
The global recession is re-exposing fissures in U.S.-China relations that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spent more than two years
smoothing over. Heightened tensions between China and the U.S. may worsen a contraction in world trade that already threatens to
deepen and prolong the economic downturn. The friction comes as President-elect Barack Obama readies a two-year stimulus package
worth as much as $850 billion that will require the U.S. to borrow more than ever from China, the largest buyer of Treasury securities.
“The American economic slump is running into the Chinese economic slump,” says Derek Scissors, a research fellow at the
Washington-based Heritage Foundation. “It’s creating the conditions for a face-off between Beijing and the U.S. Congress, possibly
leading to destabilization of the world’s most important bilateral economic relationship.”
US-Sino relations solve multiple scenarios for nuclear war and environmental destruction.
Desperes, 01 (John Desperes, Fellow, RAND Corporation. “China, the United States, and the Global Economy.” p. 227-8
Indeed, U.S.-Chinese relations have been consistently driven by strong common interests in preventing mutually damaging wars in
Asia that could involve nuclear weapons; in ensuring that Taiwan's relations with the mainland remain peaceful; in sustaining the
growth of the U.S., China, and other Asian-Pacific economies; and, in preserving natural environments that sustain healthy and
productive lives. What happens in China matters to Americans. It affects America's prosperity. China's growing economy is a valuable
market to many workers, farmers, and businesses across America, not just to large multinational firms like Boeing, Microsoft, and
Motorola, and it could become much more valuable by opening its markets further. China also affects America's security. It could
either help to stabilize or destabilize currently peaceful but sometimes tense and dangerous situations in Korea, where U.S. troops are
on the front line; in the Taiwan Straits, where U.S. democratic values and strategic credibility may be at stake; and in nuclear-armed
South Asia, where renewed warfare could lead to terrible consequences. It also affects America's environment. Indeed, how China
meets its rising energy needs and protects its dwindling habitats will affect the global atmosphere and currently endangered species.
K SPEC
The Affirmative Refused To Specify The Branch Of Government They Act Through—Doing It In The 2ac Is Too
Late Because We’ve Already Chosen The 1nc And No Longer Have The Ability To Conduct Comparative
Institutional Analysis And, Power In The Federal Government Is Divided By 3 Branches
Rotunda, 2001 (Richard, professor of law at the University of Illinois, 18 Const. Commentary 319, “THE COMMERCE CLAUSE, THE POLITICAL QUESTION DOCTRINE, AND MORRISON”, lexis)
No one denies the importance of the Constitution's federalist principles. Its state/federal division of authority protects liberty - both by restricting the burdens that government can impose from a distance and by facilitating
Chief Justice Rehnquist, for the majority, agreed. The "Framers crafted the federal system of government
so that the people's rights would be secured by the division of power." The Framers of our Constitution anticipated that a self-interested
"federal majority" would consistently seek to impose more federal control over the people and the states. Hence,
they created a federal structure designed to protect freedom by dispersing and limiting federal power. They instituted
citizen participation in government that is closer to home. n8
n9
n10
federalism [*321] chiefly to protect individuals, that is, the people, not the "states qua states." n11 The Framers sought to protect liberty by creating a central government of enumerated powers. They divided power between
they further divided power within the federal government by splitting it among the three
branches of government, and they further divided the legislative power (the power that the Framers most feared) by splitting it between two Houses of Congress.
the state and federal governments, and
n12
This Is A Voting Issue :
1. Policy Education—it’s impossible to determine whether the plan is valuable without looking to the branch of
government implementing it
Komesar, 94 (Neil, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin, Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Institutions in Law, Economics, and Public Policy, p. 4-5)
My belief in the importance of institutional choice and comparative institutional analysis is not universally shared, however. There are, in fact, dramatic anomalies in the study of law and public policy when it comes to the
e, one would assume that the central issue of constitutional law is the choice of who
decides—the choice between alternative social decision-makers such as the executive, the legislative, and the
judiciary—and that, therefore, constitutional scholarship would be replete with sophisticated analyses of these alternatives.
In turn, one would assume that, when economic analysts of law—usually non-constitutional law—consider the issue of who
decides, these high priests of trade-offs and opportunity costs would know that one cannot decide who decides
by examining only one alternative. Yet most constitutional scholars ignore the issue of who decides or at most
treat it with superficial maxims. And when economic analysts of law address the subject of who decides, they often focus their attention on the attributes of only one alternative.
Constitutional law and the economic approach to law are important enough aspects of legal study that such anomalies standing alone would justify searching inquiry. But, in fact, these anomalies are
only dramatic examples of a pervasive problem in the analysis of law and, more generally, of public policy.
Although important and controversial decisions about who decides are buried in every law and public policy
issue, they often go unexamined, are treated superficially, or, at best, are analyzed in terms of the characteristics
of one alternative. Most existing theories of law and public policy focus attention on social goals and values.
The economic approach to legal analysis is cast in terms of a single social goal—resource allocation efficiency.
Its critics attack that goal as insufficient both normatively and descriptively, while its proponents defend its
validity. Constitutional law analysis is largely a debate about social goals and values such as resource allocation efficiency, Rawlsian justice, or Lockean protection of property. Although the
choice among social goals or values is an important ingredient in understanding and evaluating law and public
policy outcomes, analysis of goal and value choices, standing alone, tells us virtually nothing about these
subject of deciding who decides. For exampl
outcomes—what they are or what they should be. Upon close inspection, each social goal bandied about in analyses of law
and public policy is generally consistent with virtually any law or public policy outcome. In other words, a given goal
can be seen as consistent with liability or no liability, regulation or no regulation, constitutional right no
constitutional right. Goal Choice may be necessary to the determination of law and public policy, but its is far from sufficient. A link is missing—an assumption overlooked—in
analyses that suppose that a given law or public policy analysis that ostensibly depends solely on goal choice is
the judgment, often unarticulated, that the goal in question is best varied out by a particular institution. Given the goal of protecting property, for
example, the case for recognizing a constitutional right involves the implicit judgment that the adjudicative process protects property better than the political process. In turn, given the goal of promoting safety, the case for
removing tort liability involves the implicit judgment that the market or government regulation promote safety better than the adjudicative process.
Goal choice and institutional choice are
both essential for law and public policy. They are inextricably related. On the one hand, institutional performance and,
institutional choice can not be assessed except against the bench mark of some social goal or set of goals.
On the other, because in the abstract any goal can be consistent with a wide range of public policies, the decision as to
who decides determines how a goal shapes public policy. It is institutional choice that connects goals with their legal or public policy results. Institutional
choice is difficult as well as essential. The choice is always a choice among highly imperfect alternatives. The strengths and weaknesses of one
institution versus another vary from one set of circumstances to another. For example, whether the adjudicative process is the best protector of
therefore,
property rights or the worst determiner of safety is by no means obvious. Sometimes the courts will be the best protectors of private property, and sometimes that task will be better assigned to the political process.
Sometimes the courts will be the best determiners of safety, and sometimes the courts will be the best determiners of safety, and sometimes that task will be better assigned to the political process or the market
2. Advocacy: Comparative Institutional Analysis Is Vital To Participatory Activism For Social Justice
Komesar, 94 (Neil, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin, Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Institutions in Law, Economics, and Public Policy,)
Ambiguity and discretion move institutional choice to center stage. Suppose, for example, that the legislature (or any other branch of
government) assigned the task of implementing this standard is dominated by the rich or even the non poor. One might
expect a relatively stingy guaranteed minimum, this stinginess might stem from an intentional distortion of justice or it might reflect the honest but still biased view of officials
and constituents that, if the guaranteed income were any higher, the pie would shrink so much that the poor would be worse off in the long run. Recognizing the possibility of a biased
legislature, a constitution maker might consider a wide range of design choices including a legislature structured
to better represent the poor, another branch of government to review the determination of the first (presumably that reviewer
branch would be structured differently than the reviewed branch), or a detailed schedule of guaranteed income specified in the constitution
itself. The important point here is that even the most straightforward version of Rawl’s difference principle depends for its real substance on the decisions of the institutions that Rawls neglects to examine. Even the
constitutions of totalitarian states have contained high sounding announcements of right. The welfare of the populace depends on the presence of institutions capable of translating high sounding principles into substance.
Issues of institutional representation and participation seem especially important ₪
15:03 ₪ for the least advantaged who
stopped here at
have had difficulties with representation and participation are important for
resolving the simpler version of the difference principle, they would seem even more important in fronting the more complicated standard that Michelman derives from Rawls. They would seem more
important yet when society faces the immense task of fulfilling a measure of justice that seeks to integrate this difference principle with the
concepts of equal opportunity and liberty. Determining the character of the legislature or agency given the task of this integration seems central here. The
real content of Rawlsian justice depends on such determination. Any theory of justice capable of even minimally capturing our basic sensibilities has many loosely defined
components. Because such loosely defined elements and complicated standards are inherent in goal choice and articulation, the character of the institutions that will
define and apply these goals becomes an essential-perhaps the essential-component in the realization of the just society. The more
complex and vaguely defined the conception of the good, the more central becomes the issue of who decides-the issue of institutional choice. The discussion of
,
almost by definition
boomer showed that these questions of institutional choice dominate issues of resource allocation efficiency-a definition of the social good more confined and better defined than broader conceptions of the good such as
Rawl’s theory of justice. The lessons about the important and complexity of institutional choice derived from Boomer are even more appropriate with more-complex definitions of the good. Rawls purposely and expressly
abstracts from concerns about institutions and institutional choice. Under such circumstances, perhaps it was unfair for me to raise the subject in criticism of his theory-however limited that criticism. I did so for two reasons.
implicit assumptions about institutional choice exist within even the most carefully constructed abstractions and that, if left unexamined,
these hidden assumptions can have adverse effects on the internal structure of the theory. Second, I wanted to show that such
abstraction from institutional choice severely constrains the robustness of the resulting theory. Any attempt to employ Rawls to
First I wanted to show that
explore the character of the just society, as opposed to justice in the abstract, requires abandonment of the vow of non-institutionalism.
1NC FW
A. The Aff doesn’t affirm the topic instrumentally. The 1AC must include a topical plan that is justified with a
normative defense of federal government adoption of such a policy.
This is most predictable –
1. “Resolved” before a colon reflects a legislative forum
Army Officer School, 04 (5-12, “# 12, Punctuation – The Colon and Semicolon”, http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)
The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a
survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael
Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more
paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause which
explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon)
large lakeside cabin with dock g.
A formal resolution, after the word "resolved:"Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the
mayor.
2. “United States Federal Government should” means the debate is solely about the outcome of a policy established
by governmental means
Ericson, 03 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable
. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a
policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase
that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy
into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions,
elements of value-oriented propositions
topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred.
The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer
sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
B. Vote Neg
Advance Parole CP
Text: The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services should grant advance parole with all
necessary extensions for all those seeking entrance, regardless of any category-specific beneficiary
restrictions on eligibility.
Solves 100% of case
Endelman and Mehta ‘10 (Gary Endelman, practices immigration law at BP America Inc, serves on the Editorial Advisory
Board of Immigration Daily, and Cyrus D. Mehta, nationally recognized in the field of
immigration law. He represents corporations and individuals from around the world in
business and employment immigration, family immigration, consular matters, naturalization,
federal court litigation and asylum. He also advises lawyers on ethical issues. Based on 18
years of experience in immigration law, He is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Brooklyn
Law School where he teaches a course, Immigration and Work, Chair of the American
Immigration Lawyers Association’s (AILA) National Pro Bono Committee and Co-Chair of
the AILA-NY Chapter Pro Bono Committe COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM
THROUGH EXECUTIVE FIAT, April 25, 2010,
http://cyrusmehta.blogspot.com/2010/04/comprehensive-immigration-reform.html)
For instance, there is nothing that would bar the USCIS from allowing the beneficiary of an approved employment
based I-140 or family based I-130 petition, and derivative family members, to obtain an employment authorization document
(EAD) and parole. The Executive, under INA § 212(d)(5), has the authority to grant parole for urgent humanitarian
reasons or significant public benefits. The crisis in the priority dates where beneficiaries of petitions may need to wait for green
cards in excess of 30 years may qualify for invoking § 212(d)(5) under “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefits.”
Similarly, the authors credit David Isaacson who pointed out that the Executive has the authority to grant EAD under INA
§274A(h)(3), which defines the term “unauthorized alien” as one who is not “(A) an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence,
or (B) authorized to be so employed by this Act or by the Attorney General” (emphasis added). Under sub paragraph (B), the USCIS
may grant an EAD to people who are adversely impacted by the tyranny of priority dates. Likewise, the beneficiary of an I-130 or
I-140 petition who is outside the U.S. can also be paroled into the U.S. before the priority date becomes current. The
principal and the applicable derivatives would enjoy permission to work and travel regardless of whether they
remained in nonimmigrant visa status. Even those who are undocumented or out of status, but are beneficiaries of
approved I-130 and I-140 petitions, can be granted employment authorization and parole. The retroactive grant of parole
may also alleviate those who are subject to the three or ten year bars since INA § 212(a)(9)(B)(ii) defines “unlawful presence” as
someone who is here “without being admitted or paroled.” Parole, therefore, eliminates the accrual of unlawful presence.
While parole does not constitute an admission, one conceptual difficulty is whether parole can be granted to an individual who is
already admitted on a nonimmigrant visa but has overstayed. Since parole is not considered admission, it can be granted
more readily to one who entered without inspection. On the other hand, it is possible for the Executive to rescind
the grant of admission under INA §212(d)(5), and instead, replace it with the grant parole. As an example, an
individual who was admitted in B-2 status and is the beneficiary of an I-130 petition but whose B-2 status has expired
can be required to report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). who can retroactively rescind the grant of
admission in B-2 status and instead be granted parole retroactively.
Should CP
Text: Kevin and I favor that the United States Federal Government substantially increase the number of, and
substantially expand beneficiary eligibility for, its category-based visas for all those seeking entrance, regardless of
any category-specific beneficiary restrictions on eligibility.
The affirmative’s use of the word “should” posits a universal moral reality – this precludes reasoned debate and
makes violence inevitable
Greene, 02 (Joshua David Greene, currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. “THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD TRUTH ABOUT MORALITY AND WHAT TO
DO ABOUT IT.” Dissertation presented to Princeton University in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. November 2002. http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Dissertation.pdf)
Moral realism is the theoretical expression of the Stone Age moral psychology with which we are saddled. It is an illusion that exacerbates conflict and promotes
misunderstanding. If I want things to be one way and you want things to be some other way, we might be able
to reach some sort of compromise. But, if I want things to be one way, and if I believe that the way I want
things is not merely the way I want things but also the way things ought to be, and if I believe further that it’s just plain to see that my way is the
way things ought to be and that anyone who says otherwise must be outright lying or willfully refusing to see the truth, and if you want things to be some other way and
you’re just as convinced of the rightness of your position as I am of mine, then what chance do we have of
reaching a reasonable compromise? I see you as an errant child, someone who has lost the way, someone who wasn’t paying attention on the day right and wrong were explained, or,
I
attempt to argue with you and am amazed at your obtuseness. The words I speak so clearly reveal the truth, and
yet you persist in your wrongheaded ways. And you are similarly perplexed by me and my stubbornness . Haidt (2001,
pg. 823) summarizes the social-intuitionist take on ordinary moral discourse: The bitterness, futility, and self-righteousness of most moral arguments can now be explicated. In a debate on abortion, politics,
consensual incest, or on what my friend did to your friend, both sides believe that their positions are based on reasoning about the facts and
issues involved (the wag-the-dog illusion). Both sides present what they take to be excellent arguments in
support of their positions. Both sides expect the other side to be responsive to such reasons (the wag-the-other-dog’s-tail illusion). When the other side fails to be
affected by such good reasons, each side concludes that the other side must be insincere, closed-minded, or even
devious…. In this way the culture wars over issues such as homosexuality and abortion can generate morally motivated players on both sides who believe that their opponents are not morally motivated (Haidt &
Hersh, 2001, Robinson, Keltner, Ward, & Ross, 1995). A mess, indeed. But how to clean it up? Must we resign ourselves to a world of
endless conflict and misunderstanding? Haidt (Pg. 823) suggests a shift in tactics: Moral reasoning may have little persuasive power in conflict situations, but the social
intuitionist model says that moral reasoning can be effective in influencing people before a conflict arises… If one can
get the other person to see the issue in a new way, perhaps by reframing a problem to trigger new intuitions, then one can influence others with one’s words. This, however, does not get to the
heart of the problem. It is a gesture toward more subtle, less explosive forms of moral warfare, not peace. Moreover, it
perhaps, as someone who was paying attention but who, for whatever inexplicable reason, has chosen to cast aside what is right and good in favor of that which is base and evil. And you, of course, see me in a similar light.
is a lesson that most professional moral communicators have already learned from experience. No surprise that novels, plays, metaphors, and anecdotes are more effective means of propaganda than philosophical arguments
and statistics. (I’ve never stayed in a hotel room that came furnished with a copy of Kant’s Grundlegung.) As Haidt suggests, a better understanding of moral psychology may be used to further one’s own moral agenda—a
I propose instead that we use our understanding of moral psychology to transcend
our ordinary modes of moral discourse rather than to operate more effectively within them.15 Once again, the enemy, the wolf in
sheep’s clothing, is moral realism. Conflicts of interest may be inevitable, but they need not be exacerbated by people’s
unflagging confidence that they’re right and that their opponents are wrong. The solution, then, is to get rid of
realist thinking and to start by getting rid of realist language. Speak only in terms that make the subjective
nature of value plain. Instead of saying that capital punishment is wrong say that you are opposed to it. Say that
it is an ineffective deterrent, difficult to implement in a colorblind fashion, and likely to lead to irreversible
mistakes. And then say no more. Instead of saying that eating animals is wrong and a form of murder, say that you are opposed to eating animals because you wish to alleviate suffering and
good or bad thing depending on the agenda in question. But
you believe that this practice causes much unnecessary suffering. Instead of saying that gay marriage undermines “family values,” say that it undermines your family’s values, that it is against the teachings of your religion,
Speaking in this way is honest,
requires no false metaphysical commitments, and should make discussions of moral matters much more fruitful
and, at the very least, shorter. When someone makes a claim about how he feels; what he wants, values, or cares
about; or what he is or is not willing to accept in a negotiation, there is, in the absence of realist interlocutors,
nothing to dispute. When someone makes a putative statement of fact, there is often much to dispute, but in a
purely factual discussion there is a decent chance that genuine evidence can be brought to bear on the issue,
resolving it in favor of one party or another or, failing that, demonstrating to both parties that the evidence is
inconclusive.16 Even where differences of value and/or factual disagreements persist, such a mode of discourse
is likely to lead to increased mutual understanding and less exasperating huffing and puffing. The language of
moral realism is sufficiently rich to provide a reasonable sounding justification for just about anything a society
would actually want to do. Even terrorists (or “freedom fighters,” depending on your point of view) can justify their actions in terms that sound
eerily similar to those used by their victims in other contexts. Because there is no fact of the matter about
what’s right or wrong, no true moral theory, there is no neutral ground from which to sort out the putatively true
moral claims from the ones that simply ring true to some people. Thus, the language of moral realism makes an
excellent smoke screen for aggressive or otherwise anti-social behavior, a smoke screen that is so effective it can, and usually does, fool those who
employ it. A nation with economic incentives to take over a neighbor’s territory can claim that the neighboring
territory really belongs to their nation and that they have a right to it. One might go so far as to say that nations
require the language of moral realism to marshal popular support for aggressive actions. Has a military
aggressor ever not claimed a moral right to carry out its plans? Has a nation ever been moved to war by leaders
who said, “It would be good for us economically, and we can get away with it, so why not?” As Roger Fisher says in Basic
Negotiating Strategy (1971, Pg. 110), “Governments are not like bank robbers. People ask ‘What ought I do?’ not ‘What can I get
etc. (Obviously some people will have an easier time with this transition than others. This is an important point to be explored later in Chapter 5.)
away with?’” Arthur Schlesinger (1971) concurs: “National interest has a self-limiting factor. It cannot, unless transformed by an injection of moral righteousness, produce ideological crusades for unlimited
objectives.” As does Kenneth Thompson (1985, pg. 5): “Foreign policy tends to be articulated in moral terms, even in most authoritarian
regimes.” As noted above, moral realists naturally interpret the actions and opinions of their (realist) opponents
as products of a surreptitious disregard for morality. They see things this way because, to them, the moral truth that has been disregarded by their opponents is so selfevident that only one who willfully disregards morality’s requirements could think and act as their opponents do. People who are evil, people who believe that their actions are wrong and carry on just the
same, are native to Hollywood movies and children’s books, but in real life (and good books and films) such
characters are few and their influence is negligible. (See Section 5.2.3.) In the real world, the vast majority of avoidable
suffering is caused by people who think they have the moral truth on their side.
Terrorism CP
We are resolved that…..
The United States Federal Government should substantially increase the number of, and substantially
expand beneficiary eligibility for, its category-based visas for those seeking entrance who aren’t screened
by the Homeland Security Department as terrorists, regardless of any category-specific beneficiary
restrictions on eligibility.
Counterplan is textually competitive – PICs out of the word all, as it excludes terrorists
Counterplan solves case because it allows open borders – however it excludes terrorists
Government Executive 10 [“Analysis: Visa security is critical to preventing terrorist attacks”, February 9, 2010]
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed attempt to bomb Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day is
another reminder that a visa is priceless to a terrorist. It is the golden key that allows easy passage to the United
States. If the intelligence on Abdulmutallab had been properly analyzed, his visa would have been quickly
revoked and he would have been denied access to Flight 253. We must go back to basics and strengthen the role
of the Homeland Security Department in visa issuance, review and security. Certainly, we must continue to
improve methods and technologies for screening and detecting explosives carried by airline passengers, but our
highest priority is to remember the lesson of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the attempted Christmas
Day bombing: Our first line of defense against terrorism is intelligence and visa security. Yes, visa security. It's
not an easy, 30-second sound bite and it takes a little more explaining, but it might be our best defense. Without
a valid visa, America's enemies will not be able to lawfully enter the United States at all. This does not mean we
should in any way diminish America's role as a gateway to visitors from around the world. Common-sense
security measures and an open and welcoming culture are not mutually exclusive. Revoking Abdulmutallab's
visa would have done nothing to interfere with the travel plans of any other passenger boarding a flight to
America. When it was initially revealed that the United States granted visas to the Sept. 11 terrorists, Congress
wisely directed the new Homeland Security Department to take a larger role in visa security. Prior to that, the
State Department had exercised a historically lax approach to visa security. As DHS' first undersecretary for
border and transportation security, it was my responsibility to fulfill the congressional mandate to establish a
visa security office, deploy visa security agents to priority and at-risk embassies, and identify visa seekers who
might pose a risk to the United States. Before DHS was created, visa security checks were limited. Consular
officers would interview visa applicants at U.S. embassies worldwide, they would conduct automated name
checks against watch lists of known terrorists, and they would obtain the applicants' fingerprints and a digital
photograph. Now a visa security agent complements the State Department's efforts, applying a keen law
enforcement perspective to further check applicants who are either "not yet known" or flagged, to stop them
from reaching the United States
Terrorists are trying to get nuclear weapons now – letting them in the country causes a nuclear attack
Allison ‘7
(Graham Allison, Director – Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Professor of Government, and Faculty Chair of the Dubai Initiative – Harvard University’s Kennedy
School of Government, “Symposium: Apocalypse When?”, The National Interest, November / December 2007, Lexis)
MUELLER IS entitled to his opinion that the threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is "exaggerated" and
"overwrought." But analysts of various political persuasions , in and out of government, are virtually unanimous in their
judgment to the contrary. As the national-security community learned during the Cold War, risk = likelihood x consequences. Thus, even when the likelihood of nuclear
Armageddon was small, the consequences were so catastrophic that prudent policymakers felt a categorical imperative to do everything that feasibly could be done to prevent that war. Today, a single
nuclear bomb exploding in just one city would change our world. Given such consequences, differences between a 1 percent and a 20 percent likelihood of such an attack are relatively insignificant when
considering how we should respond to the threat. Richard Garwin, a designer of the hydrogen bomb who Enrico Fermi once called "the only true genius I had ever met", told Congress in March that he
estimated a "20 percent per year probability [of a nuclear explosion-not just a contaminated, dirty bomb-a nuclear explosion] with American cities and European cities included." My Harvard colleague
Matthew Bunn has created a model in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science that estimates the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack over a ten-year period to be 29 percentidentical to the average estimate from a poll of security experts commissioned by Senator Richard Lugar in 2005. My book, Nuclear Terrorism, states my own best judgment that, on the current trend line,
the chances of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next decade are greater than 50 percent. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has expressed his own view that my work may even underestimate the
Warren Buffet, the world's most successful investor and legendary odds-maker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but
catastrophic events, concluded that nuclear terrorism is "inevitable." He stated, "I don't see any way that it
won't happen." To assess the threat one must answer five core questions: who, what, where, when and how? Who could be planning a nuclear terrorist attack? Al-Qaeda remains the leading
candidate. According to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Al-Qaeda has been substantially reconstituted-but with its leadership having moved from a
medieval Afghanistan to Pakistan-a nation that actually has nuclear weapons. As former CIA Director George J. Tenet's memoir reports, Al-Qaeda's
risk.
leadership has remained "singularly focused on acquiring WMDs" and that "the main threat is the nuclear
one." Tenet concluded, "I am convinced that this is where [Osama bin Laden] and his operatives want to go." What nuclear weapons could terrorists use? A ready-made weapon from
the arsenal of one of the nuclear-weapons states or an elementary nuclear bomb constructed from highly enriched uranium made by a state remain most
likely. As John Foster, a leading U.S. bomb-maker and former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote a quarter of a century ago, "If the essential nuclear
materials are at hand, it is possible to make an atomic bomb using information that is available in the open literature." Where could
terrorists acquire a nuclear bomb? If a nuclear attack occurs, Russia will be the most likely source of the weapon or material. A close second,
however, is North Korea, which now has ten bombs worth of plutonium, or Pakistan with sixty nuclear bombs. Finally, research reactors in forty developing and
transitional countries still hold the essential ingredient for nuclear weapons. When could terrorists launch the first nuclear attack? If terrorists bought or stole a nuclear weapon in good
working condition, they could explode it today. If terrorists acquired one hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium, they could make a working elementary nuclear bomb in less than a year. How could
terrorists deliver a nuclear weapon to its target? In the same way that illegal items come to our cities every day. As one of my former colleagues has quipped, if you have any doubt about the ability of
terrorists to deliver a weapon to an American target, remember:
They could hide it in a bale of marijuana.
Terrorism Causes Extinction
Sid-Ahmed, political analyst 04 (Mohamed, Managing Editor for Al-Ahali, “Extinction!” August 26-September 1, Issue no. 705,
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/705/op5.htm)
What would be the consequences of a nuclear attack by terrorists? Even if it fails, it would further exacerbate
the negative features of the new and frightening world in which we are now living. Societies would close in on
themselves, police measures would be stepped up at the expense of human rights, tensions between civilisations and religions
would rise and ethnic conflicts would proliferate. It would also speed up the arms race and develop the awareness
that a different type of world order is imperative if humankind is to survive. But the still more critical scenario is if the attack
succeeds. This could lead to a third world war, from which no one will emerge victorious. Unlike a conventional
war which ends when one side triumphs over another, this war will be without winners and losers. When nuclear pollution
infects the whole planet, we will all be losers.
Side constraint to prevent terrorism
Allison 5
Graham Allison, Harvard Government Prof, 2005 [The American Prospect, "The Gravest Danger," March, LN]
The gravity of the potential consequences requires that the president give absolute priority to this
challenge. In the Cold War, we recognized that preventing a global nuclear war was a necessary condition for pursuing any other objective. In Ronald Reagan's oft-quoted one-liner, "A nuclear
war can never be won and must never be fought." The face of that danger today is a nuclear terrorist attack on an American city.
This would be a world-altering event. The categorical imperative, therefore, is to do everything
technically feasible on the fastest possible time line to prevent it.
Impact Calculus
Utilitarianism is the only moral framework and alternatives are inevitability self-contradictory
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; “Nuclear Ethics” pg. 18-19)
Imagine that you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square
an army captain is about to order his men to shoot two peasants lined up against a wall.
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case.34
where
When you ask the reason, you are told
someone in this village shot at the captain's men last night. When you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all have dirty
and tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other. Otherwise both die. He warns
Will you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will you
allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play his dirty game? The point of the story is to
show the value and limits of both traditions. Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would
refuse to shoot. But at what point does the principle of not taking an innocent life collapse before the
consequentialist burden? Would it matter if there were twenty or 1,000 peasants to be saved? What if killing or torturing one innocent person
could save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists' nuclear device? At some point does not integrity become the ultimate egoism of fastidious selfrighteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the lives of countless others? Is it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit
remorse or regret over the immoral means, but justify the action by the consequences? Do absolutist approaches to integrity become selfhands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle
you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you.
contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons? "Do what is right though the world should perish" was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that he did not
Now that it may be literally possible in the nuclear age, it seems more than ever to be
self-contradictory.35 Absolutist ethics bear a heavier burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.
mean it to be taken literally even then.
***Cap
Cap Good – Top Level
The desire for freedom and growth is innate – moving away risks totalitarianism, violence, poverty and
war
Aligica ‘03
(Paul Aligica, Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Adjunct Fellow at the
Hudson Institute, “The Great Transition and the Social Limits to Growth: Herman Kahn on Social Change and
Global Economic Development”, April 21,
http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2827)
Stopping things would mean if not to engage in an experiment to change the human nature, at least in an equally
difficult experiment in altering powerful cultural forces: "We firmly believe that despite the arguments put
forward by people who would like to 'stop the earth and get off,' it is simply impractical to do so. Propensity to
change may not be inherent in human nature, but it is firmly embedded in most contemporary cultures. People
have almost everywhere become curious, future oriented, and dissatisfied with their conditions. They want more
material goods and covet higher status and greater control of nature. Despite much propaganda to the contrary,
they believe in progress and future" (Kahn, 1976, 164). As regarding the critics of growth that stressed the issue
of the gap between rich and poor countries and the issue of redistribution, Kahn noted that what most people
everywhere want was visible, rapid improvement in their economic status and living standards, and not a
closing of the gap (Kahn, 1976, 165). The people from poor countries have as a basic goal the transition from
poor to middle class. The other implications of social change are secondary for them. Thus a crucial factor to
be taken into account is that while the zero-growth advocates and their followers may be satisfied to stop at the
present point, most others are not. Any serious attempt to frustrate these expectations or desires of that majority
is likely to fail and/or create disastrous counter reactions. Kahn was convinced that "any concerted attempt
to stop or even slow 'progress' appreciably (that is, to be satisfied with the moment) is catastrophe-prone". At
the minimum, "it would probably require the creation of extraordinarily repressive governments or movementsand probably a repressive international system" (Kahn, 1976, 165; 1979, 140-153). The pressures of
overpopulation, national security challenges and poverty as well as the revolution of rising expectations could
be solved only in a continuing growth environment. Kahn rejected the idea that continuous growth would
generate political repression and absolute poverty. On the contrary, it is the limits-to-growth position "which
creates low morale, destroys assurance, undermines the legitimacy of governments everywhere, erodes personal
and group commitment to constructive activities and encourages obstructiveness to reasonable policies and
hopes". Hence this position "increases enormously the costs of creating the resources needed for expansion,
makes more likely misleading debate and misformulation of the issues, and make less likely constructive and
creative lives". Ultimately "it is precisely this position the one that increases the potential for the kinds of
disasters which most at its advocates are trying to avoid" (Kahn, 1976, 210; 1984).
Free market capitalism is vital to preventing extinction and ensuring equality and value to life – also
solves disease and poverty
Rockwell ‘02
(Llewellyn H., President of the Mises Institute, The Free Market, “Why They Attack Capitalism”, Volume 20,
Number 10, October, http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control=418&sortorder-articledate)
If you think about it, this hysteria is astonishing, even terrifying. The market economy has created unfathomable
prosperity and, decade by decade, for centuries and centuries, miraculous feats of innovation, production,
distribution, and social coordination. To the free market, we owe all material prosperity, all our leisure time, our
health and longevity, our huge and growing population, nearly everything we call life itself. Capitalism and
capitalism alone has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness, and early death. In the
absence of the capitalist economy, and all its underlying institutions, the world’s population would, over time,
shrink to a fraction of its current size, in a holocaust of unimaginable scale, and whatever remained of the
human race would be systematically reduced to subsistence, eating only what can be hunted or gathered. And
this is only to mention its economic benefits. Capitalism is also an expression of freedom. It is not so much a
social system but the de facto result in a society where individual rights are respected, where businesses,
families, and every form of association are permitted to flourish in the absence of coercion, theft, war, and
aggression. Capitalism protects the weak against the strong, granting choice and opportunity to the masses who
once had no choice but to live in a state of dependency on the politically connected and their enforcers. The
high value placed on women, children, the disabled, and the aged— unknown in the ancient world—owes so
much to capitalism’s productivity and distribution of power. Must we compare the record of capitalism with
that of the state, which, looking at the sweep of this past century alone, has killed hundreds of millions of
people in wars, famines, camps, and deliberate starvation campaigns? And the record of central planning of the
type now being urged on American enterprise is perfectly abysmal.
Cap Good – AI
Ending capitalism dooms artificial intelligence
Kurzweil 1
Ray Kurzweil, Ph.D. and Genius Inventor, “The Law of Accelerating Returns”, Lifeboat Foundation Special Reports, 2001,
http://lifeboat.com/ex/law.of.accelerating.returns
There is a vital economic imperative to create more intelligent technology. Intelligent machines have enormous
value. That is why they are being built. There are tens of thousands of projects that are advancing intelligent machines in
diverse incremental ways. The support for "high tech" in the business community (mostly software) has grown enormously. When I
started my optical character recognition (OCR) and speech synthesis company (Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc.) in 1974, there were
only a half-dozen high technology IPO's that year. The number of such deals has increased one hundred fold and the number of dollars
invested has increased by more than one thousand fold in the past 25 years. In the four years between 1995 and 1999 alone, high tech
venture capital deals increased from just over $1 billion to approximately $15 billion. We will continue to build more
powerful computational mechanisms because it creates enormous value. We will reverse-engineer the human
brain not simply because it is our destiny, but because there is valuable information to be found there that will
provide insights in building more intelligent (and more valuable) machines. We would have to repeal capitalism and
every visage of economic competition to stop this progression.
Extinction
Bostrum 03
(Nick, Director, Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University,
http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.htm)
It is hard to think of any problem that a superintelligence could not either solve or at least help us solve.
Disease, poverty, environmental destruction, unnecessary suffering of all kinds: these are things that a
superintelligence equipped with advanced nanotechnology would be capable of eliminating. Additionally, a
superintelligence could give us indefinite lifespan, either by stopping and reversing the aging process through
the use of nanomedicine[7], or by offering us the option to upload ourselves. A superintelligence could also
create opportunities for us to vastly increase our own intellectual and emotional capabilities, and it could assist
us in creating a highly appealing experiential world in which we could live lives devoted to in joyful game-playing,
relating to each other, experiencing, personal growth, and to living closer to our ideals.
Cap Good – Democracy
Economic freedom inherent in capitalism is inextricably linked to political democracy
Novak in ‘82
Michael Novak, Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Award-winning author, “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism”,
1982, p. 14-15
.The premise of this book may startle some. In the conventional view, the link between a democratic political system and a
market economy is merely an accident of history. My argument is that the link is stronger: political democracy is
compatible in practice only with a market economy. In turn, both systems nourish and are best nourished by a pluralistic
liberal culture. It is important to give attention to all three systems. The full implications of a system which is threefold, rather than
unitary, are developed through all the pages of this book. To begin with, modern democracy and modern capitalism proceed
from identical historical impulses. These impulses had moral form before institutions were invented to realize them; they
aimed (1) to limit the power of the state, in defense against tyranny and stagnation; and (2) to liberate the energies of
individuals and independently organized communities. Such impulses gave birth to modern European cities, whose first
citizens took as their battle cry "City air makes men free."' Such citizens sought liberation from the crippling taxation, heavy
bureaucracy, and dreary regulations of state and church. The moral vision of such citizens demanded forms of self-government in "city
republics" and "free cities." It led them to cherish economies based upon free markets, incentives, and contracts. Gradually, such
citizens developed polities based upon covenants, suffrage, the separation of powers, and the declaration of individual rights. The two
revolutions—political and economic—in practice, but also in theory, nourished each other.' Karl Marx recognized this link in his term
of con-tempt: "bourgeois democracy," he called it. Both spring from the same logic, the same moral principles, the same nest of
cultural values, institutions, and presuppositions. While bastard forms of capitalism do seem able for a time to endure without
democracy, the natural logic of capitalism leads to democracy.' For economic liberties without political liberties are
inherently unstable. Citizens economically free soon demand political freedoms. Thus dictatorships or
monarchies which permit some freedoms to the market have a tendency to evolve into political democracies, as
has happened in recent years in Greece, Portugal, Spain, and other nations. On the other side, the state which does not recognize limits
to its power in the economic sphere inevitably destroys liberties in the political sphere. There are, as yet, no instances of dictatorial
socialist states becoming democratic (although in 1981 one watched Poland with fascination). Democratic states which are sometimes
described as socialist (Sweden, Israel, West Germany) invariably retain large components of private property, markets, and incentives.
Another point must be noted. Democratic polities depend upon the reality of economic growth. No traditional society, no
socialist society—indeed, no society in history—has ever produced strict equality among individuals or classes. Real differences in
talent, aspiration, and application inexorably individuate humans. Given the diversity and liberty of human life, no fair and free system
can possibly guarantee equal outcomes. A democratic system depends for its legitimacy, therefore, not upon equal results but upon a
sense of equal opportunity. Such legitimacy flows from the belief of all individuals that they can better their condition. This belief can
be realized only under conditions of economic growth. Liberty requires expanse and openness.
Solves extinction
Diamond 95
Larry Diamond, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, December, PROMOTING DEMOCRACY IN THE 1990S, 1995, p.
http://www.carnegie.org//sub/pubs/deadly/diam_rpt.html //
Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global
ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated
with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular
sovereignty and openness. The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a
truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize
themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and
they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do
not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable,
open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more
environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the
destruction of their environments.
Cap Good – Disease
Cap solves disease
Norberg 3
[Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro (Swedish think tank), 2003, In Defense of Global Capitalism, p. 189 ]
Personally, I believe we have more to expect from philanthropic capitalists than from politics. Capitalism
does not force people
to maximize their profit at every turn; it enables them to use their property as they see fit, free of political
considerations. Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the very personification of modern capitalism, himself devotes more to the
campaign against disease in the developing countries than the American government does. Between November 1999
and 2000, through the $23 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Health Fund, $1.4 billion went to vaccinate children in
developing countries for common diseases and to fund research into HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB, for example,
in developing countries. That is a quarter of what all industrialized nations combined devoted to combating
disease in the developing countries. So the fact that Bill Gates is worth more than $50 billion should give the poor and the
sick of the world reason to rejoice. Clearly they would stand to gain more from a handful of Gateses than from the
whole of Europe and another couple of WHO.
Uncontained disease leads to extinction
Toolis, the director of a major television series on the history of plagues, 09
(Kevin, The Express, April 28, 2009 U.K. 1st Edition “Pandemic Pandemonium” lexis)
It destroyed the Roman Empire, wiped out most of the New World and killed millions in Europe. How disease not just Mexico's swine fever - has shaped the planet SCIENTISTS call it the Big Die Off, when a terrifying
new virus rips through a species and kills up to a third of the entire population. And we all now could be facing a new
apocalypse, though no one yet knows how potent the new strain of Mexican swine fever will be, or how many millions could die.
Yet if history teaches us anything it tells us that the greatest danger the human race faces is not some crackpot
North Korean dictator but a six-gene virus that could wipe out one third of the global population. Our real enemy,
a new plague virus, is so small you can barely see it even with an advanced electron microscope. It has no
morality, no thought or no plan. All it wants to do is reproduce itself inside another human body. We are just
another biological opportunity, a nice warm place to feed and replicate. Viruses are as old as life itself. What is startling
though is how vulnerable our globalised societies are to the threat of a new deadly plague. Before World Health Organisation
scientists could identify this new H1N1 virus it had travelled halfway across the world via international flights.
Cap Good – Environment
Capitalism key to environmental protection
Taylor, director of natural resource studies at CATO, Aprill 22, 2003
[Jerry, Happy Earth Day? Thank Capitalism, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3073]
Indeed, we wouldn't even have environmentalists in our midst were it not for capitalism. Environmental
amenities, after all, are luxury goods. America -- like much of the Third World today -- had no environmental
movement to speak of until living standards rose sufficiently so that we could turn our attention from simply
providing for food, shelter, and a reasonable education to higher "quality of life" issues. The richer you are, the
more likely you are to be an environmentalist. And people wouldn't be rich without capitalism. Wealth not only
breeds environmentalists, it begets environmental quality. There are dozens of studies showing that, as per
capita income initially rises from subsistence levels, air and water pollution increases correspondingly. But once
per capita income hits between $3,500 and $15,000 (dependent upon the pollutant), the ambient concentration
of pollutants begins to decline just as rapidly as it had previously increased. This relationship is found for
virtually every significant pollutant in every single region of the planet. It is an iron law. Given that wealthier
societies use more resources than poorer societies, such findings are indeed counterintuitive. But the data don't
lie. How do we explain this? The obvious answer -- that wealthier societies are willing to trade-off the
economic costs of government regulation for environmental improvements and that poorer societies are not -- is
only partially correct. In the United States, pollution declines generally predated the passage of laws mandating
pollution controls. In fact, for most pollutants, declines were greater before the federal government passed its
panoply of environmental regulations than after the EPA came upon the scene. Much of this had to do with
individual demands for environmental quality. People who could afford cleaner-burning furnaces, for instance,
bought them. People who wanted recreational services spent their money accordingly, creating profit
opportunities for the provision of untrammeled nature. Property values rose in cleaner areas and declined in
more polluted areas, shifting capital from Brown to Green investments. Market agents will supply whatever it is
that people are willing to spend money on. And when people are willing to spend money on environmental
quality, the market will provide it. Meanwhile, capitalism rewards efficiency and punishes waste. Profithungry companies found ingenious ways to reduce the natural resource inputs necessary to produce all kinds of
goods, which in turn reduced environmental demands on the land and the amount of waste that flowed through smokestacks and water pipes. As we learned to do
more and more with a given unit of resources, the waste involved (which manifests itself in the form of pollution) shrank. This trend was magnified by
the shift away from manufacturing to service industries, which characterizes wealthy, growing economies. The
latter are far less pollution-intensive than the former. But the former are necessary prerequisites for the latter.
Property rights -- a necessary prerequisite for free market economies -- also provide strong incentives to invest
in resource health. Without them, no one cares about future returns because no one can be sure they'll be around
to reap the gains. Property rights are also important means by which private desires for resource conservation
and preservation can be realized. When the government, on the other hand, holds a monopoly on such decisions, minority preferences in developing
societies are overruled (see the old Soviet block for details). Furthermore, only wealthy societies can afford the investments necessary to secure basic environmental
improvements, such as sewage treatment and electrification. Unsanitary water and the indoor air pollution (caused primarily by burning organic fuels in the home for
heating and cooking needs) are directly responsible for about 10 million deaths a year in the Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the
planet today.
Capitalism can save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the
environmental organizations combined.
Biodiversity Loss Increases The Risk Of Total Ecosystem Collapse And Extinction
Major David N. Diner , JAG – US Army, MILITARY LAW REVIEW, Winter 1994,
http://www.stormingmedia.us/14/1456/A145654.html
By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so
does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the
United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each new animal or
plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined effects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and
human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets
from an aircraft's wings, mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.
Cap Good – Ethics
The alternative is evil – capitalism is the most moral.
Edward Romar, Lecturer in Management – U. Mass. Boston College of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, “Noble Markets:
The Noble/Slave Ethic in Hayek’s Free Market Capitalism”, 85:57-66, 2009, Springer
The question, then, is what principles underlie the free market and other social systems? Hayek in many ways is a
supporter and heir to the liberal traditions of Adam Smith, David Hume, J.S. Mill and others. In this respect, there appears to be a
strong utilitarian aspect to his views of freedom and markets. Allowing markets to develop spontaneously and with very limited
restrictions enables progress to take place and civilization to advance. For Hayek these are synonymous. ‘‘In one sense, civilization
is progress and progress is civilization…Progress is movement for movement’s sake, for it is in the process of learning, and in the
effects of having learned something new, that man enjoys the gifts of his intelligence’’ (Hayek, 1960, pp. 39, 41). Therefore,
humanity can only benefit from the spontaneous development created by markets and the freedom they require
to operate effectively. This beneficial spontaneous development is founded upon ‘‘rules of human conduct that gradually
evolved (especially those dealing with several property, honest contract, exchange, trade, competition, gain, and privacy)’’ (Hayek,
1988, p. 12). One might see in this a utilitarian approach. In one sense this is true, but it may be characterized better
as a ‘‘general consequentialism.’’ Hayek is convinced humanity is far better off in a world where spontaneity is
welcome and only basic rules accepted. This allows for freedom, which is unquestioningly good, change and
movement for change and movement sake, and the advancement of civilization. Hayek rejects utilitarianism except in what he calls
a wide sense and general sense.7 Freedom, as the basic foundation of the just and moral society ‘‘will prevail only if
it is accepted as a general principle whose application to particular instances requires no justification’’ (Hayek,
1973, p. 61). Therefore, the general rules regulating markets have utility because they can be defended on historical grounds through
their contribution to change and progress and not on the basis of any specific outcome or future benefit. Hayek uses the term
utilitarianism in what he calls the narrow sense. Originally, the term simply meant useful. Since Bentham, it has come to mean
something more specific. Now utilitarian means that something can contribute to a particular outcome and be associated with
particular acts. Thus utility is no longer a general quality but something quite specific to a desirable outcome. ‘‘Bentham’s
conception of a calculus of pleasure and pain by which the greatest happiness of the greatest number is to be determined presupposes
that all the particular individual effects of any one action can be known by the acting person’’ (Hayek, 1976, p. 19). Furthermore,
rule utilitarianism cannot be the foundation for society’s rules because ‘‘no system of generic or rule utilitarianism could treat all
rules as fully determined by utilities known to the acting person …’’ (Hayek, 1976, p. 20). Utilitarianism of whatever flavor is a
false foundation for moral rules because it requires omniscience when in fact ignorance makes the rules necessary. ‘‘Man developed
rules of conduct not because he knows but because he doesn’t know what all the consequences of a particular action will be’’
(Hayek, 1976, p. 20). In the moral and just society the foundation for human interaction is the limited number of abstract rules
supporting freedom, private property and so forth. Since this situation provides for the maximum human freedom and responsibility,
the issue of what regulates human behavior becomes critical. Just as human institutions and society have evolved, so has humanity.
Social customs and morality have evolved from a small group focus, where individual success depended upon group survival, to one
where the individual is more independent because of a wider and more complex set of relationships, what Hayek calls the extended
order that goes far beyond the small band and group. Morality has evolved from an altruism, where the individual must
subordinate individuality to group success, to one based upon the individual alone. As humanity develops,
ethics become individual and the individual must become more responsible for her behavior. However, though
she may be responsible, her responsibility can only be limited because individual knowledge is incomplete and no individual can
understand the full consequences of her actions.8
Their alternative is epistemologically unacceptable – it prescribes against freedom
Jack Douglas, Prof. Emeritus Soc. – UC San Diego, “The Myth of the Welfare State”, 1991, p. 19-20, Google Print
Our goal here is practical wisdom and understanding. Any attempt to explain everything, or even much, of human life by
simple determinants is scientism--pseudoscience, not social science. Modes of production, social class, rates of
investment, income distribution, and hundreds of other factors are important in human life, but anyone who
seizes upon them to explain everything important produces monstrous misunderstandings such as have led over
and over into catastrophes. All of these modernist theories deny or assume away the fundamental factors-human nature and the human condition--which include partial free choice by individuals and situational
accidents--"fortuna." They begin with the more superficial and, thus, are able at best to provide only correlational
analyses that hold for some situations (where the parameters are the same, as they say). Almost all of the recent analyses fail
completely to see the importance of the specific properties of the dominance drive--the lust for power--and of statism, and
bureaucracies. If you exclude from your analysis the lust for power, statism, and bureaucracies, you easily
conclude that the collectivization of power in statist bureaucracies ruled by the best and brightest will be the
most rational, efficient, and benevolent of all social orders. This is precisely what most social "scientists" have
concluded, from Marxist-Leninists to our current "industrial policy" central planners. Since they have denied or never seen
the crucial factors, they can only produce monstrous misunderstandings and catastrophes, if their rationalistic
plans are long followed. Our goal here is to deal with first things first, to understand the crucial factors at work.
Everything else is secondary and must build on that. If people come to see how the mistaken modernist ideas
about human beings, especially about economics and politics, have brought us to these brinks--that we are not the victims of
mere accidents, nor the wages of economic freedom, as the megastatists of all stripes insist, then I feel sure they will find ways to
turn the great tidal shift. Until they have the general understanding, the great myths of the modernist welfare state will reign
supreme and no effective policy proposals for deratcheting megastatist powers will be adopted. Only once people
rediscover that most American of all ideas--that "Freedom works!" and consequently, "Statist repression fails!" we
shall see a birth of freedom, philanthropy, prosperity, and peace--no utopia, but the New World, a shining land of hope-America.
Cap Good – Food
A. Socializing agriculture collapses food production
Thomas Sowell, senior fellow Hoover Institution, 1/2/02
(Capitalism Magazine From Marxism to the Market, http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1331)
The rhetoric of socialism may be inspiring, but its actual record is dismal. Countries which for centuries exported food have
suddenly found themselves forced to import food to stave off starvation, after agriculture was socialized. This has
happened all over the world, among people of every race. Anyone who saw the contrast between East Berlin and West
Berlin, back in the days when half the city was controlled by the Communists, can have no doubts as to which system produces more
economic benefits for ordinary people. Even though the people in both parts of the city were of the same race, culture
and history, those living under the Communists were painfully poorer, in addition to having less freedom. Much the same
story could be told in Africa, where Ghana relied on socialistic programs and the Ivory Coast relied more on the marketplace, after
both countries became independent back in the 1960s. Ghana started off with all the advantages. Its per capita income was double that
of the Ivory Coast. But, after a couple of decades under different economic systems, the bottom 20% of people in the Ivory Coast had
higher incomes than 60% of the people in Ghana.
B. A fall in food production causes world war three
William H Calvin 2002 (University of Washington, A Brain for All Season,
http://WilliamCalvin.com/BrainForAllSeasons/ NAcoast.htm Caporal)
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields will cause some powerful countries
try to take over their neighbors or distant lands – if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, will go
marauding, both at home and across the borders. The better-organized countries will attempt to use their armies,
to
before they fall apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or
starving their inhabitants if not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for
the remaining food. This will be a worldwide problem – and could easily lead to a Third World War – but
Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze.
Cap Good – Space
Capitalism is key to space exploration and development
Blundell, director general of the Institute for Economic Affairs, 2004 (John, “Mission to Mars must go private to succeed,”
February 2, http://www.iea.org.uk/record.jsp?type=news&ID=166)
Bush is not finding the billions himself. Rather the tab will be picked up by US taxpayers in perhaps 20 years’ time. What arrests me
is the unchallenged assumption that space exploration must be a nationalised industry. The Soviet effort may be
stalled but the Chinese seem committed to joining the race. The European Space Agency is a strange combination of nationalised
bodies. NASA is a pure old-fashioned nationalised entity. I argue we should relinquish the expectation that space has to be
limited to vast quangos. The mindset we all share is an echo of the rivalry between the evaporated USSR and the still dynamic
US. The first bleeps of the Sputnik galvanised the US into accelerating its space effort. What we need is capitalists in space.
Capitalism needs property rights, enforcement of contracts and the rule of law. The ideological tussle does not cease
once we are beyond the ionosphere. With the exception of Arthur C Clarke, none of us imagined the entertainment potential
from satellites. Geostationary lumps of electronic gadgetry beam us our BSkyB television pictures. I remain in awe that Rupert
Murdoch can place a device in the skies above Brazil that sends a signal to every home in each hemisphere. Who could have
foreseen that mobile phones could keep us chattering without any wiring, or that global position techniques
could plot where we all are to within a metre? These are business applications. Business is already in space.
Markets detect and apply opportunities that are not envisaged by even the most accomplished technicians. I’m
not saying Murdoch has special competences. I imagine he is as baffled by digital miracles as I am. The point is that companies
define and refine what public bodies cannot achieve. Lift the veil of course and all those satellite firms are an intricate
web of experts supplying ideas and services. We have an infant space market. What use will the Moon be? Is
there value on Mars other than the TV rights? The answer is nobody can know. We can only make some guesses. The
Spanish ships that set off for the US thought they would get to India. The Portuguese knew they’d reach China. The English followed
them westwards seeking gold. In fact, they got tobacco. Events always confound expectations. The arguments for putting men on
Mars are expressly vague from President Bush. Perhaps he was really bidding for votes. From my reading the best results may be
medical. Zero, or low, gravity techniques may allow therapies of which we are ignorant. It seems facetious to suggest
tourism may be a big part of space opportunity but as both the North and South poles are over-populated and there is a queue
at the top of Mount Everest, a trip to the Sea of Tranquility may prove a magnet for the wealthy. Instead of NASA’s grotesque
bureaucracy it may be Thomas Cook will be a greater force for exploration. NASA could be a procurement body. It need not
design and run all space ventures. It could sub-contract far more extensively. Without specialised engineering expertise
it is not easy to criticise projects such as the shuttle. It seems to be excessively costly and far too fragile. There are private space
entrepreneurs already. They are tiddlers up against the mighty NASA. Yet Dan Goldin, the NASA leader, says he favours
the privatisation of space: "We can’t afford to do solar system exploration until we turn these activities over to
the cutting edge private sector..."Some may say that commercialising portions of NASA’s functions is heresy. Others may think
we are taking a path that will ruin the wonders of space. I believe that when NASA can creatively partner, all of humankind
will reap the benefits of access to open space". Is it possible the Moon has a more noble future than merely a
branch office of NASA? Is it tolerable that Mars could be a subsidiary of the USA? Could it be nominally a
further state of the union? These are not silly questions. In time space will be defined by lawyers and
accountants as property rights will need to be deliberated. One possibility may be that both environments are so hostile that
Mars and the Moon will never be more than token pockets for humanity. On the evidence so far it is the orbiting satellites that have
made us see the Earth through new eyes. We can survey and explore the planet better from 200 miles up than stomping
on the surface. The emerging commercial body of space law is derived from telecommunications law. It is
perplexing and contrary to our immediate senses. How can you own or exchange something as intangible as digital messages bouncing
off satellites? Yet we all pay our mobile phone bills. Many of the business results of space exploration are unintended
consequences of NASA’s early adventures. Computer development would probably have been slower but for
the need for instrumentation for Apollo. Are there prospects for Scottish firms in space? The prizes will not go to only the
mega corporations. Perhaps Dobbies, the Edinburgh garden centre group, can create new roses by placing pots beyond gravity.
Edinburgh University laboratories, or rather their commercial spin offs, could patent new medicines. Is it possible the
genetic magicians at the Bush could hitch a ride into space and extend their discoveries? NASA is a monopolist. All monopolies are
bad for business. They only stunt opportunities. They blunt alternatives. By opening space to entrepreneurship we will be
starting on what FA Hayek memorably describes as "a discovery procedure". Science is an open system. So is
capitalism.
Space solves multiple existential threats – the program is key to survival
Pelton in ’03 (Joseph, Director of the Space and Advanced Communications Research institute at George Washington University
and Executive Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, “COMMENTARY: Why Space? The Top 10 Reasons”, September 23,
http://www.space.com/news/commentary_top10_030912.html)
Actually the lack of a space program could get us all killed. I dont mean you or me or my wife or children. I mean that
Homo sapiens as a species are actually endangered. Surprising to some, a well conceived space program may well be our
only hope for long-term survival. The right or wrong decisions about space research and exploration may be key to the futures
of our grandchildren or great-grandchildren or those that follow. Arthur C. Clarke, the author and screenplay writer for 2001: A Space
Odyssey, put the issue rather starkly some years back when he said: The dinosaurs are not around today because they did
not have a space program. He was, of course, referring to the fact that we now know a quite largish meteor crashed into
the earth, released poisonous Iridium chemicals into our atmosphere and created a killer cloud above the Earth that
blocked out the sun for a prolonged period of time. This could have been foreseen and averted with a
sufficiently advanced space program. But this is only one example of how space programs, such as NASAs Spaceguard
program, help protect our fragile planet. Without a space program we would not know about the large ozone hole in
our atmosphere, the hazards of solar radiation, the path of killer hurricanes or many other environmental
dangers. But this is only a fraction of the ways that space programs are crucial to our future. He Continues…
Protection against catastrophic planetary accidents: It is easy to assume that an erratic meteor or comet will not bring
destruction to the Earth because the probabilities are low. The truth is we are bombarded from space daily. The
dangers are greatest not from a cataclysmic collision, but from not knowing enough about solar storms, cosmic
radiation and the ozone layer. An enhanced Spaceguard Program is actually a prudent course that could save our
species in time.
Solvency
Democracy checks the terminal impact
O’Kane, 1997 (“Modernity, the Holocaust, and politics”, Economy and Society, February, ebsco)
Chosen policies cannot be relegated to the position of immediate condition (Nazis in power) in the explanation of the Holocaust.
Modern bureaucracy is not ‘intrinsically capable of genocidal action’ (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state
coercion has no natural move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which play
the greatest part, whether in effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror, harnessing
science and technology or introducing extermination policies, as means and as ends. As Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR
have shown, furthermore, those chosen policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards
modernity. The choosing of policies, however, is not independent of circumstances. An analysis of the history of
each case plays an important part in explaining where and how genocidal governments come to power and analysis of political
institutions and structures also helps towards an understanding of the factors which act as obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not
just political factors which stand in the way of another Holocaust in modern society. Modern societies have not only pluralist
democratic political systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to change jobs and bargain
wages and where independent firms, each with their own independent bureaucracies, exist in competition with statecontrolled enterprises. In modern societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served by the open scientific method.
By ignoring competition and the capacity for people to move between organizations whether economic, political, scientific or social,
Bauman overlooks crucial but also very ‘ordinary and common’ attributes of truly modern societies. It is these very ordinary
and common attributes of modernity which stand in the way of modern genocides.
Moralizing turn:
The 1AC is justified with a moralizing politics, which distances us from true responsibility
Bauman 95 (Zygmunt, Professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, Life in fragments. Essays in postmodern Moralities, 1995)
the focus of moral concerns has been shifted from the self-scrutiny of the moral actor to the
philosophical/political task of working out the prescriptions and proscriptions of an ethical code; meanwhile
the ‘responsibility for the responsibility’—that is the responsibility for deciding that practical steps the responsibility requires to be taken and what steps are not called for (go beyond
the call of duty)—has been shifted from the moral subject to supra-individual agencies now endowed with exclusive
ethical authority. From the moral actor’s points of view, the shift has much to be commended. (Indeed, this shift was one of the main reasons why the surrender of autonomy could be credibly represented as
emancipation and increase of freedom). Having reduced the vague notoriously under defined responsibility to a finite list of duties
or obligations, it spares the actor a lot of anxious groping in the dark, and helps to avoid the gnawing feeling that the account can never be closed, the work
never finally done. The agony of choice (Hannah Arendt’s ‘tyranny of possibilities) is largely gone, as is the bitter aftertaste of a choice never ultimately proved right. The
substitution of rule-following for the intense, yet never really successful, listening to infuriatingly taciturn, moral impulses, results in the almost unimaginable feat of
not just absolving the actor from the personal responsibility for the wrongs done, but freeing the actor from the
very possibility of having sinned. More promptly than the equivalent religious remedies—because in advance, before the act has been
committed—the guilt is eliminated from choice, which is now simplified to the straightforward dilemma of obedience
or disobedience to the rule. All in all, the modern shift from moral responsibility to ethical ruling offered a compensatory drug for an ailment induced by another modern accomplishment: the foiling
In effect,
of many determines threat once kept the actor’s actions within tight and strictly circumscribed limits, so producing an ‘unencumbered’, ‘disembodied’ personality that is allowed. ( and forced to) self-define and self-assert. To
the moral self, modernity offered freedom complete with patented ways of escaping it. In what are commonly called ‘postmodern’ times the modern ailment of autonomy persists, while the compensatory drug is not longer
available on the National Ethical Service prescriptions. It can be purchased only in the free market, in the thick of the cutthroat publicity war between drug companies calling each other’s bluff, extolling their own products
and undercutting the claims of the competition. With the state ethical monopoly (and indeed, the state’s desire for monopoly) in abeyance, and the supply of ethical rules by and large privatized and abandoned to the care of
The actor is responsible not for the
contents with which the responsibility has been filled, but for the choice of an ethical code from among many,
the marketplace, the tyranny of choice returns, though this time it taxes not so much the moral competence, as the shopping skills of the actor.
each of which ports expert endorsement and/or the
This justifies inevitable violence and prevents us from truly embracing ethics
Bauman 95 (Zygmunt, Professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, Life in fragments. Essays in postmodern Moralities, 1995)
(Reject the gendered language)**
Such conditions—conditions without which there would be no camps and no genocide, conditions which turned the unthinkable into reality—are accomplishments of our modern civilization, and in particular of three
the ability to act at a distance, the neutralization of the moral constraints of
action, and its ‘gardening posture’—the pursuit of artificial, rationally designed order. That one can kill today
without ever looking the victim in the face, is a banal observation. Once sinking a knife into the body, or strangling, or shooting at
features which underlie, simultaneously, its glory and its misery:
close distance have been replaced with moving dots over a computer screen—just like one does in amusement
arcade games or on the screen of a portable Nintendo—the killer does not need to be pitiless; he does not have the occasion to feel
pity. This is, however, the most obvious and trivial, even if the most dramatic, aspect of ‘action at a distance’. The less dramatic and spectacular manifestations of our new, modern, skills of distant action are more
consequential yet—all the more so for not being so evident. They consist in creating what may be called a social and psychological, rather than a merely physical and oplical, distance between actors and the targets of their
Such social psychological distance is produced an reproduced daily, and ubiquitously, and on a massive scale, by the modern management
of action, with its three different, yet complementary aspects. First, in a modern organization every personally performed action is a mediated action, and every actor is cast in what Stanley Milgram called the
actions.
‘magnetic state’: almost no actor ever has a chance to develop the ‘authorship’ attitude towards the final outcome of the operation, since each actor is but an executor of a command and giver of another; not a writer, but a
there is the horizontal, functional division of the overall task: each actor has but a specific, selfcontained job to perform and produces an object with no written-in destination, no information on its future uses; no contribution seems to ‘determine’ the final outcome of the
operation, and most retain but a tenuous logical link with the ultimate effect—a link which the participants may be in
good conscience claim to be visible only in retrospect. Third, the ‘targets’ of the operation, the people who by design or by default are affected
by it, hardly ever appear to the actors as ‘total human beings’, objects of moral responsibility and ethical subjects themselves. As Michael Schluter and David Lee wittily
yet aptly observed, ‘in order to be seen at the higher levels you have to be broken up into bits and most of you thrown away’. As a result, most actors in organizations deal not with
human beings, but with facets, features, statistically represented traits; while only total human persons can be
bearers or moral significance. The global impact of all these aspects of modern organization is what I have called borrowing the
term from the vocabulary of the medieval Church—the moral adiaphorization of action: for all practical purposes, the moral significance
of the ultimate and combined effect of individual actions is excluded from the criteria by which individual
actions any measure. And so the latter are perceived and experienced as morally neutral. More exactly out with the same effect. The
fragmentation of the objects of action is replicated by the fragmentation of actors. The vertical and horizontal division of the global operation
translator of someone else’s intentions. Second,
into partial jobs makers every actor into a role-performer. Unlike ‘the person’, the role-performer is an eminently replaceable and exchangeable incumbent of a site in the complex network of tasks—there is always a certain
impersonality, a distance, a less-than-authorship relationship between the role-performer and the role performed. In none of the roles is the role-performer a whole person, as each role’s performance engages but a selection of
the actor’s skills and personality features, and in principle should neither engage the remaining parts nor spill over and affect the rest of the actor’s personality. This again makes the role-performance ethically adiophoric:
only total persons, only unique persons (‘unique’ in the sense of being irreplaceable in the sense that the deed would remain undone without them’) can be moral
subjects, bearers of moral responsibility—but modern organization derives its strength from its uncanny
capacity for splitting the fragmentation, while on the other hand providing occasions for the fragments to come together again has never been modern organization’s forte. Modern
organization is the rule of nobody. It is, we may say, a contraption to the float responsibility—most conspicuously, moral responsibility.
Falsifiability turn
The critique refuses to accept the same falsifiable review our evidence goes through – disproves their
methodology, destroys academic debate, and causes extinction.
Coyne ‘6 (Jerry A., Author and Writer for the Times, “A plea for empiricism”, FOLLIES OF THE WISE, Dissenting essays,
405pp. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 1 59376 101 5)
Supernatural forces and events, essential aspects of most religions, play no role in science, not because we
exclude them deliberately, but because they have never been a useful way to understand nature. Scientific
“truths” are empirically supported observations agreed on by different observers. Religious “truths,” on the other
hand, are personal, unverifiable and contested by those of different faiths. Science is nonsectarian: those who
disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it. But
religion is not completely separable from science. Virtually all religions make improbable claims that are in principle
empirically testable, and thus within the domain of science: Mary, in Catholic teaching, was bodily taken to heaven, while
Muhammad rode up on a white horse; and Jesus (born of a virgin) came back from the dead. None of these claims has been
corroborated, and while science would never accept them as true without evidence, religion does. A mind that accepts both science
and religion is thus a mind in conflict. Yet scientists, especially beleaguered American evolutionists, need the support of the many
faithful who respect science. It is not politically or tactically useful to point out the fundamental and unbreachable gaps between
science and theology. Indeed, scientists and philosophers have written many books (equivalents of Leibnizian theodicy) desperately
trying to show how these areas can happily cohabit. In his essay, “Darwin goes to Sunday School”, Crews reviews several of these
works, pointing out with brio the intellectual contortions and dishonesties involved in harmonizing religion and science. Assessing
work by the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, the philosopher Michael Ruse, the theologian John Haught and others, Crews concludes,
“When coldly examined . . . these productions invariably prove to have adulterated scientific doctrine or to have emptied religious
dogma of its commonly accepted meaning”. Rather than suggesting any solution (indeed, there is none save adopting a form of
“religion” that makes no untenable empirical claims), Crews points out the dangers to the survival of our planet
arising from a rejection of Darwinism. Such rejection promotes apathy towards overpopulation, pollution,
deforestation and other environmental crimes: “So long as we regard ourselves as creatures apart who need only repent of our
personal sins to retain heaven’s blessing, we won’t take the full measure of our species-wise responsibility for these calamities”.
Crews includes three final essays on deconstruction and other misguided movements in literary theory. These
also show “follies of the wise” in that they involve interpretations of texts that are unanchored by evidence.
Fortunately, the harm inflicted by Lacan and his epigones is limited to the good judgement of professors of
literature. Follies of the Wise is one of the most refreshing and edifying collections of essays in recent years. Much like Christopher
Hitchens in the UK, Crews serves a vital function as National Sceptic. He ends on a ringing note: “The human race has produced
only one successfully validated epistemology, characterizing all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from
quarks to poems. It is, simply, empiricism, ₪ stopped here at 15:10 ₪ or the submitting of
propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the contending parties. Ideas
that claim immunity from such review, whether because of mystical faith or privileged “clinical insight” or the
say-so of eminent authorities, are not to be countenanced until they can pass the same skeptical ordeal to which
all other contenders are subjected.” As science in America becomes ever more harried and debased by politics and religion, we
desperately need to heed Crews’s plea for empiricism.
Turn—their kritikal focus destroys truth value by rejecting western culture of rationalism, and threatens
to unmake western civilization and destroys the value to life and the ability to maintain human dignity
and freedom
Kors ‘1
(Alan, professor of history at University of Pennsylvania and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute,
Orbis, Summer, ebsco)
What often denies us both optimism and pride, however, is the very stringency of our self-judgment untempered by historical realism.
It is a dangerous intellectual error to imagine that goodness, wisdom, order, justice, peace, freedom, legal equality,
mutual forbearance, and kindness are the "default mode" in human affairs, and that it is malice, folly, disorder, war,
coercion, legal inequality, murderous intolerance, and cruelty that stand in need of historical explanation. The
West, in theory, always has understood that man has a lower side to which he is drawn, that man is a wolf to man, and that we are
governed more by prejudice and passion than by the rational capacity of our minds. If that is so, however, then we err
grievously in our assumptions of what it is that requires particular explanation in the world. We understand the defaults; what should
astonish us is the ability to change them. Rousseau and the postmodernists have it all backward in this domain. It is not aversion to
difference, for example, that requires historical explanation, for aversion to difference is the human condition; rather, it is the West's
partial but breathtaking ability to overcome tribalism and exclusion that demands explanation, above all in the singular American
accomplishment. Anti-Semitism is not surprising; the opening of Christian America to Jews is what should amaze. Racial aversion and
injustice are not sources of wonderment; the Fourteenth Amendment and its gradual implementation are what should astonish. It is not
the abuse of power that requires explanation--that is the human condition--but the Western rule of law. Similarly, it is not coerced
religious conformity that should leave us groping for understanding, but the forging of values and institutions of religious toleration. It
is not slavery that requires explanation, for slavery is one of the most universal of all human institutions; rather, it is the values and
agency by which the West identified slavery as an evil and, astonishment of astonishments, abolished it. Finally, it is not relative
pockets of poverty in the West that should occasion our wonder, because we used to term almost infinitely worse absolute levels of
poverty simply "the human condition." Instead, what is extraordinary are the values, institutions, knowledge, risk, ethics, and liberties
that created such prosperity that we even notice that poverty at all, yet alone believe that it is eradicable. We are surprised, in a failure
of intellectual analysis, by all of the wrong things, and we lose our wonder at the accomplishments and aspirations of our civilization
as a tragic result. Depravity should never startle us; rather, the identification and naming of depravity should amaze us, and the
attempt, frequently successful, to contain it should fill us with awe. Indeed, that attempt has been so successful in the West, relative to
the human condition, that the other world fantasized by the multiculturalists seeks entrance, again and again, at our doors, and the
multiculturalists are not riding leaky boats to the otherness of the Third World. Most obviously, the multiculturalists' ostensible
rejection of the West's philosophical realism--their vaunted "social constructionism"-does not stay with them
past their medical doctor's door. In the final analysis, it is that last trait, the West's commitment to a logically ordered
philosophical realism, that undergirds its ways of thinking, valuing, and, indeed, worshiping. Such philosophical realism was defended
by Augustine, Aquinas, and almost all fathers and doctors of the Church. While various extreme epistemological and ontological
skepticisms and radical irrationalisms have flourished, sometimes with brilliance and profundity in our history, Western
civilization has always had at its core. a belief that there is a reality independent of our wishes for and ideas of
it; that natural knowledge of that reality is possible and indeed indispensable to human dignity; that such
knowledge must be acquired through a discipline of the will and mind; and that central to that discipline is a
compact with reason. The West has willed, in theory at least, to reduce the chaos of the world to natural coherence by the powers
of the mind. Indeed, the belief that truth is independent of a particular time and place is precisely what has led the
West to borrow so much from other cultures, such that, ironically, whole schools of tendentious thought decry Western
"thefts," as if the recognition of compelling example and argument in others were a weakness, not a strength. The West recognized
and adopted Eastern systems of numbers superior to that of the Romans; it took the Aristotelianism of the High Middle Ages from the
Islamic scholars who had preserved and interpreted it in manners superior to the schools of the West; it took music, art, forms of
expression, and new foods from around the earth that, in large part out of restless curiosity about realities beyond its own, it had
explored. The West has always renewed and revitalized itself by means Of recognizing superior ways to its own. It did so, however,
with a commitment to being a rational culture. The Greek principle of self-contradiction as the touchstone of error, and thus its
avoidance as a touchstone of truth, is the formal expression of a commitment to reason that the Christian West always understood to
separate us from beasts and madmen. To live with self-contradiction was not merely to fail an introduction to philosophy, it was to be
less than human. Induction from experience always had a logic, and the exploration of that logic was one of the great and ultimately
triumphant pursuits of the Western mind. To live with error was to deny oneself the fruits of human light. Again, the core
philosophical assumption of Western civilization is that there is a reality that exists independently of our will and wish, and that this
reality can be known by human inquiry and reason. There were many radical ruptures in the history of certain disciplines in the West;
there were no radical ruptures with the Western compact with reality and reason. It is that compact that led to a civilization of selfscrutiny and honest borrowings; to a civilization in which self-criticism gave rise to a critical scholarship that could question and
either strengthen or repair the West's received beliefs themselves; to a civilization in which the mind could appeal, with ultimate
success, against the irrational to the rational; to a way of understanding that led to the sciences that have changed both the entire
human relationship to nature and our sense of human possibilities, always tempered by our knowledge of human nature. The fruits
of that civilization have been an unprecedented ability to modify the remediable causes of human suffering, to
give great agency to utility and charity alike; to give to each individual a degree of choice and freedom unparalleled in
all of human history; to offer a means of overcoming the station in life to which one was born by the effort of one's labor, mind,
and will. A failure to understand and to teach that accomplishment would be its very betrayal. To the extent that Western
civilization survives, then, the hope of the world survives to eradicate unnecessary suffering; to speak a language
of human dignity, responsibility, and rights linked to a common reality; to minimize the depredations of the
irrational, the unexamined, the merely prejudicial in our lives; to understand the world in which we find ourselves, and,
moved by interest and charity, to apply that knowledge for good. The contest, then, is between the realists and the
antirealists, and the triumph of the West ultimately depends on its outcome. The failure to assess the stakes of the
struggle between the West and its communist adversary always came from either a pathological self-hatred of one's own world or, at
the least, from a gross undervaluation of what the West truly represented in the history of mankind. The West has altered the
human relationship to nature from one of fatalistic helplessness to one of hopeful mastery. It has made possible
a human life in which biological atavism might be replaced by cultural value, the rule of law, individuation, and
growing tolerance. It also created an intellectual class irrationally devoted to an adversarial stance. That adversarial view of the
West, in the past generation at least, had become a neo-Gramscian and thus neo-Marxist one in which the West was seen as an
unparalleled source of the arbitrary assignment of restrictive and life-stultifying roles. The enemies of the West--for some, in practice;
for others, increasingly in the ideal represented a fictive make-believe that supposedly cast grave doubt upon the West's claim of
enhancing freedom, dignity, and opportunity. With the triumph of the West in reality, and with the celebration of Marxism and the
Third World shown more and more to have been truly delusional, the adversarial intellectual class appears to be retreating
into ideologies and philosophies that deny the very concept of reality itself. One sees this in the growing
strength in the humanities and social sciences of critical theories that view all representations of the world
as mere text and fiction. When the world of fact can be twisted to support this or that side of delusion (as in
astrology or parapsychology), pathology tries to appropriate what it can of the empirical. When the world of fact
manifestly vitiates the very foundations of pathological delusion, then it is the claim of facticity or reality per se that must be denied.
This is what we now may expect: the world having spoken, the intellectual class, the left academic wing of it above all, may
appropriate a little postcommunist chaos to show how merely relative a moral good the defeat of Stalin's heirs has been. If it does so,
however, it will assail the notion of reality itself. In Orwell's 1984, it was the mark of realistic, totalitarian power to
make its subjects say that all truth was not objective but political--"a social construction," as intellectuals would say
now--and that, in the specific case, 2 + 2 = 5. By 2004, making students in the humanities and social sciences grant the
equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5 will be the goal of adversarial culture. They will urge that all logical--and, one should add, inferential-inductive truths from experience are arbitrary, mere social constructions. The West Has Indeed Survived,, So Far The ramifications of
that effort will dominate the central debates of the humanities in the generation to come. Until there is a celebration and moral
accounting of the historical reality of "The Triumph of the West," that "triumph" will be ephemeral indeed. Academic culture has
replaced the simplistic model that all culture was functional, a model that indeed could not account for massive discontents or
revolutionary change, let alone for moral categories, by the yet more astonishing and absurd model that virtually all culture is
dysfunctional. Whole disciplines now teach that propositions are to be judged by their therapeutic value rather
than by their inductive link to evidence until, in the final analysis, feeling good about saying something
determines the truth-value of what is said. Understanding human weakness, however, the West has always believed that it
is precisely when we want to believe something self-gratifying that we must erect barriers of experiment, rigor, and analysis against
our self-indulgence and our propensity for self-serving error. The human ability to learn from experience and nature, so
slighted in current humanistic theory, is not merely an object of cultural transmission, let alone of social control, but an
evolutionary triumph of the species, indeed, a triumph on which our future ultimately depends. There is nothing
more desperate than helplessness, and there is no more inveterate cause of helplessness than the inability to affect and mitigate the
traumas of our lives. If the role of both acquired knowledge and the transmission and emendation of the means of
acquiring knowledge is only a "Western" concern, then it is a Western concern upon which human fate
depends. In the current academic climate of indoctrination, tendentiousness, and fantasy, the independence of critical intellect and
the willingness to learn open-mindedly from experience of a reality independent of the human will are the
greatest hopes of our civilization. Has Western civilization survived? That is, has a human relationship to the world based upon
the assumption of a knowable reality, reason, and a transcendent value of human dignity and responsibility survived? Has a will to
know oneself and the world objectively survived? Has a recognition of human depravity and the need to limit the power of men over
men survived? I do not think that free men and women will abandon that hard-won shelter from chaos, ignorance, parochial tribalism,
irrationalism, and, ultimately, helplessness. Has Western civilization survived, its principle of reality justified and intact? Yes, indeed,
though it requires constant defense. The demand for perfection is antinomian, illogical, and empirically absurd. The triumph of the
West is flawed but real. While everyone else around you weeps, recall Alexander Ushakov, and celebrate the fall of the Soviet threat
as he celebrated the fall of Grenada. Then recall how everything depends on realism in our understanding, and rejoin the intellectual
struggle.
Attrocities are inevitable and require a response—language has the power to facilitate or confront
attrocity. Deconstructing language breeds cynicism and nihilism that greases the wheels to further
attrocities
Ketels, 96 (Violet, professor of English at Temple University, The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social
Science, November, lexis)
[*46] THE political bestiality of our age is abetted by our willingness to tolerate the deconstructing of humanist
values. The process begins with the cynical manipulation of language. It often ends in stupefying murderousness
before which the world stands silent, frozen in impotent "attentism"--a wait-and-see stance as unsuited to the human plight as a
pacifier is to stopping up the hunger of a starving child. We have let lapse our pledge to the 6 million Jewish victims of
the Holocaust that their deaths might somehow be transfiguring for humankind. We allow "slaughterhouse
men" tactical status at U.N. tables and "cast down our eyes when the depraved roar past." 1 Peacemakers, delegated
by us and circumscribed by our fears, temporize with thugs who have revived lebensraum claims more boldly than Hitler did. In the
Germany of the 1930s, a demonic idea was born in a demented brain; the word went forth; orders were given, repeated, widely
broadcast; and men, women, and children were herded into death camps. Their offshore signals, cries for help, did
not summon us to rescue. We had become inured to the reality of human suffering. We could no longer hear what the
words meant or did not credit them or not enough of us joined the chorus. Shrieking victims perished in the cold blankness of
inhumane silence. We were deaf to the apocalyptic urgency in Solzhenitsyn's declaration from the Gulag that we must check the
disastrous course of history. We were heedless of the lesson of his experience that only the unbending strength of the human
spirit, fully taking its stand on the shifting frontier of encroaching violence and declaring "not one step further,"
though death may be the end of it--only this unwavering firmness offers any genuine defense of peace for the individual, of
genuine peace for mankind at large. 2 In past human crises, writers and thinkers strained language to the breaking point to keep alive
the memory of the unimaginable, to keep the human conscience from forgetting. In the current context, however, intellectuals seem
more devoted to abstract assaults on values than to thoughtful probing of the moral dimensions of human experience. "Heirs of the
ancient possessions of higher knowledge and literacy skills," 3 we seem to have lost our nerve, and not only because of Holocaust
history and its tragic aftermath. We feel insecure before the empirical absolutes of hard science. We are intimidated by the "high
modernist rage against mimesis and content," 4 monstrous progeny of the union between Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the
grim proposal we have bought into that there is no truth, no objectivity, and no disinterested knowledge. 5 Less
certain about the power of language, that "oldest flame of the [*47] humanist soul," 6 to frame a credo to live by or
criteria to judge by, we are vulnerable even to the discredited Paul de Man's indecent hint that "wars and revolutions
are not empirical events . . . but 'texts' masquerading as facts." 7 Truth and reality seem more elusive than they
ever were in the past; values are pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are
embarrassed by virtue. Words collide and crack under these new skeptical strains, dissolving into banalities the
colossal enormity of what must be expressed lest we forget. Remembering for the future has become doubly dispiriting by our having
to remember for the present, too, our having to register and confront what is wrong here and now. The reality to be fixed in memory
shifts as we seek words for it; the memory we set down is flawed by our subjectivities. It is selective, deceptive, partial, unreliable,
and amoral. It plays tricks and can be invented. It stops up its ears to shut out what it does not dare to face. 8 Lodged in our brains,
such axioms, certified by science and statistics, tempt us to concede the final irrelevance of words and memory. We have to get on
with our lives. Besides, memories reconstructed in words, even when they are documented by evidence, have not often changed the
world or fended off the powerful seductions to silence, forgetting, or denying. Especially denying, which, in the case of the Holocaust,
has become an obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of our sense of the past. It is said that the
Holocaust never happened. Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in words; something in words
must be set against it. Yet what? How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly disposed to cast both words and memory
in a condition of cryogenic dubiety? Not only before but also since 1945, the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and
fattening on linguistic manipulation and deliberately reimplanted memory of past real or imagined grievance, has spread calamity
across the planet. "The cancer that has eaten at the entrails of Yugoslavia since Tito's death [has] Kosovo for its locus," but not merely
as a piece of land. The country's rogue adventurers use the word "Kosovo" to reinvoke as sacred the land where Serbs were defeated
by Turks in 1389! 9 Memory of bloody massacres in 1389, sloganized and distorted in 1989, demands the bloody revenge of new
massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but to its gory tribal wars. As Matija Beckovic, the bard of Serb nationalism,
writes, "It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battle--by widening the Kosovo charnel-house, by adding wailing upon wailing,
by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo. . . . Kosovo is the Serbianized [*48] history of the Flood--the Serbian New
Testament." 10 A cover of Suddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was printed with blood donated by refugee women from Bosnia in an eerily
perverse afterbirth of violence revisited. 11 We stand benumbed before multiplying horrors. As Vaclav Havel warned more than a
decade ago, regimes that generate them "are the avant garde of a global crisis in civilization." The depersonalization of power in
"system, ideology and apparat," pathological suspicions about human motives and meanings, the loosening of individual
responsibility, the swiftness by which disastrous events follow one upon another "have deprived us of our
conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity." 12 Nothing less than
the transformation of human consciousness is likely to rescue us.
Refusing to accept determinate meanings of language doesn’t destabilize language to prevent violence—
instead, it cedes control over the meaning of language to those who would commit attrocities. taking a
public stand in favor of determinate meanings is a vital ethical stance for confronting evil
Ketels, 96 (Violet, professor of English at Temple University, The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social
Science, November, lexis)
That particular stance, however expedient, did not work well in Germany. In Czechoslovakia, it produced wartime Nazi collaborator
Gustave Husak, the "President of Forgetting," who sought to perfect totalitarianism by systematically purging "the Party and state, the
arts, the universities, and the media of everyone who dared to speak critically, independently, or even intelligently about what the
regime defined as politics." 54 It produced Tudjman and Milosevic in Yugoslavia. Intellectuals can choose their roles, but cannot not
choose, nor can we evade the full weight of the consequences attendant on our choices. "It is always the intellectuals, however [*57]
we may shrink from the chilling sound of that word . . . who must bear the full weight of moral responsibility." 55 Humanist
intellectuals can aspire to be judged by more specifically exacting criteria: as those whose work is worthwhile because it has human
uses; survives the test of reality; corresponds to history; represses rationalizing in favor of fact; challenges the veracity of rulers;
refuses the safety of abstraction; recognizes words as forms of action, as likely to be lethal as to be liberating; scruples to heal the
rupture between words and things, between things and ideas; remains incorruptibly opposed to the service of ideological ends pursued
by unnecessary violence or inhumane means; and, finally, takes risks for the sake of true witness to events, to the truth even of
unpopular ideas or to the lies in popular ones. Above all, intellectuals can resist the dreary relativism that neutralizes
good and evil as if in defense of the theoretical pseudo-notion that distinguishing between them is not possible.
The hour is too late, the situation too grave for such pettifoggery. THE CONSEQUENCES OF LINGUISTIC ABUSE AND
CYNICISM Bearing witness is not enough, but it is something. At the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C., Elie Wiesel spoke. "We must bear witness," he said. "What have we learned? . . . We are all responsible. We must
do something to stop the bloodshed in Yugoslavia." He told a story of a woman from the Carpathian Mountains who asked of the
Warsaw Uprising, "Why don't they just wait quietly until after the war?" In one year she was packed into a cattle car with her whole
family on the way to Auschwitz. "That woman was my mother," Wiesel said. Vaclav Havel, the humanist intellectual from Bohemia,
spoke too: of the Holocaust as a memory of democratic appeasement, live memory of indifference to the danger of Hitler's coming to
power, of indifference to the Munich betrayal of Prague. "Our Jews went to concentration camps. . . . Later we lost our freedom." We
have lost our metaphysical certainties, our sense of responsibility for what comes in the future. For we are all responsible,
humanly responsible for what happens in the world. Do we have the right to interfere in internal conflict? Not just the right
but the duty. Remember the Holocaust. To avoid war, we watched--silently and, so, complicitly, unleashing darker, deadlier demons.
What should we have done about Yugoslavia? Something. Much earlier. We must vigilantly listen for the early warning signs of
threats to freedoms and lives everywhere. We must keep the clamorous opposition to oppression and violence around the world
incessant and loud. Cry out! Cry havoc! Call murderers murderers. Do not avoid violence when avoidance begets more violence.
There are some things worth dying for. Do not legitimize the bloodletting [*58] in Bosnia or anywhere by negotiating with the
criminals who plotted the carnage. Do not join the temporizers. Take stands publicly: in words; in universities and
boardrooms; in other corridors of power; and at local polling places. Take stands preferably in written words, which have a
longer shelf life, are likelier to stimulate debate, and may have a lasting effect on the consciousnesses of some among us. Havel
lived under a system "in which words [proved] capable of shaking the entire structure of government," in which
the words of a poet like Solzhenitsyn "were regarded as so dangerous that their author was bundled into an airplane and shipped out."
56 Havel himself paid in deprivation, humiliation, continual harassment, and life-threatening imprisonment for his stubborn insistence
on "living in truth," an allegiance consistently annunciated in the words he uttered and wrote and refused to recant. He was denied the
education his intellect would ordinarily have entitled him to. His books were removed from schoolrooms and libraries, his plays
banned from the stage. He did odd jobs, rolling beer kegs in a brewery for a time, hard labor as a welder in prison. He never ceased
committing his conscience to words in letters, petitions, and essays, circulated in secret in hand-copied samizdat. Words that
gradually, over time, helped to create the climate for a shift in the social consciousness of citizens who had been
terrorized into silence and schizophrenic complicity for half a century by two succeeding totalitarian regimes.
Inevitably, Havel was arrested again and condemned to the dreaded Ruzyne prison. His crime? Seeking to deliver to authorities
Charter 77, a declaration of basic human rights he helped to compose and distribute, each word of which was meant to be taken at face
value. He refused to sign a false retraction that would have secured his release. He was freed, after four and a half years, only because
word that he was near death in the prison hospital reached the outside world and the world protested--in words. The Velvet Revolution
he led, his rise to the Czech presidency, were spelled out, argued, fueled, and sustained by words, and always they were words
consonant with conscience and a sense of responsibility for the common good. During the most crucial days of the 1989 revolution,
tens of thousands of Prague citizens flowed into Wenceslas Square, chanting "freedom, freedom!" as if the word were a freshly minted
coinage. Hundreds queued up hourly in the freezing November fog for copies of a newspaper called The Free Word. 57 "Truth
shall prevail," the Hussite slogan on the flag waving atop Hradcany Castle since the days of Masaryk, suddenly became words
to be taken literally, words understood to mean what they seem to mean, words with radiant power to galvanize
and regenerate. Czechs shouted them joyously in the streets, in a spontaneous eruption of civic courage [*59] against the
Communist regime that had been kept running not only by their fear but by their silence. Successive Nazi and Communist
conquests of Czechoslovakia, enforced by guns and tanks, had been reinforced by conquest of human speech and
conscience through the poisoning of the linguistic environment and the going-along of citizens who
fatalistically stopped protesting. The deadly consequences of linguistic abuse and skepticism, including their
insidious seduction to silence, passivity, and nihilism, were vividly prefigured more than a century earlier by
Georg Buchner in his plays and in his private correspondence. In Danton's Death, Robespierre and his followers mouth "empty and
impersonal and formalistic oratory and rhetoric," not to enlighten but to delude citizens into accepting absolute state control without
protest. The shouting of idealists and intellectuals had come to seem like idle foolishness to Buchner, as he reveals in a letter to his
parents: "They write, but no one reads them; they shout, but no one hears them; they act, but no one helps them." 58 Driven by his
obsessive conviction that all attempts to break the impenetrable barriers isolating people from each other were doomed, Buchner cries
out in a letter to his fiancee: I am alone as though in the grave; when will your words waken me? My friends desert me, we scream in
each other's ears like deaf men; I wish we were dumb, then we could only look at one another--nowadays I can hardly look at anyone
without tears coming to my eyes. 59 In another letter he confides, "I am afraid of my voice and--of my mirror. . . . This silence is my
damnation." 60 The central figure in Danton's Death cannot believe in the existence of a God who would not stop the ceaseless pain
and suffering man is heir to. Woyzeck's statement in the play bearing his name, "When God goes, everything goes," anticipates the
prescient Nietzsche, whose madman officially announces the death of God and accuses us: "We have killed him--you and I. All of us
are his murderers." 61 Unluckily, the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida seized on the linguistic implications of that
death to announce a radical crisis of the Word. Michel Foucault wrote the epitaph: "The death of God profoundly influenced
our language; the silence that replaced its source remains impenetrable." 62 Such untested pronouncements signaled a
linguistic relativism as profligately spawned by scholars as by scoundrels. It has cast such a blight upon words
like "love," "friendship," "truth," "goodness," and "responsibility" that we mumble in selfdepreciation when we
use them, lest [*60] someone think we honor still the values they once called to mind. Curiously, the values attached
to their opposites, words like "hate," "enmity," "lies," "corruption," and "venality," remain credible in our moral vocabularies. We
seem to have no trouble comprehending the evil that people do or tolerating excuses that confirm our misanthropy. We are
embarrassed by virtue. Stalin and Hitler debased and manipulated language as a terroristic strategy to make citizens
easier prey to a corruption of values that proved hospitable to catastrophe of monumental scale. So, too, in the
killing fields of Yugoslavia, where we became so used to slaughter sanitized as "ethnic cleansing" that rescuing
the helpless from carnage seemed outside our tidy moral categories, shielded by definition from the combined might and
will of the United Nations. The world watched, dumbly passive, as before, in the Holocaust against Jews. Killing the Jews began with
"reducing them to the 'other,'" warned Croatian journalist and fiction writer Slavenka Drakulic, eyewitness to genocide in the bloody
Balkan war: Today it is the slaughtering of civilians in Croatia or Bosnia. For Serbians, Croatians and Muslims are the "other." . . . For
Europe, the "other" is the wild "Balkans" that they pretend not to understand. For the United States it's more or less a "European
problem." . . . We don't seem to know that by such divisions . . . we expose ourselves to the possibility of one day becoming the
"others." 63 Yet, knowing that, hearing the reiteration of the historical lesson, we still hesitated to intervene, or we intervened too
tentatively, against wanton butchery, partly because our definitions of responsibility are bounded by arbitrary verbal categories. The
wars in African countries are "tribal," a word with pejorative echoes and distancing force. The war between Muslims and Serbs was
"civil." "Anarchy" prevails, placing the strife outside those exclusionary categories. In local matters, political correctness often ties our
tongues, and we excuse murder by calling it mass hysteria. When Drakulic wrote the words cited previously, she still clung to faith in
the power of words. But under the deranging prolongation of the war, her faith faded. Astonishment, then fear, gave way to anger and
defeat as hope of Western intervention, which seemed merely logical, was extinguished. The utterly despairing tone of her later
writing tragically echoes Buchner's terrible disillusion: My words--any words--have no real meaning. I am sick and tired of them.
Finally, all we have achieved with words is to establish Sarajevo as a metaphor for tragedy. So what? . . . I can write about the war as
long as I believe in the power of communication and my own moral right to do it. But . . . I do not believe in that power any longer. I
somehow have used all my words, given to me as a writer, to make people understand pain, fear and suffering. With the coming
winter in Bosnia, I am afraid that my words would just melt away. 64 [*61] Words do not matter? Do not mean? No, they are
terrifyingly potent. A woman who escaped to Prague from Auschwitz and took part in the resistance against the Nazis wrote, "No act
is too horrible . . . as long as no one speaks of it, no one calls it by its name, no one puts it into words. Just because of that, words are
the only weapons of the defenseless." 65 Truth prevails when enough people, willing to proclaim it, come together in
sufficient numbers to defend it. Words become deeds either for good or for ill. A Slovenian journalist, too, specifically
indicts the lethal connection between words and deeds in the Balkan war: All the bestialities of this war were triggered by
words--cliches put forward by intellectuals and eagerly appropriated by politicians. These words undermined an informed and refined
democratic public discourse that was slowly developing after Tito's death and opened the way for the destruction of the institutions
and social mechanisms that kept the multinational culture alive. 66 In 1987 when Slobodan Milosevic seized power, the language of
Communist ideology was dead. But "a new discourse, simplistic and strong, was invented by intellectuals," the Slovenian continues.
"These writings by intellectuals were recycled by journalists; soon draftees were sent to be killed with writers' words on their lips." 67
His charge against intellectuals is chilling. Candid regard for the integrity of words was once again a matter of life and
death. Intellectuals are answerable for the ethics of the word in statement, reaction, and analysis.
Defending truth values by holding oppressors accountable to determinate meanings is vital to preventing
extinction—each individual’s actions are vital
Ketels, 96 (Violet, professor of English at Temple University, The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social
Science, November, lexis)
The most profound insights into this process that gradually penetrated social consciousness sufficiently to make revolution possible
can be read in the role Vaclav Havel played before and during Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. As George Steiner reflects, while
"the mystery of creative and analytic genius . . . is given to the very few," others can be "woken to its presence and exposed to its
demands." 24 Havel possesses that rare creative and analytic genius. We see it in the spaciousness of his moral vision for the future,
distilled from the crucible of personal suffering and observation; in his poet's ability to translate both experience and vision into
language that comes as close as possible to truth and survives translation across cultures; in the compelling force of his personal
heroism. Characteristically, Havel raises local experience to universal relevance. " If today's planetary civilization has any
hope of survival," he begins, "that hope lies chiefly in what we understand as the human spirit." He continues: If we
don't wish to destroy ourselves in national, religious or political discord; if we don't wish to find our world with
twice its current population, half of it dying of hunger; if we don't wish to kill ourselves with ballistic missiles
armed with atomic warheads or eliminate ourselves with bacteria specially cultivated for the purpose; if we don't
wish to see some people go desperately hungry while others throw tons of wheat into the ocean; if we don't wish to suffocate in
the global greenhouse we are heating up for ourselves or to be burned by radiation leaking through holes we have made in the
ozone; if we don't wish to exhaust the nonrenewable, mineral resources of this planet, without which we cannot
survive; if, in short, we don't wish any of this to happen, then we must--as humanity, as people, as conscious beings
with spirit, mind and a sense of responsibility--somehow come to our senses. 25 Somehow we must come together in "a kind of
general mobilization of human consciousness, of the human mind and spirit, human responsibility, human reason." 26 The Prague
Spring was "the inevitable consequence of a long drama originally played out chiefly in the theatre of the spirit and the conscience of
society," a process triggered and sustained "by individuals willing to live in truth even when things [*52] were at their worst." 27 The
process was hidden in "the invisible realm of social consciousness," conscience, and the subconscious. It was indirect, long-term, and
hard to measure. 28 So, too, its continuation that exploded into the Velvet Revolution, the magic moment when 800,000 citizens,
jamming Wenceslas Square in Prague, jingled their house keys like church bells and changed from shouting "Truth will prevail" to
chanting "Havel to the castle." Havel developed his thinking in plays, petitions, letters, samizdat essays and addresses, written both in
and out of prison, circulated at peril of new imprisonment, sometimes at peril of death: his is a humanist philosophy wrested from the
logic of cruel experience, an anatomy of the process of social transformation, and a practical political strategy. He specifies to posttotalitarian societies, including Western democracies, for whom his reading of the Czech experience stands as warning and instruction,
the relevance to us of his passionately argued convictions. His prescience is amazing; his candid truthfulness, startling. In an utterly
original departure from received wisdom, he discredits the two basic political strategies between which he thinks Western intellectuals
unwittingly oscillate: (1) inventing and deploying further weapons of mass destruction "for the defense of democracy"; and (2) joining
peace movements. Both strategies "colonize" human consciousness by moving it toward the same global totalitarianism; the second
effectively makes the just mind ineffectual by "preoccupying it, then occupying it, and ultimately rendering it intellectually harmless."
29 Opposition to totalitarian systems is fumbling and futile if we fail to see them for what they really are: "a convex mirror of all
modern civilization and a harsh, perhaps final call for a global recasting of how that civilization understands itself." 30 The enemy is
the momentum of impersonal power, whether wielded by technocrats or tyrants, which defines totalitarianism of territory and spirit.
Defeating the enemy depends on routing totalitarianism from the structure of contemporary humanity, from our
very souls. The question is whether we shall succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics,
rehabilitating . . . personal experience as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our
desires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speech, in reconstituting, as the focus
of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human "I," responsible for ourselves because we are
bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything . . . for the sake of that which
gives life meaning. 31 Havel translates densely philosophical probing into simple principles of action by which individuals can resist
alienating pressure. True to his genius for globalizing local experience, Havel defines the alienating pressure so as to include
"consumption, [*53] advertising, repression, technology, or cliche--all of which are the blood brothers of fanaticism and the
wellspring of totalitarian thought." 32 All of us, then, wherever we live, under whatever form of government, have a stake in the
human struggle and a solution to try, personally, you and I, and all of us together. We are not powerless. Havel learned from
his particular experiment in "anti-political politics" something of essential and universal importance: that a single, seemingly
powerless person who dares to cry out the word of truth and to stand behind it with all his person and all his life,
ready to pay a high price, has, surprisingly, greater power, though formally disfranchised, than do thousands of
anonymous voters. 33 A realist as well as a visionary with projective imagination, Havel acknowledges that most of such
individual expressions remain rudimentary revolts, but he points out, "Here and there, a more coherent and visible initiative may
emerge . . . that transcends 'merely' individual revolt and is transformed into more conscious, structured, and purposeful work." 34 He
cites as an example Soviet fears of just such a transformation in the case of Solzhenitsyn, who was expelled
from Russia in the regime's desperate attempt "to plug up the dreadful wellspring of truth," a truth that might
have caused "incalculable transformations in social consciousness, which in turn might one day produce political
debacles unpredictable in their consequences." 35 Rockets aimed at this or that state are less dangerous to the enemy than human
beings taking responsibility for the world, which presupposes our seeing ourselves in the convex mirror and absorbing the fearful
lesson that suppression of human beings in Prague or Moscow or Mostar threatens suppression of all human beings everywhere. 36 In
his speech on 8 May 1993 commemorating the Czech Liberation Day, Havel, now president, pointed to the "impotence of
contemporary German democracy and the inability to present a united front to rampant Nazis." The policy of appeasement, suicidal in
the 1930s and 1940s, is proving so now: It is bowing down before evil and its terrible consequences for the whole world, if politicians
and whole nations forget that a threat to the freedom of one country threatens the freedom of all nations. Indifference to others and to
the community opens the door to evil. The message is we cannot afford to be indifferent. This sensible statement, suggesting a Czech
national moral obligation to intervene in Yugoslavia, prompted instant disavowal by the Czech prime minister. It is hard to resist
seeing in that disavowal a political difference between the two men that, given the peculiar constraints of the Czech constitution,
threatens to throttle the immediate effectiveness of Havel's presidency. It is, moreover, a lesson about the distance between morality
and power that must be negotiated by anyone who tries to change anything from inside a political system. Havel's antipolitical
politics is practical morality, service to truth, [*54] not a technique of power and manipulation. It is evident, he
writes, "that wholly personal categories like good and evil still have their unambiguous content and, under certain circumstances, are
capable of shaking the seemingly unshakable power with all its armies of soldiers, policemen, and bureaucrats." 37 He grounds his
hopes on a conviction that "the essential aims of life are present naturally in every person," and he defines them as a desire for dignity,
for free expression of being, and "a sense of transcendence over the world of existence," a yearning to live in truth. 38 Alongside this
magnanimous view of human potential, he keeps in mind its opposite pole: that we are all capable of trivializing our humanity by
merging into the manipulated, unprincipled, anonymous crowd, with its insatiable demand for complicity in its lies. 39