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An authentic understanding of mortality is crucial to any conception justice, so I negate. Section 1Links: A. The affirmative assumes that death is an event that can be considered morally undesirable. [Specific AC Links.] However, this assumption is false, because death is not an event or state of life. Jonathan Strauss explains: Death in itself is absolutely impersonal for the simple reason that there is no death in itself. Death does not have a personality of its own, since by definition it falls outside of existence (for death is not an event of life). How does one grasp ones death? How does one grasp ones nonexistence? Since experience and existence require the individuals corporeality, death cannot be understood as a morally undesirable event, because it is not an event at all. T. Birch furthers: Since death is not something we can experience (live through), there is really nothing at all to say about death itself. In this sense, death is notit does not exist for an individual to experience. B. The affirmative understands death as a deprivation, as a loss of the individuals life. [Specific AC Links.] This assumption is flawed, because the subject of this deprivation ceases to be a subject by the very operation of death itselfif you are, it is not; if it is, you are not. Strauss continues: The dead subject, the subject that never lived, does provide a pervasive structure to life, a first-person, discursive position, but insofar as one identifies with that abstract grammatical structure one is dead. In this sense, one can experience a form of deaththe experience of the negation of ones experience. Phrases such as loss of life refer to a society losing members or friends losing a continued presence.

Trinity Prep Section 2Impacts:

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A philosophically accurate and authentic conception of death is crucial to justice. A. The limit imposed by death is the sole motivation for creating or adopting any conception of justice. Pierre Hadot writes: The thought of immanent (or imminent) death transforms our way of acting in a radical way, by forcing us to become aware of the infinite value of each instant: we must accomplish each of lifes actions as if it were the last. With the exercises of foreseeing evils and foreseeing death, we shift almost unnoticeably from practiced philosophy to practiced ethics. Such foresight is intimately linked to action; our moral intention remains whole, even if obstacles arise. Living a moral life is inspired by the requirement of confronting death peaceably, which is why philosophy has been described as training for death. Although individuals may insist that justice is premised on tradition or desire to conform, these inauthentic motives deny the origins of morality, because of an unwillingness to contemplate death. B. Authentically confronting ones own death represents and constitutes the ultimate test of justice because it focuses solely on the individual in question, requiring a radical self-evaluation: David Couzens Hoy writes: Death is uniquely mine, it is the one thing no one can do for me. The subject fears total responsibility for an (non)event for which he is uniquely responsible yet wholly unprepared. The concept of death has no borders (in several senses of borders) and it will exceed conceptual demarcation or closure, as it is phenomenologically nonexperiential. As a guaranteed, limitless concept, death provides the only motivation for an impartial conception of justice that can surpass worldly incentives. It excludes all considerations external to the individual, leaving the individual to determine and obey a course of conduct that transcends the material world.

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C. Furthermore, the necessary contemplation of death is the grounding premise for human finitude, which is the first step in engaging any relational politics or moral projects. Jonathan Strauss writes: While I might be able to get someone else to mow my lawn, trim my hair, or serenade the object of my love, dying is something that I must do for myself. I am therefore alone in the face of my death, and that mortal isolation informs me of my separation from others, makes me aware of my finitude in relation to them. Death, by separating me off as finite, makes me capable of being a whole to myself, and I actually do become whole to myself thought my attitude toward that death. The universally guaranteed limit of our physical demise makes death a necessarily central aspect of human experience and is constitutive of any such essence, so an adequate understanding of death is prior to any moral framework required for affirmation. D. Only the individuals mortality has the power to transcend the details of modern life. Strauss continues: The end of our existence is awesome to us, in its combination of grandeur and minute, painstaking detail, for the lines of a life disappear along with all the most negligible specks of consciousness a great love, children, but also every blade of grass, a forgotten moment from childhood that returned once in a midlife memory and might have come again, the loose thread on our shirt, everything. Death, and death alone seems to know us more intimately that any parent or lover, more deeply than we know ourselves, and so it is in the mirror of that moment that we can reflect ourselves most fully and profoundly. Thus, the moral function of self-reflection relies uniquely on death; it is the distant basis of any moral schema necessary for the affirmative to assert the preferences of a just society.

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E. Death provides the motivation for societys choices and the individuals existence. Strauss continues: Because we cannot outstrip or cheat it, death force us to face the possible as possible; or, I other words, because it places a definite end to our existence, death forbids us from truthfully believing that we need not choose among possibilities. Every choice is a death, and through the anticipation of our nonexistence, every choice is authentically revealed as choice. Human beings, by always choosing and by living the question of the Being and nonbeing through our consciousness of that choosing, live in constant and pervasive relation to death. Death, in this way, is the crux of our distinctive mode of being. The notion a society must choose to adopt policies that conform to a code of justice requires an initial confrontation of death as an inevitable possibility, not as an event. The aforementioned impacts warrant a negative ballot for the following reasons: First, insofar as death is central to any conception of justice, and the affirmative misunderstands the nature of mortality, the affirmatives conclusions about justice are untrue. Also, without an accurate understanding of death, the affirmatives discussion of the death penalty is inadequate, so the 1AC offense does not provide sufficient conclusions about capital punishment. Second, by ignoring the awesomeness of death, the affirmative has already tainted the discussion of the resolution, which is incomplete without an initial understanding of mortality. Thus, since we can no longer examine the resolutions truth content or intelligibility within the affirmatives mindset, the only option is to admit the tainted nature of the affirmatives standard and contentions, and therefore negate.

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Third, based on the observations in Section 1, death is not a punishment per se, because the individual cannot experience it as such. Thus, the resolution is false due to a contradiction in terms. Fourth, even if it were possible to discuss the death penalty under the affirmatives inaccurate mindset, and even if death were a punishment, the death penalty would be positively just, since death uniquely allows the individual to attain authenticity. Conversely, affirming require understanding our relation to our deaths as the deaths of others, thereby enduring an inauthentic existence that never come to terms with the terror of existence. Fifth, the affirmative proactively violates a precondition of justice, which is hypocritical since the affirmative claims to represent the interests of a just society. Martin Heidegger describes the inauthenticity that results from the affirmatives misunderstanding. In the publicness with which we are with one another in our everyday manner, death is known as a mishap which is constantly occurringas a case of death. Someone or other dies, be he a neighbor or stranger. Death is encountered as a well-known event within-the-world. In such a way of talking, death is understood as an indefinite something, which, above all, must duly arrive from somewhere or other, but which is proximately not-yet-present-at-hand for oneself, and is therefore no threat. The expression, One dies, spreads abroad the opinion that what gets reached, as it were, by death is the They. Such inauthenticity is enticing, because it is easier to misunderstand death than it is to confront death as a non-event, which makes the affirmatives assumptions even more insidious. In order to address this problem, the

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notion of an authentic death will serve as my alternative to the affirmatives misconceptualization. Section 3The Alternative: David Couzens Hoy distinguishes between inauthentic mortality and authentic being-towards-death: Evasion of my own death results by taking my own death as if it were like the death of another, which is not really a death since one lives on. Facing up to instead of fleeing ones own mortality then becomes the key to authentic comportment and a life of integrity. An authentic understanding of our own mortality must anticipate death as an inevitable possibility for the subject, and recognize that the death of the Self cannot be displaced as if it were the death of another. Martin Heidegger explains: Anticipation turns out to be the possibility of understanding ones ownmost and uttermost potentiality for Being that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence. The ontological constitution of such existence must be made visible by setting forth the concrete structure of anticipation of death. However, this alternative is not necessary for a negation, because Section 1 already disproves and corrects the affirmatives assumptions regarding death. Strauss concludes: The structure of our death makes our authentic individual existence apparent to us as a whole, and it is, consequently, through anticipating death that we authentically exist as whole individuals. This occurs primarily for two convergent reasons. First, since it is nonrelational, my death is ownmost it is what is mor my own. Second, this owning creates its owner, since it puts the totality of finite Dasein at issue. I am an owner insofar as death lays claim to me, insofar as I am owned, in turn, by my

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death: it is only mine, but I only am, as a totality, through the fact that it, as my death, puts my personal totality at stake..