At Heidegger Alternative Energy DDI KO 2008

Heidegger AFF Answers
DDI 2008 Kernoff/Olney

Takumi Murayama

Table of Contents....................................................................................................................................... 1
Notes/Strategies..........................................................................................................................................4
2ACLong...................................................................................................................................................5
2ACMedium........................................................................................................................................... 11
2ACShort................................................................................................................................................15
2ACJunaids Block................................................................................................................................ 18
2ACFramework..................................................................................................................................... 21
No ImpactOne-dimensionality..............................................................................................................23
No ImpactPurity.................................................................................................................................... 24
TurnAuthenticity (1)..............................................................................................................................25
TurnDehumanization.............................................................................................................................28
TurnDiscourse........................................................................................................................................29
TurnFascism (1)..................................................................................................................................... 30
TurnFascism (2)..................................................................................................................................... 31
TurnFascism (3)..................................................................................................................................... 32
TurnGenocide (1)...................................................................................................................................33
TurnGenocide (2)...................................................................................................................................35
TurnHumanism......................................................................................................................................36
TurnKey to Ontology (1)....................................................................................................................... 37
TurnKey to Ontology (2)....................................................................................................................... 38
TurnKills Debate....................................................................................................................................39
TurnMorality (1)....................................................................................................................................40
TurnMorality (2)....................................................................................................................................41
TurnNuclear Annihilation.....................................................................................................................42
TurnOntology First Bad........................................................................................................................43
TurnPractical Reason............................................................................................................................44
TurnPublic Ignorance............................................................................................................................45
TurnPurity..............................................................................................................................................47
TurnValue to Life (1)............................................................................................................................. 48
(^_^)(^_^)

Takumi Murayama
Alt Cant SolveNatural Disasters.........................................................................................................53
Alt Cant SolveNuke War/Environment/Totalitarianism.................................................................. 54
Alt FailsAnarchy....................................................................................................................................55
Alt FailsDomination...............................................................................................................................56
Alt FailsEndless Cycle...........................................................................................................................57
Alt FailsIgnores Natural Disasters.......................................................................................................58
Alt FailsK of Science..............................................................................................................................59
Alt FailsLack of Action..........................................................................................................................60
Alt FailsLocal Opposition..................................................................................................................... 61
Alt FailsNo Truth...................................................................................................................................62
Alt FailsOntology Error.................................................................................................................. 63
Alt FailsOntology Fails..........................................................................................................................65
Alt FailsPublic Mindset.........................................................................................................................66
Perm SolvencyCalculation Ensures Survival......................................................................................68
Perm SolvencyGood Eco-Management............................................................................................... 69
Perm SolvencyLocal Opposition.......................................................................................................... 70
Perm SolvencyOntological Blindness...................................................................................................71
Perm SolvencyPoliticization................................................................................................................. 73
Perm SolvencyPublic Participation......................................................................................................74
Perm SolvencyScience in Social Context............................................................................................. 76
Perm SolvencyStepping Stone..............................................................................................................77
Perm SolvencySustainability................................................................................................................ 79
Alternate CausalityPatriarchy..............................................................................................................81
Calculative Thought GoodCommunication.........................................................................................82
Calculative Thought GoodDebate........................................................................................................ 83
Calculative Thought GoodEmancipation............................................................................................ 84
Calculative Thought GoodEmotional Epistemology..........................................................................85
Calculative Thought GoodMeaningful Discourse (1).........................................................................86
(^_^)(^_^)

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodMorality (1)............................................................................................... 90
Calculative Thought GoodNecessary for Coherent Framework (1).................................................94
Calculative Thought GoodPerversion of Incalculable Justice...........................................................97
Calculative Thought GoodPrevents Violence......................................................................................98
Calculative Thought GoodRejection of Genocide...............................................................................99
Discourse Doesnt MatterDoesnt Shape Reality..............................................................................100
Framework GoodReconcile Truth..................................................................................................... 101
Science GoodClimate Change (1).......................................................................................................102
Science GoodPublic Environmental Awareness................................................................................105
Science GoodTruth.............................................................................................................................. 106
(^_^)(^_^)

Takumi Murayama
Notes/Strategies
1. Hey look! Takumi produced a 2AC file! And its long! W00t! Wait, its a bit TOO
long.
2. First of all, there are many duplicates in this file, especially between Alt
Fails and Perm Solves (those two categories mean basically the same
thing a lot of the time). They ARE tagged differently, so be careful when
you pick out cards.
3. Turns refers to Plan Good (Link Turn) and Alt Bad both in the same
place. Its because I got lazy and because it doesnt matter too much
anyway.
4. There are various 2AC modules a short module, a medium answers
module, a long one, and a Framework module (that frankly is not too
good). Junaids block is also included, since somehow, I dont think I
managed to make a block that was a) as concise and b) as good. Anyway,
Ive found framework kind of useful, but its not needed 100%. Note that
there are debate-specific cards by Joseph Wagner on 08/02/08 (yes, very
recent!).
5. Sorry I had no time to write 1AR extensions. That will be an exercise left
to the reader.
6. I think the Calculative Thought Good section got REALLY muddled with
some generic Objectivism Good stuff. I mean, both are helpful, but not
necessarily for the debate.
7. Try reading some of these cards carefully. Youll either a) not understand
b) understand some, and agree with the tag, or c) want to kill me because
my tags suck. Especially with that one Derrida card, I had lots of trouble.
8. There is ONE PAGE of aff answers in the Constituent Imaginary file, and a
solid 20-30 pages in the Ecomanagerialism file that apply to Heidegger
(none of the non-electronic cards are in here, except the Barry 99 Anarchy
Fails card). Not entirely sure about Deep Ecology. Its kind of silly how
each K is so similar.
9. Enjoy! No smiley faces this time ^^ oh wait, I slipped. Oh and somehow
theres one in the footer. Oops.
(^_^)(^_^)

Takumi Murayama
2ACLong
1. Perm do nothing in all other instances except the plan.
2. Perm Solves The hands-off approach of the alt isnt enough to guarantee
alt solvency.
John Barry, Professor of Politics, Keele. 1999. Rethinking Green Politics.
As indicated in the last section, maintaining ecological diversity within social-environmental relations requires active
social intervention.
Added to this is the controversy over the whole idea that diversity and ecosystem complexity are positively related to
ecosystem stability. According to Clark, and contrary to popular perception, 'The highest diversity of species tends to occur not
in the most stable systems, but ion those subject to constant disturbance, e.g. rainforests subject to destruction by storm, and
rocky intertidal regions buffeted by heavy surf' (1992: 42). One implication of this is that if biodiversity is a desired value
this may imply human intervention in ecosystems to maintain high degrees of biodiversity, perhaps by disturbing
ecosystems in the requisite manner. 17 Of the many conclusions one can draw from this perhaps the most important is that a
'hands-off' approach may not guarantee the types of ecosystems that many deep greens desire. Ecosystems characterized
by diversity, balance, and complexity may have to be actively created and managed. The normative standpoint from
which to view social impacts on the environment is not a 'hands-off' position which frames the issue of the relation between
society and environment in terms of 'use' and 'non-use', but rather that proposed in the last chapter as the 'ethics of use' which
attempts to distinguish 'use' from 'abuse'. Once this ethical issue has been settled, ecological science can then be used to
help distinguish 'good' from 'bad' ecological management, i.e. sustainability from unsustainability. The type of social
regulation implied by collective ecological management involves the normative constraining of permissible policy options. We
could imagine this as the democratic character of collective ecological management. It is not that each social-environmental
issue is to be dealt with by all citizens taking a vote on the issue; rather it is that citizens (as opposed to bureaucrats and
experts) can participate in what Jacobs (1996: 13) calls 'decision-recommending' rather than decision-making institutions. That
is, such forms of popular democratic participation lay out the parameters of 'use' and 'abuse' in particular cases, that is, the
normative bounds of environmental management which can then be carried out through state institutions.
3. Turn Antihumanism Letting things be empirically leads to genocide; only the

plan can establish separation between ends and means, preventing the alts paralyzing
antihumanism that puts 1 bird over 6 million people. Dont let the neg justify our
extinction impacts because of an irrational fear of 1AC discourse.
Murray Bookchin, Founder of the Institute for Social Ecology and Former Professor at Ramapo College.
1995. Re-enchanting Humanity, p. 168-170.
"Insofar as Heidegger can be said to have had a project to shape human lifeways, it was as an endeavor to resist, or should I
say, demur from, what he conceived to he an all-encroaching technocratic mentality and civilization that rendered human
beings 'inauthentic' in their relationship to a presumably self-generative reality, 'isness', or more esoterically, 'Being' (Sein). Not
unlike many German reactionaries, Heidegger viewed modernity' with its democratic spirit, rationalism, respect for the
individual, and technological advances as a 'falling' (Gefallen) from a primal and naive innocence in which humanity once
'dwelled, remnants of which he believed existed in the rustic world into which he was born a century ago. 'Authenticity', it can
be said without any philosophical frills, lay in the pristine Teutonic world of the tribal Germans who retained their ties with
the Gods, and with later peoples who still tried to nourish their past amidst the blighted traits of the modern world. Since
some authors try to muddy Heidegger's prelapsarian message by focusing on his assumed belief in individual freedom and
ignoring his hatred of the French Revolution and its egalitarian, 'herd'-like democracy of the 'They', it is worth emphasizing
that such a view withers m the light of his denial of individuality. The individual by himself counts for nothing', he declared
after becoming a member of the National Socialist party in 1933. 'The fate of our Volk m its state counts for everything.' 22 As a
member of the Nazi party, which he remained up to the defeat of Germany twelve years later, his antihumanism reached
strident, often blatantly reactionary proportions. Newly appointed as the rector of the University of Freiburg upon Hitler's
ascent to power, he readily adopted the Fuehrer-principle of German fascism and preferred the title Rektor-Fuhrer, hailing
the spirit of National Socialism as an antidote to 'the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the
earth [by technology], the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative .28 His
(^_^)(^_^)

Takumi Murayama
most unsavory remarks were directed in the lectures, from which these lines are taken, 'from a metaphysical point of view',
against 'the pincers' created by America and Russia that threaten to squeeze 'the farthermost corner of the globe ... by
technology and ... economic exploitation.'29 Technology, as Heidegger construes it, is 'no mere means. Technology is a way of
revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the
realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.30 After which Heidegger rolls out technology's transformations, indeed mutations, which give
rise to a mood of anxiety and finally hubris, anthropocentricity, and the mechanical coercion of things into mere objects for
human use and exploitation. Heidegger's views on technology are part of a larger weltanschauung which is too multicolored to
discuss here, and demands a degree of interpretive effort we must forgo for the present in the context of a criticism of
technophobia. Suffice it to say that there is a good deal of primitivistic animism in Heidegger's treatment of the 'revealing' that
occurs when techne is a 'clearing' for the 'expression' of a crafted material - not unlike the Eskimo sculptor who believes (quite
wrongly, I may add) that he is 'bringing out' a hidden form that lies in the walrus ivory he is carving. But this issue must be
seen more as a matter of metaphysics than of a spiritually charged technique. Thus, when Heidegger praises a windmill, in
contrast to the 'challenge' to a tract of land from which the hauling out of coal and ore' is subjected, he is not being 'ecological'.
Heidegger is concerned with a windmill, not as an ecological technology, but more metaphysically with the notion that 'its sails
do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing'. The windmill 'does not unlock energy from the air
currents, in order to store it'. 31 Like man in relation to Being, it is a medium for the 'realization' of wind, not an artifact for
acquiring power. Basically, this interpretation of a technological interrelationship reflects a regression - socially and
psychologically as well as metaphysically into quietism. Heidegger advances a message of passivity or passivity conceived
as a human activity, an endeavor to let things be and 'disclose' themselves. 'Letting things be' would be little more than a trite
Maoist and Buddhist precept were it not that Heidegger as a National Socialist became all too ideologically engaged, rather
than 'letting things be', when he was busily undoing 'intellectualism,' democracy, and techno logical intervention into the
'world'. Considering the time, the place, and the abstract way in which Heidegger treated humanity's 'Fall' into technological
inauthenticity a Fall that he, like Ellul, regarded as inevitable, albeit a metaphysical, nightmare - it is not hard to see why
he could trivialize the Holocaust, when he deigned to notice it at all, as part of a techno-industrial condition.
'Agriculture is now a motorized (motorsierte) food industry, in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas
chambers and extermination camps,' he coldly observed, 'the same as the blockade and starvation of the countryside, the same
as the production of the hydrogen bombs.32 In placing the industrial means by which many Jews were killed before the
ideological ends that guided their Nazi exterminators, Heidegger essentially displaces the barbarism of a specific state
apparatus, of which he was a part, by the technical proficiency he can attribute to the world at large! These immensely
revealing offhanded remarks, drawn from a speech he gave in Bremen m 1949, are beneath contempt. But they point to a way
of thinking that gave an autonomy to technique that has fearful moral consequences which we are living with these days in the
name of the sacred, a phraseology that Heidegger would find very congenial were he alive today. Indeed, technophobia,
followed to its logical and crudely primitivistic conclusions, finally devolves into a dark reactionism and a paralyzing
quietism. For if our confrontation with civilization turns on passivity before a disclosing of Being, a mere dwelling on
the earth, and a letting things be, to use Heideggers verbiage much of which has slipped into deep ecologys vocabulary as
well the choice between supporting barbarism and enlightened humanism has no ethical foundations to sustain it.
Freed of values grounded in objectivity, we are lost in a quasi-religious antihumanism, a spirituality that can with the
same equanimity hear the cry of a bird and ignore the anguish of six million once-living people who were put to death
by the National Socialist state.
(^_^)(^_^)

Takumi Murayama
4. Turn Human survival does not lead to more management; realization that
death is imminent is key for ontology and the ability to save lives.
Brent Dean Robbins, doctoral student in clinical psychology at Duquesne University, 1999. Medard
Boss, http://mythosandlogos.com/Boss.html
"Death is an unsurpassable limit of human existence," writes Boss (119). Primarily, however, human beings flee from death
and the awareness of our mortality. But in our confrontation with death and our morality, we discover the "relationship" which
"is the basis for all feelings of reverance, fear, awe, wonder, sorrow, and deference in the face of something greater and more
powerful." (120). Boss even suggests that "the most dignified human relationship to death" involves keeping it--as a possibility
rather than an actuality--constantly in awareness without fleeing from it. As Boss writes: "Only such a being-unto-death can
guarantee the precondition that the Dasein be able to free itself from its absorption in, its submission and surrender of itself
to the things and relationships of everyday living and to return to itself." (121) Such a recognition brings the human being
back to his responsibility for his existence. This is not simply a inward withdrawal from the world--far from it. Rather, this
responsible awareness of death as the ultimate possibility for human existence frees the human being to be with others in a
genuine way. From this foundation--based on the existentials described above--Boss is able to articulate an understanding
of medicine and psychology which gives priority to the freedom of the human being to be itself. By freedom, Boss does
not mean a freedom to have all the possibilites, for we are finite and limited by our factical history and death. Yet within these
finite possibilities, we are free to be who we are and to take responsibility for who we are in the world with others and
alongside things that matter.
5. Perm Do Both we can engage in constructive policy while still remaining

critical of what we do.
6. Perm Solves The search for ontological truth fails because we allow atrocities to
continue we must use rationality to improve the status quo but remain critical of our
process.
Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences in Ljubljana, 1999. The Ticklish
Subject, p. 13-15.
Apropos of this precise point, I myself run into my first trouble with Heidegger (since I began as a Heideggerian - my first
published hook was on Heidegger and language). When, in my youth, I was bombarded by the official Communist
philosophers' stories of Heidegger's Nazi engagement, they left me rather cold; I was definitely more on the side of the
Yugoslav Heideggarians. All of a sudden, however, I became aware of how these Yugoslav Heideggarians were doing exactly
the sauce thing with respect to the Yugoslav ideology of self-management as Heidegger himself did with respect to Nazism: in
ex-Yugoslavia, Heideggerians entertained the same ambiguously assertive relationship towards Socialist self- management, the
official ideology of the Communist regime - in their eyes, the essence of sell-management was the very essence of modern
man, which is why the philosophical notion of self-managemrnt suits the ontological essence of our epoch, while the standard
political ideology of the regime misses this 'inner greatness' of self-management ... Heideggerians are thus eternally in search
of a positive, ontic political system that would come closest to the epochal ontological truth, a strategy which inevitably
leads to error (which, of course, is always acknowledged only retroactively, post factum, after the disastrous outcome of
one's engagement). As Heidegger himself put it, those who carne closest to the Ontological Truth are condemned to err at the
ontic level ... err about what? Precisely about the line of separation between ontic and ontological. The paradox not to be
underestimated is that the very philosopher who focused his interest on the enigma of ontological difference - who warned
again and again against the metaphysical mistake of conferring ontological dignity on some ontic content (God as the
highest Entity, for example) - fell into the trap of conferring on Nazism the ontological dignity of suiting the essence of
modern man. The standard defence of Heidegger against the reproach of his Nazi past consists of two points: not only was his
Nazi engagement a simple personal error (a stupidity [Dummheit]', as Heidegger himself put it) in no way inherently related to
his philosophical project; the main counter-argument is that it is Heidegger's own philosophy that enables us to discern the true
epochal roots of modern totalitarianism. However, what remains unthought here is the hidden complicity between the
ontological indifference towards concrete social systems (capitalism, Fascism. Communism), in so far as they all belong to
the same horizon of modern technology, and the secret privileging of a concrete sociopolitical model (Nazism with
Heidegger, Communism with some 'Heideggerian Marxists') as closer to the ontological truth of our epoch. Here one should
avoid the trap that caught Heidegger's defenders, who dismissed Heideggers Nazi engagement as simple an anomaly, a fall
(^_^)(^_^)

Takumi Murayama
into the ontic level, in blatant contradiction to his thought, which teaches us not to confuse ontological horizon with ontic
choices (as we have already seen, Heidegger is at his strongest when he demonstrates how, on a deeper structural level,
ecological, conservative, and so on, oppositions to the modern universe of technology are already embedded in the horizon of
what they purport to reject: the ecological critique of the technological exploitation of nature ultimately leads to a more
'environmentally sound' technology. etc.). Heidegger did not engage in the Nazi political project 'in spite of' his ontological
philosophical approach, but because of it; this engagement was not 'beneath' his philosophical level - on the contrary if one is
to understand Heidegger, the key point is to grasp the complicity (in Hegelese: 'speculative identity') between the elevation
above ontic concerns and the passionate 'ontic' Nazi political engagement. One can now see the ideological trap that caught
Heidegger: when he criticizes Nazi racism on behalf of the true 'inner greatness' of the Nazi movement, he repeats the
elementary ideological gesture of maintaining an inner distance towards the ideological text - of claiming that there is
something more beneath it, a non-ideological kernel: ideology exerts its hold over us by means of this very insistence that the
Cause we adhere to is not 'merely' ideological. So where is the trap? When the disappointed Heidegger turns away from active
engagement in the Nazi movement, he does so because the Nazi movement did not maintain the level of its 'inner greatness',
but legitimized itself with inadequate (racial) ideology. In other words, what he expected from it was that it should legitimize
itself through direct awareness of its 'inner greatness'. And the problem lies in this very expectation that a political
movement that will directly refer to its historico-ontological foundation is possible. This expectation, however, is in itself
profoundly metaphysical, in so far as it fails to recognize that the gap separating the direct ideological legitimization of a
movement from its 'inner greatness' (its historico-ontological essence) is constitutive, a positive condition of its
'functioning'. To use the terms of the later Heidegger, ontological insight necessarily entails ontic blindness and error, and
vice versa - that is to say, in order to be 'effective' at the ontic level, one must disregard the ontological horizon of one's
activity. (In this sense, Heidegger emphasizes that 'science doesn't think' and that, far from being its limitation, this inability is
the very motor of scientific progress.) In other words, what Heidegger seems unable to endorse is a concrete political
engagement that would accept its necessary, constitutive blindness - as if the moment we acknowledge the gap
separating the awareness of the ontological horizon from ontic engagement, any ontic engagement is depreciated, loses
its authentic dignity.
[Ecomanagerialism]
7. No Link We are not the instrumental rationality they describe. Beck 95
acknowledges that we are a specific instance of rationality to improve upon the
world. Our 1AC is a way to open debate on the issue; their evidence assumes
that our rationality prevents discussion.
[Calculation, Technology, and Askesis]
7. No Link We are not the instrumental rationality they describe. McWhorter
92 says that science is the only way to solve the aff impacts. Our 1AC is a way to
open debate on the issue; their evidence assumes that our rationality prevents
discussion.
(^_^)(^_^)

Takumi Murayama
8. Turn Practical Reason The plan allows for a reflection of ends to counter the
hegemony of instrumental reason, the cause of bad technological thought.
Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
90. The Politics of Being, p.167.
Heidegger's theory of technology ultimately collapses under the weight of its own self-imposed conceptual limitations. And
thus, the intrinsic shortcomings of his theoretical framework prevent him from entertaining the prospect that the problem of
technological domination owes more to the dearth of reason in the modern world rather than an excess. For in modern life,
the parameters of rationality have been prematurely restricted: formal or instrumental reason has attained de facto
hegemony; practical reason-reflection on ends-has been effectively marginalized. Instead of the "overcoming" of reason
recommended by Heidegger, what is needed is an expansion of reason's boundaries, such that the autonomous logic of
instrumental rationality is subordinated to a rational reflection on ends. Similarly, Heidegger's incessant lamentations
concerning the "will to will-the theoretical prism through which he views the modern project of human self-assertion in its
entirety- only serve to confuse the problem at issue?7 That the forces of technology and industry follow an independent
logic.
9. Perm Do the plan and all part of the alt that dont explicitly reject the plan
If the alt can theoretically solve case, vote aff vague alts are bad because
theyre a shifting target, making it impossible to win.
10. Impacts inevitable Management of nature still happens because of status
quo policies worse than the plan. Current companies and individuals are largely
driven by selfishness than considerations of their actions effects on the
environment.
11. No impact The alts one-dimensionality lumps together Western
rationalism with Stalinism, proving that the plan does not justify all forms of
violence.
Luc Ferry, Professor of Political Science, Sorbonne and Alain Renaut, Professor of Philosophy, Nantes.
1990. Heidegger and Modernity, trans. Franklin Philip, P. 87-88
From this viewpoint, it is first of all clear, as we have noted, that this criticism of technology as the global concretization of an
idea of man as consciousness and will implies, like it or not, a deconstruction of democratic remains on and hence, in some
sense, of humanism. It is also clear, however, that Heidegger's thinking, even fixed up this way, continues in some odd way
to misfire because of its one-dimensionality. Just as, on the strictly philosophical level, it leads to lumping the various
facets of modem subjectivity together in a shapeless mass and to judging that the progression from Descartes to Kant to
Nietzsche is linear and in fact inevitable; just as, on the political level, it leads to the brutal inclusion of American liberalism
in the same category with Stalinist totalitarianism. Now this is no mere matter of taste: anyone has the right to loathe rock
concerts, Disney World, and California. Nonetheless, no one may-Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, who lived in the United
States, did not make this mistake - identify, in the name of a higher authority, the barbarism of the Soviet gulags with the
depravities of a Western society whose extraordinary political, social, and cultural complexity allows areas of freedom
that it would be wholly unwarranted to judge a priori as mere fringes or remnants of a world in decline.
(^_^)(^_^)

Takumi Murayama
12. Turn Authenticity The alt is predicated off of a notion of authenticity
that separates practical reason from human Being-in-the-world.
90. The Politics of Being, p.33-34
Although an understanding of Heidegger's political thought should in no way be reduced to the concrete political choices made
by the philosopher in the 1930s, neither is it entirely separable therefrom. And while the strategy of his apologists has been to
dissociate the philosophy from the empirical person, thereby suggesting that Heidegger's Nazism was an unessential aberration
in the hope of exempting the philosophy from political taint, this strategy will not wash for several reasons. To begin with,
Heidegger's philosophy itself would seem to rule out the artificial, traditional philosophical separation between thought and
action. In truth, much of Being and Time is concerned with overcoming the conventional philosophical division between
theoretical and practical reason; a fact that is evident above all in the "pragmatic" point of departure of the analytic of Dasein:
"Being-in- the-world" rather than the Cartesian "thinking substance." More importantly, though, what is perhaps the central
category of Heidegger's existential ontology-the category of "authenticity''- automatically precludes such a facile
separation between philosophical outlook and concrete life-choices. As a work of fundamental ontology, Being and Time
aims at delineating the essential, existential determinants of human Being-in-the-world. Heidegger refers to these
structures (e.g., "care," "fallenness," "thrownness," "Being-toward-death") as Existenzialien. The category of authenticity
demands that the ontological structures of Being and Time receive practical or ontic fulfillment; that is, the realization of
these categorial determinations in actual, concrete life contexts is essential to the coherence of the Heideggerian project. This
conclusion follows of necessity from the nature of the category of authenticity itself: it would be nonsensical to speak of an
"authentic Dasein" that was unrealized, existing in a state of mere potentiality. Authenticity requires that ontic or practical
choices and involvements-concrete decisions, engagements, and political commitments-become an essential feature of an
authentic existence.
13. Impact This notion of authenticity justifies the imposition of totalitarian

higher spiritual mission on those who live everyday lives.
90. The Politics of Being, p.46
The political philosophical implications of this theory are as unequivocal as they are distasteful to a democratic sensibility. On
the basis of the philosophical anthropology outlined by Heidegger, the modern conception of popular sovereignty becomes
a sheer non sequitur: for those who dwell in the public sphere of everydayness are viewed as essentially incapable of selfrule. Instead, the only viable political philosophy that follows from this standpoint would be brazenly elitist: since the
majority of citizens remain incapable of leading meaningful lives when left to their own devices, their only hope for
"redemption" lies in the imposition of a "higher spiritual mission" from above. Indeed, this was the explicit political
conclusion drawn by Heidegger in 1933. In this way, Heidegger's political thought moves precariously in the direction of
the "Fuhrerprinzip" or "leadership principle." In essence, he reiterates, in keeping with a characteristic antimodern bias, a
strategem drawn from Platonic political philosophy: since the majority of men and women are incapable of ruling themselves
insofar as they are driven by the base part of their souls to seek after inferior satisfactions and amusements, we in effect do
them a service by ruling them from above.77To date, however, there has never been a satisfactory answer to the question Marx
poses concerning such theories of educational dictatorship: "Who shall educate the educator?
(^_^)(^_^)
10

Takumi Murayama
2ACMedium
1. Perm do nothing in all other instances except the plan.
2. Perm Solves The hands-off approach of the alt isnt enough to guarantee
alt solvency.

(^_^)(^_^)
11

Takumi Murayama

(^_^)(^_^)
12

Takumi Murayama
process.
Subject, p. 13-15.
(^_^)(^_^)
13

Takumi Murayama
[Ecomanagerialism]
discussion.
environment.
logic.
9. Perm Do the plan and all part of the alt that dont explicitly reject the plan
If the alt can theoretically solve case, vote aff vague alts are bad because
theyre a shifting target, making it impossible to win.
(^_^)(^_^)
14

Takumi Murayama
2ACShort
process.
Subject, p. 13-15.
(^_^)(^_^)
15

Takumi Murayama
[Ecomanagerialism]
discussion.
environment.
(^_^)(^_^)
16

Takumi Murayama
logic.
(^_^)(^_^)
17

Takumi Murayama
2ACJunaids Block
1. Perm do nothing in all other instances except the plan
2. The hands-off anarchist approach of the alt is not enough to guarantee the
solvency claimed by the alternative
3. Alternative doesn't solve the case doing nothing will only perpetuate poverty and
instability via natural disasters. Terrorists will arm making extinction inevitable
4. Perm do both we can engage in constructive policy to address constant issues but
we can continue to be critical of what we do.
5. Perm solves the search for ontological truth fails because we allow atrocities to
continue- we must use rationality to improve the status quo but remain critical of our
process
Subject, p. 13-15.
(^_^)(^_^)
18

Takumi Murayama
6. We aren't the instrumental rationality they describe we are a specific instance of

rationality to improve the world the 1ac is an opening step to provoke discussion
their evidence assumes a world in which we refuse to discuss our rationality
(^_^)(^_^)
19

Takumi Murayama
7. Technological thought is only bad because it lacks the right rationality the plan
allows a reflection that ends instrumental logic
logic.
8. Perm do the alt if the alternative could theoretically result in the plan- you should
vote aff- vague alts are bad because they create a shifting target that makes it
impossible for the aff to win
(^_^)(^_^)
20

Takumi Murayama
2ACFramework
1. FrameworkAllow us to weigh our impacts against the K.
A. Gateway issues allow contradictionthey can contradict themselves
on different levels.
B. Infinitely regressivethere can be an infinite number of
representations wed have to get through.
C. Educationlack of plan focus turns into vague alts and incentivizes
theory to win.
D. Burden of rejoineras the team speaking first, we deserve the right
to pick framework
E. Err aff on theorythere is a HUGE neg block imbalance already.
2. Our impacts outweigh any impacts they have of human and environmental
sacrifice:
A. Loss of humanity does not matter when all of us are extinct.
B. Their alt fails to address any environmental threats because theyre
scared of the representations they need to use.
C. Out impacts outweigh because they affect the ENTIRE BIOSPHERE!
You can cry over sacrifice of the environment under the plan. But
you wouldnt even be ABLE to cry under the alternative. The ENTIRE
environment would be GONE turns their alt.
D. Vote aff A neg vote justifies the death of billions in favor of the cry
of one bird.
3. Reason and objectivity are necessary for any coherent epistemology,
equality, justice, and respect. Relativists concede that meaningful
discourse and debate requires objective reason.
Joseph Wagner, Department of Political Science, Colgate. 08/02/08. The Revolt Against Reason:
Mistaken Assumptions In Post-Positivist Relativism, originally printed in Critical Thinking: Focus on
Social and Cultural Inquiry (1991), ed. Wendy Oxman-Michelli and Mark Weinstein, p. 1-2.
http://hascall.colgate.edu/jwagner/DownloadFiles/Revolt.doc
[Takumi Murayama]
These articulations are often associated with the doctrines of post-modernism, post-positivism and multiculturalism. I hope to
show these claims are indefensible on epistemic, moral, and political grounds. I intend to challenge progressive thinkers to
consider how relativism ill serves and dishonors their ends and to see how transcultural and ahistorical claims of reason can
be advanced as universally and objectively true while also denying that human beings can occupy a "god's eye point of
view." Finally, I wish to show that despite firm assurances about the death of universalism and objectivity, these standards
are necessary for any coherent epistemic position and essential for anyone who prescribes an obligation to honor
prescriptions for equality, justice, and the mutuality of respect.
To see the defects of post-modern relativism it is necessary to see the failure of relativism in its simplest and most ancient form.
In its simplest form, relativism asserts the inherent subjectivity of each individual's claims. Yet despite the recurrent
popularity of subjectivism, it is only an extreme and unsophisticated egoism that inevitably collapses into solipsism.
Articulate post-modern defenders of relativism reject it as irremediably flawed (Barnes and Bloor 1985, Krausz 1989, also
see Siegal 1989). They appreciate that meaningful discourse requires transindividual presumptions of truth, right, and
objectivity, and that relativism can only be defended by employing what I will call, framework relativism. The claim that
values as truth, meaningfulness, rightness, reasonableness, appropriateness, aptness, or the like are relative to the contexts in
which they appear . . . Relativism denies the viability of grounding the pertinent claims in ahistorical, acultural, or absolutist
terms. (Krausz 1989, 1)
(^_^)(^_^)
21

Takumi Murayama
(^_^)(^_^)
22

Takumi Murayama
No ImpactOne-dimensionality
The alts one-dimensionality lumps together Western rationalism with
Stalinism, proving that the plan does not justify all forms of violence.
From this viewpoint, it is first of all clear, as we have noted, that this criticism of technology as the global concretization of an
idea of man as consciousness and will implies, like it or not, a deconstruction of democratic remains on and hence, in some
sense, of humanism. It is also clear, however, that Heidegger's thinking, even fixed up this way, continues in some odd way
to misfire because of its one-dimensionality. Just as, on the strictly philosophical level, it leads to lumping the various
facets of modem subjectivity together in a shapeless mass and to judging that the progression from Descartes to Kant to
Nietzsche is linear and in fact inevitable; just as, on the political level, it leads to the brutal inclusion of American liberalism
in the same category with Stalinist totalitarianism. Now this is no mere matter of taste: anyone has the right to loathe rock
concerts, Disney World, and California. Nonetheless, no one may-Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, who lived in the United
States, did not make this mistake - identify, in the name of a higher authority, the barbarism of the Soviet gulags with the
depravities of a Western society whose extraordinary political, social, and cultural complexity allows areas of freedom
that it would be wholly unwarranted to judge a priori as mere fringes or remnants of a world in decline.
(^_^)(^_^)
23

Takumi Murayama
No ImpactPurity
No Impact No one forgets Being, preventing a view of Nature as pure stock.
Bruno Latour, professor of sociology, School of Mines. 1990. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter,
p. 65-67.
[Takumi Murayama]
But immediately the philosopher loses this well-intentioned simplicity. Why? Ironically, he himself indicates the reason for
this, in an apologue on Heraclitus who used to take shelter in a bakers oven. Einai gar kai entautha theous here, too, the
gods are present, said Heraclitus to visitors who were astonished to see him warming his poor carcass like an ordinary mortal
(Heidegger, 1977b, p. 233). Auch hier nmlich wesen Gtter am. But Heidegger is taken in as much as those naive visitors,
since he and his epigones do not expect to find Being except along the Black Forest Holzwege. Being cannot reside in
ordinary beings. Everywhere, there is desert. The gods cannot reside in technology that pure Enframing (Zimmerman,
1990) of being [Ge-Stell], that ineluctable fate [Geshick], that supreme danger [Gefahr]. They are not to be sought in science,
either, since science has no other essence but that of technology (Heidegger, 1977b). They are absent from politics, sociology,
psychology, anthropology, history which is the history of being, and counts its epochs in millennia. The gods cannot reside in
economics that pure calculation forever mired in beings and worry. They are not to be found in philosophy, either, or in
ontology, both of which lost sight of their destiny 2,500 years ago. Thus Heidegger treats the modern world as the visitors treat
Heraclitus: with contempt.
And yet here too the gods are present: in a hydroelectric plant on the banks of the Rhine, in subatomic particles, in
Adidas shoes as well as in the old wooden clogs hollowed out by hand, in agribusiness as well as in timeworn landscapes, in
shopkeepers calculations as well as in Hlderlins heartrending verse. But why do those philosophers no longer recognize
them? Because they believe what the modern Constitution says about itself! This paradox should no longer astonish us. The
moderns indeed declare that technology is nothing but pure instrumental mastery, science pure Enframing and pure
Stamping [Das Ge-Stell], that economics is pure calculation, capitalism, pure reproduction, the subject pure consciousness,
Purity everywhere! They claim this, but we must be careful not to take them at their word, since what they are asserting is
only half of the modern world, the work of purification that distils what the work of hybridization supplies.
Who has forgotten Being? No one, no one ever has, otherwise Nature would be truly available as a pure stock. Look
around you: scientific objects are circulating simultaneously as subjects and discourse. Networks are full of Being. As for
machines, they are laden with subjects and collectives. How could a being lose its difference, its incompleteness, its mark, its
trace of Being? This is never in anyones power; otherwise we should have to imagine that we have truly been modern, we
should be taken in by the upper half of the modern Constitution.
Has someone, however, actually forgotten Being? Yes, anyone who really thinks that Being has really been forgotten. As LviStrauss says, the barbarian is first and foremost the man who believes in barbarism. (Lvi-Strauss, [1952] 1987, p. 12). Those
who have failed to undertake empirical studies of sciences, technologies, law, politics, economics, religion or fiction have
lost the traces of Being that are distributed everywhere among beings. If, scorning empiricism, you opt out of the exact
sciences, then the human sciences, then traditional philosophy, then the sciences of language, and you hunker down in your
forest then you will indeed feel a tragic loss. But what is missing is you yourself, not the world! Heideggers epigones
have converted that glaring weakness into a strength, We dont know anything empirical, but that doesnt matter, since your
world is empty of Being. We are keeping the little flame of Being safe from everything, and you, who have all the rest, have
nothing. On the contrary, we have everything, since we have Being, and beings, and we have never lost track of the
difference between Being and beings. We are carrying out the impossible project undertaken by Heidegger, who
believed what the modern Constitution said about itself without understanding that what is at issue is only half of a larger
mechanism which has never abandoned the old anthropological matrix. No one can forget Being, since there has never been a
modern world, or, by the same token, metaphysics. We have always remained pre-Socratic, pre-Cartesian, pre-Kantian,
pre-Nietzschean. No radical revolution can separate us from these pasts, so there is no need for reactionary
counterrevolutions to lead us back to what has been abandoned. Yes, Heraclitus is a surer guide than Heidegger: Einai gar
kai entautha theous.
(^_^)(^_^)
24

Takumi Murayama
TurnAuthenticity (1)
A. The alt is predicated off of a notion of authenticity that separates practical
reason from human Being-in-the-world.
B. Impact This notion of authenticity justifies the imposition of totalitarian

higher spiritual mission on those who live everyday lives.
90. The Politics of Being, p.46
The political philosophical implications of this theory are as unequivocal as they are distasteful to a democratic sensibility. On
the basis of the philosophical anthropology outlined by Heidegger, the modern conception of popular sovereignty becomes
a sheer non sequitur: for those who dwell in the public sphere of everydayness are viewed as essentially incapable of selfrule. Instead, the only viable political philosophy that follows from this standpoint would be brazenly elitist: since the
majority of citizens remain incapable of leading meaningful lives when left to their own devices, their only hope for
"redemption" lies in the imposition of a "higher spiritual mission" from above. Indeed, this was the explicit political
conclusion drawn by Heidegger in 1933. In this way, Heidegger's political thought moves precariously in the direction of
the "Fuhrerprinzip" or "leadership principle." In essence, he reiterates, in keeping with a characteristic antimodern bias, a
strategem drawn from Platonic political philosophy: since the majority of men and women are incapable of ruling themselves
insofar as they are driven by the base part of their souls to seek after inferior satisfactions and amusements, we in effect do
them a service by ruling them from above.77To date, however, there has never been a satisfactory answer to the question Marx
poses concerning such theories of educational dictatorship: "Who shall educate the educator?
(^_^)(^_^)
25

Takumi Murayama
Letting beings be destroys any ability to discern between truth and lies,
initiating the path toward Nazism.
90. The Politics of Being, p.121-122.
Ultimately Heidegger's theory of truth succumbs to the same problem of criterionlessness that was at issue in the
decisionistic approach to human action in Being and Time. On the one hand, Heidegger seems at first to be claiming that
unconcealment is merely an ontological precondition of truth-which is, as far as it goes, certainly a plausible and valuable
insight. In point of fact, however, the nature of truth is conceptualized in terms of the dialectic of concealment and
unconcealment that occurs within the phenomenological horizon that has been opened up by a work, a world, etc. In the end,
his thoroughgoing antisubjectivism, which is radicalized in the "Turn," results in a type of ineffectual positivism: objects
(beings) are no longer to be "judged" (for this would be to subject them to subjective criteria, or, worse still, to "values"),
but "disclosed" or "unveiled." Yet, once the lines between truth and error become blurred, the distinction between
authentic and inauthentic unveiling essentially evaporates: both are victimized by error in an unspecifiable way.
Heidegger could conceivably redeem his theory of truth by an attempt, however minimal, to distinguish a true from an untrue
act of unconcealment. A true unconcealment would thus unveil a being "essentially" or as it is "in itself." But no such
distinction between genuine and non-genuine unveiling is forthcoming in his work. Instead, error (Irrnis) is paradoxically
deemed a mode of unconcealment that is valid in its own right and thus "equiprimordial" with truth. Or again, Heidegger might
have claimed that unconcealment presents a type of privileged or exemplary disclosure of beings; and judgments of truth, in
turn, could have been predicated on this exemplary mode of disclosure. But no such claim is made. Instead, all we are left
with is an unexalted, positivistic affirmation of "givenness," "beings in their immediacy," "disclosure as such." In this
respect, Heidegger's theory of Seinsgeschichte regresses behind both the Husserlian and the ancient Greek conceptions of truth.
For in both cases, truth resides not in the "givenness" of beings as such, but in a supramundane or superior mode of givenness?
* As a result of his obsession with providing a "topography" of truth-with defining the clearing or openness as a sufficient
condition for the appearance of truth as "untruth"-to the wholesale exclusion of all traditional predicative considerations,
Heidegger lays himself open to extreme judgmental incapacities. And it was this philosophically induced lack of
discernment that would lead to his fatal misapprehension of the intellectual as well as the political essence of National
Socialism.
(^_^)(^_^)
26

Takumi Murayama
Applications of authenticity in politics establish a totalitarian state that
controls all spheres of life.
There are many dangers lurking in the statist conception of politics advanced by Heidegger in the preceding citation. The
specifically political danger of this theory of the polis/state is that it is latently totalitarian: when the state-and the "destiny
of a historical Volk" that is its raison d'etre-are accorded unchallenged ontological primacy as "the work for the works," the
autonomy and integrity of the other spheres of life (social, cultural, religious) disappears: they are gleichgeschaltet or
immediately subsumed within the political sphere. The Greeks could solve this potential danger via the institution of direct
democracy: by virtue of this medium, political space was opened up to its maximum extent. But in Heidegger's contemporary
pan-Germanic "repetition" of the ancient polis, the opposite is true: since his twentieth century polis/ state is integrally tied to
the Fhrerprinzip, it becomes a Fhrerstaat, a new form of political tyranny, in which political space shrivels up into the
person of the Fhrer and his sycophantic entourage.6 As the remarks just cited suggest, for Heidegger, the concept of a
Fhrerstaat is unproblematical provided there be "rulers alone, but then really rulers." That is, the rulers must be "authentic"
and not imposters. And as we will soon see, Heidegger develops a theory of world-historical "leader-creators" in order to
ground his partisanship for the Fhrerprinzip philosophically.
(^_^)(^_^)
27

Takumi Murayama
TurnDehumanization
Heideggers kritik of technological thought equates the production of Jews
corpses with industrial waste.
Arnold I. Davidson, co-editor of Critical Inquiry, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Member of the
Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the
University of Chicago. Winter 1989. Questions Concerning Heidegger: Opening the Debate, Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2, p. 423-424.
[Takumi Murayama]
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who brought this statement to prominence and discusses it at length in La Fiction du politique,
admits that insofar as Heidegger intended to refer the gas chambers and death camps to the essence of technology his
thought is "absolutely just." But the justice of this condemnation, by way of the relation between technology and nihilism,
is by itself "scandalously insufficient" (F, p. 58). According to Lacoue-Labarthe, this scandalous insufficiency results from
the fact that Heidegger never acknowledged that this mass extermination was essentially [pour l'essential] the extermination of
the Jews, and that this fact makes for an incommensurable difference from the economic and military practice of blockades, or
even the production of nuclear weapons, not to mention the mechanization of the food industry (F, pp. 58-59). 32 For LacoueLabarthe, as for Blanchot and Levinas, Heidegger's silence concerning the Final Solution, his failure to pronounce the
name of the Jews, is what remains beyond pardon. And I think that behind this silence, when one encounters Heidegger's
1949 pronouncement, one cannot but be staggered by his inability-call it metaphysical inability-to acknowledge the
everyday fate of bodies and souls, as if the bureaucratized burning of selected human beings were not all that different
from the threat to humanity posed in the organization of the food industry by the forces of technology.33 The
mechanization of agriculture may be a cause for worry; the production of hydrogen bombs is a reason for terror; the economic
blockades of countries may be evil; but the production of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps brings us face to face
with the experience of horror. Where have these distinctions gone? Humanism aside, what has become of the human? At
Auschwitz, says Lacoue-Labarthe, the Jews were treated as industrial waste (F, pp. 61-62). Do we have no criteria of
evaluation to distinguish between the waste products of technology and the production of human corpses in the gas
chambers? Are the advances of Heidegger's thought inseparable from this indifference to the specifically human?
(^_^)(^_^)
28

Takumi Murayama
TurnDiscourse
Relativists concede that meaningful discourse requires objective reason, which
is key for any communication in this debate round.
[Takumi Murayama]
(^_^)(^_^)
29

Takumi Murayama
TurnFascism (1)
The alt is an empty vessel of authentic decision. Heideggers Nazism was the
logical response driven by his ethical vacuum.
The consequences of this decisionistic "ethical vacuum" coupled with the prejudicial nature of Heidegger's conservative
revolutionary degradation of the modern life-world, suggests an undeniable theoretical cogency behind Heidegger's
ignominious life-choice of 1933. In its rejection of "moral convention-which qua convention, proves inimical to acts of
heroic bravado-decisionism shows itself to be distinctly nihilistic vis-a-vis the totality of inherited ethical paradigms.118F or
this reason, the implicit political theory of Being and Time-and in this respect, it proves a classical instance of the German
conservative-authoritarian mentality of the period-remains devoid of fundamental "liberal convictions" that might have served
as an ethicopolitical bulwark against the enticement of fascism. Freed of such bourgeois qualms, the National Socialist
movement presented itself as a plausible material "filling" for the empty vessel of authentic decision and its categorical
demand for existentiell-historical content. The summons toward an "authentic historical destiny" enunciated in Being and
Time was thus provided with an ominously appropriate response by Germany's National Revolution. The latter, in
effect, was viewed by Heidegger as 'the ontic fulfillment of the categorical demands of "historicity": it was Heidegger's
own choice of a "hero," a "destiny," and a "community."
(^_^)(^_^)
30

Takumi Murayama
TurnFascism (2)
The alts endless anti-technological inquiry ignores the specific goals of
political movements, preventing the establishment of a clear ethical
foundation.
Leslie Paul Thiele, Professor of Political Science, University of Florida, 2003. The Ethics and Politics of
Narrative, Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p.
211-212.
[Takumi Murayama]
The pursuit of knowledge continues unabated for the skeptic. Yet it proceeds with a suspicious eye. There are inherent
limitations to and a price to pay forthe pursuit of knowledge. Charles Scott describes Foucault's efforts in this regard: Far
from the skepticism that argues that nothing is really knowablegenealogies embody a sense of the historical limits that define
our capacities for knowing and believing. Things are known. But they are known in ways that have considerable social and
cultural costs. 8 Both Heidegger and Foucault maintain that there is no legitimate basis for the radical skeptic's
conviction that knowledge is impossible or unworthy of pursuit. This sort of skepticism, Heidegger states, consists merely
in an addiction to doubt. 9 The skeptical nature of political philosophical thought, in contrast, is grounded in the
imperative of endless inquiry. The point for Heidegger and Foucault is to inquire not in order to sustain doubt, but to doubt
that one might better sustain inquiry. At the same time, inquiry is tempered with a sensibility of the ethico-political costs of
any knowledge that is gained. Doing political philosophy of this sort might be likened to walking on a tightrope. If vertigo
is experienced, a precarious balance may be lost. Falling to one side leaves one mired in apathy, cynicism, and apoliticism.
This results when skeptical inquiry degenerates into a radical skepticism, an addictive doubt that denies the value of (the search
for) knowledge and undermines the engagements of collective life, which invariably demand commitment (based on tentatively
embraced knowledge). Falling to the other side of the tightrope leaves one mired in dogmatic belief or blind activism.
Authoritarian ideologies come to serve as stable foundations, or a reactive iconoclasm leads to irresponsible defiance. Apathy,
cynicism, and apoliticism, on the one side, and dogmatic authoritarianism or reactive iconoclasm, on the other, are the
dangerous consequences of losing one's balance. These states of mind and their corresponding patterns of behavior relieve
the vertigo of political philosophical inquiry, but at a prohibitive cost. It has been argued that Foucault did not so much walk
the tightrope of political philosophy as straddle it, at times leaving his readers hopeless and cynical, at times egging them on to
an irresponsible monkeywrenching. For some, the Foucauldian flight from the ubiquitous powers of normalization undermines
any defensible normative position. Hopelessness accompanies lost innocence. Cynicism or nihilism become the only
alternatives for those who spurn all ethical and political foundations. By refusing to paint a picture of a better future, Foucault
is said to undercut the impetus to struggle. Others focus on Foucault's development of a tool kit whose contents are to be
employed to deconstruct the apparatuses of modern power. Yet the danger remains that Foucault's hyperactive tool-kit users
will be unprincipled activists, Luddites at best, terrorists at worst. In either case, Foucault provides no overarching theoretical
vision. Indeed, Foucault is upfront about his rejection of ethical and political theories and ideals. I think that to imagine
another system is to extend our participation in the present system, Foucault stipulates. Reject theory and all forms of
general discourse. This need for theory is still part of the system we reject. 10 One might worry whether action is meant to
take the place of thought. If Foucault occasionally straddles the tightrope of political philosophy, Heidegger obviously
stumbled off it. In the 1930s, Heidegger enclosed himself within an authoritarian system of thought grounded in
ontological reifications of a folk and its history. Heidegger's historicization of metaphysics led him to believe that a new
philosophic epoch was about to be inaugurated. It implicitly called for a philosophical Fuehrer who could put an end to two
millennia of ontological forgetting. 11 The temptation for Heidegger to identify himself as this intellectual messiah and to
attach himself to an authoritarian social and political movement capable of sustaining cultural renewal proved
irresistible. Whether Heidegger ever fully recovered his balance has been the topic of much discussion. Some argue that
Heidegger's prerogative for political philosophizing was wholly undermined by his infatuation with folk destiny,
salvational gods, and political authority. 12
(^_^)(^_^)
31

Takumi Murayama
TurnFascism (3)
Objective reason makes universal moral and political claims that are
irrefutable. Abandonment of this universality leads to a foolish, imprudent, and
unwise moral and political program.
Social and Cultural Inquiry (1991), ed. Wendy Oxman-Michelli and Mark Weinstein, p. 17.
[Takumi Murayama]
Alternatively, objective principles of justice and mutual respect make moral and political claims which ought to be
honored by all persons, nations, and cultures. These are universal claims, the only sorts of claims which assert
obligation on those who are dominant as well as those who are subordinate. Only universal claims of justice are the
kind that cannot be discharged by the rejoinder, 'those are simply your tastes and preferences, not mine,' because only
universal claims are grounded on the fundamental commonality of human beings and human societies, not upon the
ineradicable differences between them. Such universality resides in the common reason and common truths (empirical and
moral), which make differences possible as well as shared understanding and appreciation.
Finally, identifying, understanding and appreciating differences between groups and individuals depends the universal
capacity for logical consistency and objectivity that every language user possesses. By this means I recognize that
'happiness,' 'pain,' 'frustration,' 'friendship,' 'commitments' and 'beliefs about justice' matter not only to me but to
others. I recognize that 'happiness' is desirable not because it occurs in me, but because happiness is a desirable experience in
whomever it occurs. I recognize that if these matters are reasons to advance my interests or the interests of my society, they are
also reasons to advance the interests of others and other societies. It is our commonality and universality that forms the
basis for understanding and solidarity. Abandoning the common and the universal, as post-positivists, poststructuralists, and post-moderns do, not only rests upon a series of epistemic mistakes, but leads to a moral and political
program that is as foolish as it is imprudent and unwise.
(^_^)(^_^)
32

Takumi Murayama
TurnGenocide (1)
Letting things be empirically leads to genocide; only the plan can establish separation
between ends and means, preventing a paralyzing antihumanism that puts 1 bird over 6
million people.
(^_^)(^_^)
33

Takumi Murayama
(^_^)(^_^)
34

Takumi Murayama
TurnGenocide (2)
Heideggerean kritik ignores possibility of freedom, justifying genocide
Michael E. Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy, Tulane. 1990. Heideggers Confrontation with
Modernity, p. 255-256.
[Takumi Murayama]
While influenced by Hegel's historical determinism, then, Heidegger renounced the progressive dimension of that determinism,
a progressivism which was transformed by Marx into his own vision of human progress. Influenced by Nietzsche and by such
reactionary Nietzscheans as Jnger, Heidegger had no confidence in the Enlightenment vision of "progress." Hence, he
made both Hegel and Marx walk on their heads, in the sense of claiming that their progressive view of history would be better
read as a history of decline and degeneration. For Heidegger, the liberatory promise of the Enlightenment in fact paved the way
for an epoch of total human enslavement. Viewing the Enlightenment as a crucial phase in the rise of the technological
Will to Power is what enabled Heidegger to equate extermination camps with mechanized agriculture and hydroelectric
dams. For Heidegger, genocide was a predictable outcome of the reckless power impulse at work in the Enlightenment, an
impulse given free rein in modern technology. Ernesto Laclau has objected to this view of Western history: "When the
theorists of the eighteenth century are presented as the initiators of a project of 'mastery' that would eventually lead to
Auschwitz, it is forgotten that Auschwitz was repudiated by a set of values that, in large part, also stem from the
eighteenth century."6 Like so many Germans of his generation, however, and like a number of recent French thinkers,
Heidegger saw only the "dark side" of the Enlightenment project and also discounted the possibility of human freedom.
(^_^)(^_^)
35

Takumi Murayama
TurnHumanism
Heideggers humanist ontology used to criticize anti-Semetism justifies the
plans approach to the world. The fanatical hatred of the alt allows the return
of nationalistic myth.
Whatever is true of this debate, which, it will be readily agreed, here remains open, one thing is still certain. Heidegger is not
close to Nazism because he remained a prisoner of humanism, nor because of his deliberations about authenticity and the
distinguishing property of man. For Heidegger, the distinguishing property of man is always transcendence, and on the
contrary, it was in the name of this transcendence and thus because he was still a humanist that Heidegger could criticize
the biologizing reifications of Nazi anti-Semitism. More generally, it is very much in the name of humanism thus
understood, in the name of that strictly human capacity to wrench oneself free of natural determinations, that a criticism of
the racist imaenation (in the Lacanian sense) is possible. When, however, Heidegger makes the destiny of Being the destiny
of man, when he thus returns to the antihumanist idea of a traditional code (if only that of the history of Being), he
founders in inauthenticity, and his fall makes possible the return of the nationalistic myth and the fanatical hatred of
modernity.
(^_^)(^_^)
36

Takumi Murayama
TurnKey to Ontology (1)

Human survival does not lead to more management; realization that death is
imminent is key for ontology and the ability to save lives.
Brent Dean Robbins, doctoral student in clinical psychology at Duquesne University, 1999. Medard
Boss, http://mythosandlogos.com/Boss.html
"Death is an unsurpassable limit of human existence," writes Boss (119). Primarily, however, human beings flee from death
and the awareness of our mortality. But in our confrontation with death and our morality, we discover the "relationship" which
"is the basis for all feelings of reverance, fear, awe, wonder, sorrow, and deference in the face of something greater and more
powerful." (120). Boss even suggests that "the most dignified human relationship to death" involves keeping it--as a possibility
rather than an actuality--constantly in awareness without fleeing from it. As Boss writes: "Only such a being-unto-death can
guarantee the precondition that the Dasein be able to free itself from its absorption in, its submission and surrender of itself
to the things and relationships of everyday living and to return to itself." (121) Such a recognition brings the human being
back to his responsibility for his existence. This is not simply a inward withdrawal from the world--far from it. Rather, this
responsible awareness of death as the ultimate possibility for human existence frees the human being to be with others in a
genuine way. From this foundation--based on the existentials described above--Boss is able to articulate an understanding
of medicine and psychology which gives priority to the freedom of the human being to be itself. By freedom, Boss does
not mean a freedom to have all the possibilites, for we are finite and limited by our factical history and death. Yet within these
finite possibilities, we are free to be who we are and to take responsibility for who we are in the world with others and
alongside things that matter.
(^_^)(^_^)
37

Takumi Murayama
TurnKey to Ontology (2)

The plan allows ontological outlook to receive ontic fulfillment, allowing
(^_^)(^_^)
38

Takumi Murayama
TurnKills Debate
Objective reason is necessary for any contradiction between people. The alt
kills any possibility of debate in this round.
[Takumi Murayama]
First, only in objective language does the assertion of a predicate 'is red' and its denial 'is not red' constitute genuine
disagreement. For if one persons asserts 'X seems red' and another 'X does not seem red,' no disagreement exists at all. For
these two individuals are not talking about the same thing. Each is only reporting on her internal states and no contradiction
arises in embracing the truth of both subjective claims. If all language were subjective language, no contradictions would
ever arise. For in the subjective language of appearance, our statements about objects turn out to be reports of internal states.
Without external reference, we never confront the question of deciding between claims of different persons; the external
world evaporates; and so interestingly enough does the question of relativism. If all claims are subjective then relativism
never arises. For our statements are never incompatible because we never speak of the same thing. This is the selfdefeating nature of subjectivist relativism.
(^_^)(^_^)
39

Takumi Murayama
TurnMorality (1)
The alt annihilated morality, which requires logical consistency and objective
rationality. The alts framework is arbitrary and yields inconsistencies.
[Takumi Murayama]
Clearly, morality must mean something more than preference. Preference cannot ground moral claims, e.g., that "I like
artichokes" is not a moral claim. Surely if moral claims prescribe obligatory actions for other persons, then Jones'
declaration of dislike is not a moral claim. It prescribes nothing. Nor is it a reason to deny black human rights any more
than the fact that I like artichokes is a reason why everyone should be obliged to eat them. Or put otherwise, the claims 'I like
X' and 'everyone ought to recognize X is right' must rest upon different kinds of grounds. 'I like X' is not a reason anyone else
should accept 'X' and by definition, fails to justify, 'X is right'. Conversely, if morality provides reasons everyone should
accept, then it must rest upon universally acceptable grounds, namely grounds of logical consistency and objectivity.
Consequently, all the racist can be saying is that she does not wish blacks to be granted equal rights. Such a claim is admittedly
subjective and relative, and therefore not objective or universalizable. If so, no conflict or contradiction exists when I assert, 'I
prefer all persons, including blacks, be accorded equal rights.' Neither claim is moral, for morality without reason is
arbitrary and given diversity of preference, it inherently yields inconsistencies when generalized, and if it cannot be
generalized in what sense can it justify or assert what is right. Thus the racist fails or refuses to satisfy conditions of reason
and consistency may persist in wishing to deny rights to some human beings, but the racist must concede that the claim is
groundless and lacks rational justification.
(^_^)(^_^)
40

Takumi Murayama
TurnMorality (2)
The alts sense of morality makes it justifiable by any relativistic wish or will,
justifying racism.
[Takumi Murayama]
Of course, affectively the racist will not concede to the conclusion, and while that is an important matter for practical purposes,
it is irrelevant for epistemic purposes. The racist internal states are not what make his or her beliefs justified or right. The
problem is not different than the one Wittgenstein raises when we asks us to consider what is involved in trying to mean 'hot'
when we say 'cold.' The racist, clenching her teeth and willing with all her might cannot will that 'racism is justified' nor can
'feeling an intense preference and strong disposition in favor of X' entail that 'X is right.' But neither does the relativist make
egalitarianism right by clenching her teeth and willing it. To the extent that justice requires equality, it does so on grounds
much stronger than wish and will. Thus the issue here is not simply that racism is wrong, but that grounded on internalism
and relativism it becomes incoherent if it seeks justification. The sad and ironic fact is that the post-modern thinks her
argument from relativism refutes racism, when in fact the racist and the relativist occupy the same epistemic niche.
Now I am not suggesting that relativists are racists. On the contrary, the relativists of whom I speak are as committed to the
proposition that racism is bad and equality is good as are those who embrace more objective epistemologies. In fact, let us
assume the relativist and the objectivist advocate the same egalitarian principles. Let us even assume both agree that ordinary
people would more surely become egalitarians if we seduced them with clever manipulation, rather than reason. That is not the
question. The question is whether the relativist can give a 'reason' why manipulation of public opinion for egalitarian ends is
superior to the manipulation of public opinion for personal, self-interested or racist ends? The relativist response that no theory
is superior to any other and therefore equal respect should reign is a response that invites scorn. For given the premise,
relativism cannot offer compelling reasons for its conclusion. The racist stands on good grounds if she claims to be
unconvinced.
Relativism offers no bar to the prescriptions of Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Nietzsche, for each offers a framework. If
frameworks by their nature make no universal claims, then a framework of justice or compassion creates no obligation
for those who do not subscribe to it. Machiavelli's, Hobbes', and Nietzsche's prescriptions carry as much legitimacy as any
other. Princes, leviathans, and supermen would have as much a claim to moral and political legitimacy as does democracy,
mutuality, or egalitarian justice. Most importantly the failing moral and political relativism derives directly from
relativism's epistemic failing, from relativism's failure to acknowledge what it cannot deny, namely that the standards of
logical consistency and objectivity are implicit in any framework and, as such, create groundings no one is free to deny.
These groundings are not volitionally chosen conventions, but meta-principles that apply to any framework.
(^_^)(^_^)
41

Takumi Murayama
TurnNuclear Annihilation
The alt permits nuclear omnicide by ignoring nuclear escalation, which
outweighs ontology. We must become co-nurturers of the planet and cleanse
the earth of nuclear weapons.
Ronald E. Santoni, Phil. Prof @ Denison, 1985, Nuclear War, ed. Fox and Groarke, p. 156-7
To be sure, Fox sees the need for our undergoing certain fundamental changes in our thinking, beliefs, attitudes, values and
Zimmerman calls for a paradigm shift in our thinking about ourselves, other, and the Earth. But it is not clear that
what either offers as suggestions for what we can, must, or should do in the face of a runaway arms race are sufficient to
wind down the arms race before it leads to omnicide. In spite of the importance of Foxs analysis and reminders it is not clear
that admitting our (nuclear) fear and anxiety to ourselves and identifying the mechanisms that dull or mask our emotional
and other responses represent much more than examples of basic, often. stated principles of psychotherapy. Being aware of
the psychological maneuvers that keep us numb to nuclear reality may well be the road to transcending them but it must only
be a first step (as Fox acknowledges), during which we Simultaneously act to eliminate nuclear threats, break our complicity
with the ams race, get rid of arsenals of genocidal weaponry, and create conditions for international goodwill, mutual trust, and
creative interdependence. Similarly, in respect to Zimmerman: in spite of the challenging Heideggerian insights he brings out
regarding what motivates the arms race, many questions may be raised about his prescribed solutions. Given our need for
a paradigm shift in our (distorted) understanding of ourselves and the rest of being, are we merely left to prepare for a
possible shift in our self-understanding? (italics mine)? Is this all we can do? Is it necessarily the case that such a shift
cannot come as a result of our own will? and work but only from a destiny outside our control? Does this mean we
leave to God the matter of bringing about a paradigm shift? Granted our fears and the importance of not being controlled
by fears, as well as our anthropocentric leanings, should we be as cautious as Zimmerman suggests about out disposition to
want to do something or to act decisively in the face of the current threat? In spite of the importance of our taking on the
anxiety of our finitude and our present limitation, does it follow that we should be willing for the worst (i.e. an all-out
nuclear war) to occur? Zimmerman wrongly, I contend, equates resistance with denial when he says that as long as
we resist and deny the possibility of nuclear war, that possibility will persist and grow stronger. He also wrongly perceives
resistance as presupposing a clinging to the order of things that now prevails. Resistance connotes opposing, and
striving to defeat a prevailing state of affairs that would allow or encourage the worst to occur. I submit, against
Zimmerman, that we should not, in any sense, be willing for nuclear war or omnicide to occur. (This is not to suggest that
we should be numb to the possibility of its occurrence.) Despite Zimmermans elaborations and refinements his Heideggerian
notion of letting beings be continues to be too permissive in this regard. In my judgment, an individuals decision not to
act against and resist his or her governments preparations for nuclear holocaust is, as I have argued elsewhere, to be an
early accomplice to the most horrendous crime against life imaginable its annihilation. The Nuremburg tradition calls not
only for a new way of thinking, a new internationalism in which we all become co-nurturers of the whole planet, but for
resolute actions that will sever our complicity with nuclear criminality and the genocidal arms race, and work to
achieve a future which we can no longer assume. We must not only come face to face with the unthinkable in image and
thought (Fox) but must act now - with a new consciousness and conscience - to prevent the unthinkable, by cleansing the
earth of nuclear weaponry. Only when that is achieved will ultimate violence be removed as the final arbiter of our planets
fate.
(^_^)(^_^)
42

Takumi Murayama
TurnOntology First Bad

Prioritizing ontology prevents engagement with reality, trapping us in the
abstract world of false destiny.
Heidegger's inability to conceptualize the sociohistorical determinants and character of modern technology raises the oftdiscussed question of the "pseudo-concreteness of his philosophy"; that is, its apparent incapacity to fulfill its original
phenomenological promise as a philosophy of "existential concretion." The problem was already evident in the tension between
the ontological and ontic levels of analysis that dominated the existential analytic of Being and Time. For there the sphere of
ontic life seemed degraded a priori as a result of its monopolization by the "They" and its concomitant inauthentic
modalities. As a result, both the desirability and possibility of effecting the transition from the metalevel of ontology to
the "factical" realm of ontic concretion seemed problematical from the outset. Nowhere was this problem better
illustrated than in the case of the category of historicity. And thus despite Heidegger's real insight into limitations of
Dilthey's historicism, the inflexible elevation of ontology above the ontic plane virtually closes off the conceptual space
wherein real history might be thought. In truth, it can only appear as an afterthought: as the material demonstration of
conclusions already reached by the categories of existential ontology. Consequently, the "ontology of Being and Time is
still bound to the metaphysics that it rejects. The conventional tension between existentia and essentia stands behind the
difference between everyday (factical) and 'authentic historical existence.'
(^_^)(^_^)
43

Takumi Murayama
TurnPractical Reason
The plan allows for a reflection of ends to counter the hegemony of instrumental
reason, the cause of bad technological thought.
logic.
(^_^)(^_^)
44

Takumi Murayama
TurnPublic Ignorance
The alt only reinforces the ignorance of the public in environmental concerns
by rejecting state action, which is key to raise public awareness.
Alyson Flournoy, Professor, University of Florida, Levin College of Law. Fall 2003. Building
Environmental Ethics from the Ground Up.
Thus, it takes a concerted effort to identify what values we are pursuing under our laws. It requires that we wade through the
analysis required under the relevant statutes and regulations for a start. Then, we need to look at how the regulations are
applied and interpreted by agencies and courts, to determine whether some values are systematically favored, while others are
protected in name only. Lawyers and legal scholars already typically engage in this type of analysis, but only up to a point. We
study how the laws, regulations, and policies are interpreted and applied, and analyze whether agency and court decisions are
based on sound reasoning. What I am suggesting is that this analysis needs an ethical dimension -- a translation of what
happens under the law into the language of values. The challenge such a task presents is that it demands work across the
boundary that divides law and philosophy. Both philosophers willing to delve into environmental law and legal scholars
interested in environmental ethics will need to forge the path for this work. The missing analysis would seek to determine what
values and ethics are embedded in Section 404. I have suggested that we need a detailed and systematic analysis. n16 Some
may challenge the notion that detailed work is really necessary. For example, those familiar with Section 404 or with
environmental philosophy might be willing to forgo a close analysis and offer as adequate the following general
characterization: that Section 404 reflects predominantly a human-centered and utilitarian ethic -- that, in general, Section 404
employs a balancing designed to maximize human good. For purposes of considering whether detailed analysis is really
necessary, let us assume that this characterization is generally correct, in this sense: that the values Section 404 advances are
more consistent with a human-centered utilitarianism than with any [*61] other coherent ethic (environmental or not)
that we can identify. Even if this is an accurate generalization, there is a fundamental problem with relying on this general
characterization as a statement of the ethic of Section 404. By virtue of its effort to capture Section 404 in the abstract
vocabulary of pure philosophy, this characterization is misleading. If we look more closely at Section 404, it is quickly
apparent, that as applied, the section incorporates a very incomplete calculation of "the good." Rather than reflecting a pure
and perfect utilitarianism, it reflects what I call a bounded and imperfect utilitarianism. By these qualifiers, I mean that
the analysis is demonstrably inadequate on numerous scores. If one imagines a utilitarian calcPerulus that incorporates the
insights of ecology as perfectly as is humanly possible, that is not the utilitarian calculus we are currently performing. n17 Our
assessment of the benefits provided by wetlands is severely constrained by data gaps as well as by the limits of our
understanding of complex natural systems. This is no surprise to most who study environmental law. Critiques that highlight
the flaws of available analytic techniques are core contributions of legal scholarship. n18 But I submit that we lack and need
analysis that does more than identify the flaws in regulatory and judicial decisions. We need to refocus our attention away
from the consistency and completeness of regulatory and legal analysis, and onto the values advanced by the flawed
analytic techniques as they exist. We need a language to express this, to describe the mix of values that actually emerges from
the flawed utilitarian calculus that our laws so often embrace. This demands a new vocabulary, one that belongs neither to
philosophy nor to law. n19 Philosophers can make a significant [*62] contribution by helping to develop this vocabulary, and
lawyers and legal scholars can contribute by using it. n20 The work to uncover and articulate the values embedded in our laws
represents a significant challenge that will require thinking that transcends disciplinary boundaries -- work and discussion
fostered by symposia like this one. C. What Can We Gain from Unearthing the Ethics in Environmental Law? Having
described the type of work I advocate, let me turn to the question of its worth. Why do we need a better understanding of the
values embedded in our laws? Why do we need to be able to accurately describe the mix of values that Section 404 tends to
protect? I contend that the public and decisionmakers need a better sense of our current bearings in order to validate or
invalidate popular assumptions. Consider the portrait of Section 404 offered above: let us assume for a moment that the most
accurate description of the ethic embedded in it is a bounded and imperfect human-centered utilitarianism -- in other words, a
utilitarianism that does not fully account even for the total value to humans of wetlands. Contrast this with the public narrative
we tell about Section 404. Section 404 is widely viewed as one of the brightest stars of the environmental law constellation.
And rightly so. Wetlands have what we might call "most-favored-ecosystem" status under our legal regime, while many
uplands ecosystems are left relatively unprotected. But the fact that Section 404 is one of our stronger environmental laws does
not mean that it reflects any uniquely environmental values or a unique way of valuing the environment. Yet, the public
narrative may reinforce the assumption that environmental law is a pure reflection of some indistinct but noble set of
environmental values. This may contrast with the reality that our laws, like Section 404, [*63] often protect a wide
array of very traditional human values, and uniquely environmental values or ethics are at best only partially
reflected. What if this is true broadly? What if the values protected by our environmental laws are human values that differ
(^_^)(^_^)
45

Takumi Murayama
only slightly from the values protected by the common law of nuisance, cloaked in the appealing veil of environmentalism? It
is possible that instead of an identity between the values in our laws and those held by the public, there is a significant
disjuncture. n21 At present, I contend that it is difficult for an expert, let alone a lay person, to know if this is the case. Such
ignorance can interfere with democratic participation. The easy equation of environmental laws and environmentalism,
which is reinforced by our inability to describe accurately the values of our laws, discourages serious public discourse about
why we care about the environment. If we do not ever consider or discuss as a society what we value and why, we are like
the rowers I described at the start: backs into the wind, rowing in unison with no idea where we are headed, but convinced it is
where we all mean to go. A clearer picture of the embedded values can correct any erroneous assumptions and validate accurate
ones. Moreover, the discourse involved in providing a more accurate account of the values protected by our laws may promote
wider attention to the ethical questions, challenging people to consider why they support environmental protection. Thus, I
propose that legal scholars and philosophers work to enhance public understanding of the values embedded in our laws. When
members of the public are confronted with a clearer picture of what values are advanced by our current laws and policies,
they can determine whether or not these laws comport with their ethical intuitions. If they find that the laws are consistent
with their ethical intuitions, we will have a stronger public commitment to support existing laws. If not, the public can support
efforts to reform the law in any direction -- to enhance protection of non-environmental human values like autonomy or to
enhance protection of the social or intrinsic [*64] value of the environment, as they see fit. Beyond the democratic benefits of
better public understanding of the values advanced under our laws, this work is important to the long-term efficacy of
environmental law and policy. Engagement with environmental issues by the public and changes in individual and civic
behavior will only result if we care about something at stake. If, as I suggest, the American public lacks clarity about what it
values about the environment, then the public is less likely to be engaged and responsive on issues of environmental policy. As
philosopher James Rachels explains, in describing where ethical argument leads us: As Hume observed, when we come to the
last reason, we mention something we care about. Nothing can count as an ultimate reason for or against a course of conduct
unless we care about that thing in some way. In the absence of any emotional involvement, there are no reasons for action. The
fact that the building is on fire is a reason for me to leave only if I care about not being burned; the fact that children are
starving is a reason for me to do something only if I care about their plight. n22 In short, unless we have a sufficient grasp both
of our own values and of how a law or decision or action affects something we care about, we will not respond. The
process of gaining clarity, of discussing the values at stake, may itself promote more reasoned thinking. n23 Deliberation may
promote ethical development. n24 One does not need to know how [*65] deliberation might affect Americans' views on
environmental values, to believe that greater thought and attention to these issues is a desirable end in itself. Because there is
ultimately no reason for any action, nor for law that regulates action, unless we care, environmental philosophy matters for
environmental law. The steady support for increased regulation to limit our impact on the environment over the past thirty
years suggests that American society does care about some values associated with the environment. If we are to change our
current pattern of conduct with regard to the environment -- including our action through government -- we need both
information and motivation to deliberate. Several characteristics of environmental problems -- their technical complexity,
the scientific uncertainty and extremely long time horizons attending them, and the wide array of values they engage -discourage clear thinking about the relevant values. The possibility that a majority may wish to change our current patterns
makes the effort to clarify our thinking about why we care worthwhile.
(^_^)(^_^)
46

Takumi Murayama
TurnPurity
Trivializing history into a quest for technological purity only increases the hegemony on
being.
p. 65-67.
[Takumi Murayama]
(^_^)(^_^)
47

Takumi Murayama
TurnValue to Life (1)

Heideggers characterization of everydayness devalues life through
disconnection with the real world, turning their alt.
Heidegger's characterization of everydayness is so disproportionately negative that we are seemingly left with no
immanent prospects for realizing our authentic natures in the domain of ontic life as such. For on the basis of his
phenomenological descriptions, it would seem that the ontic sphere in general- "worldliness" in its entirety-has been
"colonized" by the They. Here, we see that Heidegger's pessimistic philosophical anthropology and his "joyless" social
ontology ultimately join forces. The result is a radical devaluation of the life-world, that delicate substratum of
everyday human sociation which existential phenomenology claims to redeem. At this point, one might raise against
Heidegger's social ontology the same charge he levels against Husserl's theory of the pure, transcendental ego: it suffers from
an impoverishment of world-relations-a fact clearly evinced in Heidegger's self-defeating celebration of the "nonrelational" character of authentic Dasein cited above. For how can the authenticity of a Dasein that is essentially "non
-relational" ever attain realization in the sphere of ontic life?
(^_^)(^_^)
48

Takumi Murayama

Lack of calculative reason destroys meaning to life, since we cannot
comprehend feeling.
[Takumi Murayama]
Second, 'X is red' means something different than 'X seems red' because each statement has a different referent and different
truth conditions. Subjectivism cannot adequately explain how it is possible to refer to something other than personal
experience. But without reference to a mind-independent world, we could never develop language, nor communicate with
each other, nor know to what others refer when they refer. We could not even refer to our own experiences in a selfintelligible way. Why? Because objective reference is a precondition for subjective reference! Without the ability to
objectify even feelings cannot be meaningful for the organism that experiences them, because meaning arises only for being
capable of language and reference. Experiencing pain or joy and understanding what it means to be in pain or to feel joy
are to entirely different things. As is the case for most animals, one can have experience without it being meaningful.
Meaning requires self-consciousness and therefore the ability to objectify. This point will be more fully elaborated later. For
the moment it is sufficient to realize that there could be no subjective language without objective language. Subjectivism fails
because it depends upon subjective language and meaning being primary. But subjective language and meaning cannot arise
without objective language and objective meaning and subjectivism cannot account for this. By reducing one to the other
subjectivism suffers from the confusion of subject and object.
(^_^)(^_^)
49

Takumi Murayama

The alt undermines value to life by denying private meaning.
[Takumi Murayama]
Plausible as it may at first seem, a subjectivist theory of meaning is untenable. Its refutation does not derive from the
theory's failure to explain how communication about personal experiences, such as 'blue,' 'pain,' 'happiness,' 'sadness,' 'sweet,'
etc., is possible. For a subjectivist might deny any explanatory defect by insisting that communication is an illusion and
subject to to causal explanation, at least not all the way down. Rather its failure derives from the fact that subjectivism makes
even private language and private meanings impossible. We only begin to appreciate that communication depends upon
observable public (not) private reference, when we recognize that if there were observable referents (i.e., if the meaning of
terms such as 'pain' and 'happiness' were wholly dependent upon uniquely internal events), no one could know what another
means when she proclaims, 'I am in pain' or 'I see a bird.' This recognition is important, but the more radical thesis is that
without objective reference, our own internal states would be unidentifiable even to ourselves. This argument against
subjectivism is know as Wittgenstein's private language argument.
Wittgenstein's argument asserts that communication would be impossible if the meaning of our words relied upon private
aspects of sensation. To many it may seem as if Wittgenstein's argument is simply a tautology asserting that if language must
be used to communicate and if private language is by definition not-communicated, then private language, by definition, cannot
be a language. But Wittgenstein's argument is much more interesting. His claim is that if meanings are grounded on private
sensations, speakers would not be capable of consistently identifying their own experiences to themselves. In other
words the private language argument not only denies the possibility of communication, but rules out the private
meanings as well.
(^_^)(^_^)
50

Takumi Murayama

The alt necessitates meaning derived from private sensations, destroying
communication about feelings with others, and even ourselves, destroying any
value to life.
[Takumi Murayama]
What is true of blue, cars, dogs, chairs and other objects of outer senses is also true for experiences of inner sense, e.g.,
pain, happiness, depression, frustration. Each of these experiences acquires meaning in precisely the same way. For
instance, we are as successful in teaching children the words for internal sensations as we are for words that name objects in
the world. We identify grimaces, cries, smiles, and other observable behavior relative to contexts, then infer appropriate
descriptions of internal states. Thus talk of 'pain' is meaningful and we can successfully communicate about pain
(including qualitatively different kinds of pain) even though your internal experience and mine cannot be directly compared.
Imagine, for instance, trying to explain to another what it means to be in pain if you could only point to your internal
experience, if there were no behavioral, contextual, empirical features that another could use to know you were in pain, if
>pain= were only the internal experience. Now imagine that the meaning of words like >cars,= >dogs,= etc. depended upon
the internal experience one has when one sees a car or a dog. After all, experience of physical objects like cars and dogs is,
from the point of view of perception, as internal as our experience of pain. Thus if one thinks meaning is connected to
unique features of private sensations, then communication between persons would be impossible.
It becomes increasingly plausible that none of our words point to unique, private experiences in order to get their meaning.
Rather word meaning depends upon the public, generalizable features of experience. Indeed if meaning and
communication depended on internally pointing to private experience, we could not possibly succeed in communicating
with others or even with ourselves. If you doubt this, try describing happiness to someone who says she doesn't know what it
is and is not sure if she has ever experienced it. What do you come up with? If you are like others, you describe the behavioral
displays of happy people and the circumstances in which they generally feel happy. Happy people like to jump for joy, laugh,
giggle, embrace others. People often experience happiness when when they satisfy significant desires, achieve hard-won goals
or fortuitously get what they have wanted. This kind of connection to objective conditions allows us to teach and correct a
child who misidentifies her internal states. It also permits us to help her make fine distinctions, e.g., between boredom and
disappointment, regret and remorse. As with color words, we have no knowledge of others' internal experiences, and need not
have any.
Yet it might be objected that the experience of pain or blue is certainly indispensable to the meaning and the use of terms like
'pain' and 'blue.' Therefore, isn't the centrality of private sensations vindicated? To see how the objection misses the mark
consider the fact that animals experience pain and perceive the world even if they do not have language. Certainly language
and the capacity to form meaning is not a necessary condition of sensation. But it is the necessary condition for
'knowing' we are having a sensation or a perception. As Kant puts it (1965, A51/B75), "Without sensibility no object would
be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought."
(^_^)(^_^)
51

Takumi Murayama

The alt is nihilistic and causes the very impacts they try to solve, carving out a
world utterly devoid of value.
Lindsay Meisel, major in rhetoric and the green movement. 07/23/08. Buddhism, Nihilism, and Deep
Ecology, Breakthrough Institute. http://thebreakthrough.org/blog//2008/07/the_nihilism_of_deep_ecologyprint.html [Takumi Murayama]
For all the environmental movement's talk about the need for societal change, many environmentalists are deeply
conservative in their attachment to a certain idea of what nature is and should be. But as any good Buddhist or mildly
observant person can attest to, we live lives of constant change. Just as surely as the Mesozoic gave way to the Cenozoic, our
country's agrarian past is giving way to a information-based future. Attachment to a single idea of nature is nihilism; it
denies whole worlds of future possibilities, and carves out a world utterly devoid of value.
Nietzsche argued that emulating nature means living a life of indifference:
"According to nature" you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like
nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and
justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain all at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power--how could you live
according to this indifference? Living--is not that precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living -estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative "live
according to nature" meant at bottom as much as "live according to life"--how can you not do that? Why make a principle out
of what you yourselves are and must be?
Since nature isn't rational, it's absurd to try and model our lives after it.
(^_^)(^_^)
52

Takumi Murayama
Alt Cant SolveNatural Disasters

The alt ignores the issues created by nature, blaming everything on new
technologies.
Proponents of biomimicry assume that nature will always act favorably toward humans, when just as often, nature dishes out
problems and we must use our uniquely human ingenuity to solve them. No one today is criticizing nature for smiting us
with floods, fires, and diseases, but plenty of people take issue with new technologies. The Buddhist philosopher John
McClellan finds much of this criticism arbitrary:
Deep ecologists seem to have the same fear and loathing toward today's out of control technology as humans have had until
just recently toward Uncontrolled Nature, with her savage, untamed wastelands. They call technology inhuman, cruel, and
heartless, using the same words we once used to describe cruel wilderness - and like humans of the 19th century waging
war on wild nature, environmentalists today long only to conquer technology, to subdue and control it, as we have nature
herself.
Nature is no wiser than technology, and claiming adherence to nature's laws is an attempt to bypass the messy business
of ethics and values. When environmentalists urge us to follow nature's way, they are referring to a mythical nature that
never changes, that is necessarily always in balance; that is the root of all things good. But this conception of nature is
nostalgia masquerading as values. This nature has no place in politics; it belongs in a museum. And of course, a true museum
of the planet's history would contain a catalog of horrors: long stretches without oxygen or anything green; obliteration after
obliteration; Edward Abbey's jagged desert monuments miles underwater. Nature, like technology, follows one prime rule:
change. As the natural and technological scenery changes, it transforms politics, economics, and society with it.
(^_^)(^_^)
53

Takumi Murayama
Alt Cant SolveNuke War/Environment/Totalitarianism

Modern technology is anthropogenic, and is the only way to stop nuclear war,
environmental catastrophe, or new forms of totalitarianism.
[Takumi Murayama]
Second, I examine what some regard as the political danger involved in Heidegger's determinism and in his deconstruction of
the foundations of Western metaphysics, including the foundations of the humanistic, emancipatory project of the
Enlightenment. A number of contemporary pragmatists argue that while Heidegger and his deconstructionist followers are
correct in criticizing the foundationalist pretensions at work in much of Western metaphysics and in pointing out the dark side
of the Enlightenment's push for technological power over nature, those deconstructionists critics are ahistorical and
politically naive in their failure to see that the Enlightenment promoted genuine political, economic, and civil liberties
which may be ignored and condemned only at great risk. Heidegger took such a risk by aligning his own critique of
Enlightenment metaphysics with the Nazi attack on the "alien" (French, British, American, and German!) Enlightenment
commitment to individual liberty, toleration, rationality, and universal human solidarity. Pragmatists argue that the critique of
foundationalism does not go hand in hand with a reactionary determinism which effaces human freedom. From this
perspective, modern technology is not a destiny imposed upon humanity, but rather a manifestation of the effort by
humanity to gain a measure of control over the forces of nature. Even if humanity is in important respects capable of selfdetermination, the question remains open whether humanity can direct the developments of modern technology in a way
that avoids the nightmarish alternatives of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, or new forms of totalitarianism.
(^_^)(^_^)
54

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsAnarchy
The hands-off approach of the alt isnt enough to guarantee alt solvency.
(^_^)(^_^)
55

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsDomination
Relativism alone cannot liberate or emancipate one from domination. It is selfdefeating and prevents acceptance of objectivism that is essential to defeat
power.
[Takumi Murayama]
Of course, deciding whether the Locoians are wrong is distinguished from deciding whether one should respect Locoian beliefs
and customs, and whether one should tell them they are wrong. Relativism goes awry because of its tendency to confuse
distinct categories and issues. In this case it confuses an epistemic issue with a normative one. Normatively, post-positivist
relativism tells us that the universalism and objectivity of science and ethics seem insensitive to non-Western cultures or
even subordinate subcultures, groups, and classes within Western societies. It reminds us that 'knowledge is power,' and
that power is frightful. It commends relativism to those excluded groups and recommends that each group recapture
the 'fleeting images' and 'subjective memories' that constitute its group meanings and form the basis for social and
political solidarity. Each community is encouraged to articulate values implicit in such archeology (Giroux 1991).
Perhaps these are commendable prescriptions, especially if we believe there is value in solidarity and in capturing meanings
that make life in a community worthwhile. But by themselves these are inadequate prescriptions for liberation or
emancipation from domination. If the subordinate groups have one set of values and the dominant groups have another; if
the subordinate groups have their fleeting images and the dominant groups have another; if the subordinate group has its
collective memories and the dominant group theirs, then the question of politics and morals is, which values and images should
rule? If subordinate groups find objectivity hostile, then they deny a common ground that is prior to or takes precedence
over the parochial differences in beliefs and values. If they can only appeal to that which is unique in their group, if they
can appeal to values that move only them, then they fail. They fail to appeal to the values of the dominant group; they
fail to make any claim upon the dominant group; and thereby concede to a struggle that is simply a matter of power.
Unfortunately, the dominant group, by definition has power. Thus the normative prescriptions of relativism are practically
as well as logically self-defeating.
(^_^)(^_^)
56

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsEndless Cycle

Heidegger concedes that the alternative is an endless cycle that never solves
and is meaningless.
Modernity, p. 256.
[Takumi Murayama]
Heidegger's relation to structuralist determinism was ambiguous. On the one hand, he conceded that human behavior in the
epochs of Western history has been shaped by the various stages of the metaphysics of presence, i.e., by the successive rise
of metaphysical foundations from Plato's forms to Nietzsche's Will to Power. On the other hand, Heidegger also argued that
the structuralist quest for a stable foundation, center, or cornerstone to explain the activity taking place within a given
system (whether it be the human psyche or the economic realm) was itself an expression of the totalizing impulse of
foundationalist-productionist metaphysics. In other words, Heidegger conceded that a Gestalt organizes behavior in each
historical epoch, but added that this Gestalt is itself ultimately groundless, foundationless, without purpose, an-archic,
despite all appearances to the contrary. For any given history-organizing Gestalt is but a crystallized version of the
originary and abysmal revelation, a revelation which has no "purpose," no "reason," no "goal," no transcendent
"meaning."
(^_^)(^_^)
57

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsIgnores Natural Disasters

The alt ignores the issues created by nature, blaming everything on new
technologies.
Proponents of biomimicry assume that nature will always act favorably toward humans, when just as often, nature dishes out
problems and we must use our uniquely human ingenuity to solve them. No one today is criticizing nature for smiting us
with floods, fires, and diseases, but plenty of people take issue with new technologies. The Buddhist philosopher John
McClellan finds much of this criticism arbitrary:
Deep ecologists seem to have the same fear and loathing toward today's out of control technology as humans have had until
just recently toward Uncontrolled Nature, with her savage, untamed wastelands. They call technology inhuman, cruel, and
heartless, using the same words we once used to describe cruel wilderness - and like humans of the 19th century waging
war on wild nature, environmentalists today long only to conquer technology, to subdue and control it, as we have nature
herself.
Nature is no wiser than technology, and claiming adherence to nature's laws is an attempt to bypass the messy business
of ethics and values. When environmentalists urge us to follow nature's way, they are referring to a mythical nature that
never changes, that is necessarily always in balance; that is the root of all things good. But this conception of nature is
nostalgia masquerading as values. This nature has no place in politics; it belongs in a museum. And of course, a true museum
of the planet's history would contain a catalog of horrors: long stretches without oxygen or anything green; obliteration after
obliteration; Edward Abbey's jagged desert monuments miles underwater. Nature, like technology, follows one prime rule:
change. As the natural and technological scenery changes, it transforms politics, economics, and society with it.
(^_^)(^_^)
58

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsK of Science

Criticizing science undermines the alt and destroys the possibility of truth.
[Takumi Murayama]
Consider the case of Western science. If truth is only relative to standards and standards must be chosen to be binding,
then explaining scientific truth becomes problematic. How after all can the framework relativist account for the fact that the
principles of aerodynamics work in all cultures at all times? In this case the scientific beliefs of avionics engineers arguably
depend upon the truths of aerodynamic principles and not just the enculturation of engineers. How else can we account for the
fact that airplanes do not fall from the sky even if the engineer, the pilot and the passengers forget or become confused about
the principles of aerodynamics while the plane is in flight. The plane does not stay up because contemporary engineers believe
in the principles of aerodynamics and the canons of Western science. The plane stays up because some propositions are true
whether or not the principles of aerodynamics are believed, because there is an indubitable difference between the psychology
of belief and the epistemology of belief.
Relativist efforts to escape this dilemma fail. For example, since science is the bete noire of relativism, relativists typically
adopt a Kuhnian view of science arguing that scientists are conditioned to believe in certain principles. Scientific beliefs,
therefore, reflect personal and professional investments, so that on this account scientists do not believe in their theories
because the theories provide an 'objectively' better fit with world. The issue is not why the plane stays aloft, but whether the
account of why it stays aloft can be grounded on objective belief? Argued in a Kuhnian fashion the relativist reconstructs the
scientist's own discourse about objectivity and offers a meta-analysis, i.e., a reconstruction of what the scientists actually
mean. But here is the rub. Relativists cannot be consistent with their own principles and also offer a meta-analysis.
In two important ways any effort at meta-analysis is problematic for relativists. First, meta-analysis violates critical normative
principles that are central to relativism. Because meta-analysis implies that the scientists' misunderstand what they do
when they judge theories and beliefs true or false. By reinterpreting the scientists' claims, the relativist employs an
external standard to give new meanings to what the scientists say. These meanings are not the meanings given or
acknowledged by the scientists themselves. But relativists always object when this sort of reinterpretation is applied to other
cultures, e.g., the beliefs of the Azande or the Neuer. Thus meta-analysis violates the relativist's normative principle that
prescribes attunement.
Perhaps we can give the relativist an exemption on the normative issue in this case. Perhaps for the sake of argument we can
offer an exclusive exemption with respect to Western science only. We might do so on normative grounds for the purpose of
preserving the rule in all other cases and therefore remaining attuned to the indigenous meanings of other cultures. However,
this is not the only rule the relativist must violate. For in order pull off the reinterpretation, they must also violate their
epistemic standard. To show that scientists' understandings of themselves cannot be sustained at a deep level, the
relativist must apply a trans-systemic standard and assert what is the case. Now either the relativist is applying a
preferred framework to trump Western science or they claim a transcendental point of view, one that assures us that it
is true the Western science misrepresents itself on matters of objectivity and truth. This transcendental view is not
embedded in a particular culture or a particular history. Now if the relativist is applying only a preferred standard and
framework, then the relativist's analysis can be discharged as framework bound and the assertions of relativism are thereby
undercut; or the relativist makes a transcendental claim that is framework independent and the so the assertions of relativism
are undercut.
The result is a self-defeating paradox. If relativists judge science from a relativist framework, then their framework
leaves them unable to comprehend or criticize the objectivity and truth of Western science; but if they judge Western
science from a nonrelative framework, then they undermine relativism. Either way, relativism loses, for it must be the
case that the relativist either has a meta-case or the relativist does not. If the relativist has a meta-case, then the meta-case
demonstrates the falsity of relativism. If the relativist does not have a meta-case, then Western science demonstrates the falsity
of relativism. Either way, relativism is demonstrably false.
(^_^)(^_^)
59

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsLack of Action

The alt is not the superhuman event required to break the grip of technological
nihilism; lack of action only allows the status quo to persist.
[Takumi Murayama]
Heidegger never claimed that the deconstructed, post-Cartesian "self" would be "free" in any traditional sense; for him,
"freedom" meant submitting to the necessity of being. Apart from the meditative activity of deconstructing the history of
Western metaphysics, Heidegger concluded that there was nothing that could be "done" to move beyond totalitarianism
in an epoch stamped by the Gestalt of the worker. In One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse expanded on Heidegger's
suggestion that the technological system not only undermines all opposition but actually transforms critique into a source
of strength for that system.9 Just as Heidegger called for the "step back" from engagement within the technological system,
so Marcuse spoke of the importance of the "great refusal" in the face of the totalizing impulse of the system. Both thinkers
maintained some hope that great art might be able to disclose an alternative to technological nihilism, but they left us
with the question: What could possibly motivate the production of such liberating works of art? If humanity is so
dominated by Gestell, then it would appear that only a superhuman event could break its grip and initiate a new historical
possibility.
Heidegger attempted to deconstruct the totalizing, foundational impulse of Western metaphysics in order to struggle
against those totalitarian technological ideologiessuch as Bolshevism and Americanismwhich proclaimed themselves to
be progressive. We have followed both this struggle against technological totalitarianism and its paradoxical denouement in
Heidegger's support for one of the greatest totalitarian movements of this century. Given this outcome of Heidegger's political
decision, we may perhaps understand his increasingly despairing attitude regarding hopes of changing a system which can so
easily divert revolutionary critique into support for the system itself. Heidegger's political engagement in 1933-34 led him to
conclude that a merely human "revolutions" and "decisions" would simply reinforce the system already in play. The
question for us is: Is that conclusion tenable?
In his political decision of 1933, Heidegger acted on his belief that being free meant aligning himself with the new
historical destiny dawning at that time. His political decision was motivated in part by his deconstruction of the
metaphysical foundationalism which made possible the modern technology against which he fought. The political
consequences of Heidegger's deconstruction of metaphysics have been dismissed by some as irrelevant to the validity of that
deconstruction, but others have maintained there is an important connection between Heidegger's thought and his reactionary
politics.
Some of Heidegger's defenders, for example, maintain that deconstruction of foundationalist metaphysics is the best possible
defense against the totalitarianism which justifies itself on the basis of such metaphysics, while many of his critics assert that
his deconstruction of the foundations of Enlightenment humanism in fact allowed him to support a regime which also
rejected those foundations. To examine the political implications of Heidegger's deconstruction of Western metaphysics and
to evaluate his claims about human freedom, we cannot avoid a critical examination of that deconstruction itself.
(^_^)(^_^)
60

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsLocal Opposition

Shifting away from ecological modernization faces strong local opposition.
David Pepper, Professor of Geography at Oxford Brookes University. 12/1/99. Ecological modernisation
or the 'ideal model' of sustainable development? Questions prompted at Europe's periphery,
Environmental Politics, Vol.8, No.4, pp.1-34, pub. Frank Cass, London.
None of which is to suggest that adopting the model would be unproblematic. Kirby recalls how past struggles by
marginalised communities in Ireland have been piecemeal and fragmented. As Friedmann [1992: 158] notes, attempts at
endogenous development are likely to flounder without external stimulus and help, perhaps particularly from the state.
But the Irish state obstructed one of the most notable attempts to establish that economic autonomy which Fotopoulos rightly
identifies as crucial, when it opposed the communistic plans of the Glencolumbcille (Co. Donegal) Communal Farming
Cooperative in the 1960s to pool labour and rights to use local land [Tucker, undated]. Such opposition is indeed likely to be
triggered by attempts to practice IM, since the model is fundamentally incompatible with and often overtly antipathetic
to capitalist dynamics (whether there are roles within it for local markets and a decentralised state constitute open questions,
vigorously debated amongst IM's proponents). It is this, rather than antimodernist sentiments, which mainly distinguishes IM
from Barry's 'collective ecological management', Lang and Hines' 'new protectionism', Christoff's 'strong EM', or Friedmann's
[1992] 'alternative development'. These could all be described as situated around the junction between 'strong sustainability'
and the ideal model in Baker et a/.'s ladder, but distinguishable from IM because they appear to accept global marketisation 'as
a fact' [Friedmann, 1992], seeking to restrain it through intervention. It also follows from most of the analyses reviewed here
that the ideal model is not likely to be sustainable on its own: it cannot be applied to 'peripheries' unless it also applies to 'cores'
since one of its major functions is to eliminate cores and peripheries. Correspondingly, current attempts within ecological
modernisation to encourage community-led SD in EU peripheries via bottom-up 'democratic' rural initiatives are arguably
futile. For they take as read the wider context of the Single Market set within a global market, with their irresistible forces for
concentrating economic power. Expecting the ideal model to develop by 'stealth' in this context could itself be Utopian.
(^_^)(^_^)
61

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsNo Truth

The alt undermines itself by denying the ability to advance truth or meaning.
Relativism is necessarily false.
[Takumi Murayama]
Third, an implicit or inherent truth condition is essential even for meaning even for subjectivists. But simple relativism
renders 'truth' equivalent to 'true for me.' This leads to self-contradiction, for as Socrates argues in Theaetetus 'true for me'
destroys the very meaning of 'true.' After all, the point of asserting 'true' is to assert it in objective language, for it is intended
as a claim that is binding upon everyone. But if 'true' only means 'seems so to me,' then no one is bound by the assertion except
the speaker. And if the assertion, 'relativism is true' is only meant to be binding on the speaker, then the very point of the
assertion is lost. This sort of relativism undermines itself by denying its ability to advance any claim (including the claims
of relativism) as true, right, or meaningful. This is the fallacy of incoherence.
Fourth, subjectivism has no way of escaping the classical dilemma that relativism asserts a nonrelative claim. As a
philosophical claim, relativism never applies to the relativists most fundamental beliefs. The paradigm case arises when, on
grounds of relativism, one asserts as true the claim that 'no assertion is true.' It follows that either 1) 'all claims are relativistic,'
or 2) 'not all claims are relativistic.' But if 1) is true then 2) is necessarily false and if 2) is true then 1) is necessarily false.
Either 1) or 2) proves relativism is necessarily false. Thus any assertion of relativism on simply subjectivist grounds is
self-refuting. This is the fallacy of self-refutation.
Yet despite these refutations, relativism always springs anew. Perhaps no claim more clearly captures the fundamental appeal
of relativism than the belief that subjective knowledge is prior to and determinative of objective knowledge. Indeed the
primacy of experience is implicit in assertions of cultural relativism. Surely this is the appeal when one claims that persons in
nonliterate, non-Western cultures experience and understand the world in ways different from persons in advanced industrial
societies. Since no two cultures experience the world in the same way, no culture can be in the position of telling another that
its 'truths' are wrong or false. Yet the claims of cultural relativism seem gratuitous and unnecessary if we accept that even
persons in the same culture experience the world differently. After all, pain for me is necessarily different than pain for
you.
(^_^)(^_^)
62

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsOntology Error

Searching for a political system that comes closest to ontological truth inevitably
perpetuates atrocities, making rationality a necessary step to stop them.
Subject, p. 13-15.
(^_^)(^_^)
63

Takumi Murayama
(^_^)(^_^)
64

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsOntology Fails

Failure to engage in empirical studies of science makes you lose traces of
Being.
p. 65-67.
[Takumi Murayama]
(^_^)(^_^)
65

Takumi Murayama
Alt FailsPublic Mindset

Citizens cant change their mindset radically from their traditional
Utilitarianism to the alts radical environmentalism.
Initially, the term environmentalism may have served as an adequate focus for our discourse. It captured and expressed the
public desire to embrace a new ethic, new values, and prompted deep thought about our relationship with the environment. But
the meaning of the term has been so diluted over time that commentators have noted that it is now on a par with apple pie and
motherhood, n36 something most people embrace and only a few view unsympathetically. n37 Today, environmentalism seems
to suggest a posture supportive of environmental laws as they exist or with moderate reforms. It may be that
environmentalism today [*69] lacks a core meaning distinct from the dominant human-centered utilitarian ethic. n38 Use
of the word "environmentalism" does not lead to thoughtful engagement with the ethical and practical problems that arise
under the current dominant ethic. It is a question mark too often used as a period. One might argue that to cure this void,
coherent alternative theories are needed and that the theory-building work being done by philosophers is the most urgent need.
However, it seems possible that the leap required of people if they are to understand and embrace a coherent
environmental ethic is too difficult for most, given current attitudes and the limited public discourse about underlying
values. Coherent environmental ethics are compartmentalized as "radical" and rejected, leaving a vast undefined realm of
"mainstream" environmentalism. Most people believe themselves concerned about the environment, even though that
commitment may be one without well-defined content. To challenge the public's comfortable self image as "environmentally
friendly," we may need concepts that are not so radically removed from utilitarianism but which frame the ethical and
practical shortcomings of our current ethics as applied to environmental problems. n39 In other words, concepts that show
the possibility and value [*70] of more ecologically enlightened ethics, but which do not require wholesale acceptance of a
radically altered worldview, may have value. n40 A. Towards a New Ethical Discourse: Stepping Stones This paper emphasizes
the value of an environmental ethics discourse that can reach a wide segment of the public. Concepts that can frame the ethical
issues in a more accessible form may help those who are not completely satisfied with the dominant bounded and imperfect,
anthropocentric utilitarian ethics embedded in our policies and laws. Therefore, I advocate developing concepts that can serve
as points of departure from where the majority is today -- concepts that frame the ethical issues in an accessible form and offer
a new direction for those whose ethical impulses diverge from current dominant norms. n41 Such concepts may fill a gap that
exists between legal scholars' work that is directed at improving decisionmakers' analytic techniques and philosophers' work to
develop coherent ethical theories. Concepts and vocabulary that draw on both philosophy and law may be useful tools that
will help members of the public to understand the full implications of current laws in ethical terms, and to identify or envision
practices and policies consistent with their evolving individual ethical intuitions. Developing these concepts will require that
we broaden the definition of appropriate work for lawyers and philosophers. Philosophers' contribution cannot be limited to
developing and justifying a coherent alternative completely apart from human-centered utilitarianism. And lawyers'
contribution cannot be limited to critiquing current legal standards or decisionmaking techniques. Philosophers must help us to
create a discourse that describes ways of valuing the environment that builds on people's current values, and lawyers must
analyze the extent to which existing and proposed laws are compatible with these values. Ultimately, such concepts may prove
more radical in practice than ecocentric ethical theories, in that they may enable ethical transformation that would otherwise
not occur. Metaphorically, we can think of such concepts as stepping stones -- ideas that help people to find their way past
some of the constraints of [*71] traditional ethics. Such concepts should focus public attention on the constraints imposed by
traditional utilitarian ethics and bring into view the possibility of an ethic that addresses these constraints. These constraints
include inadequate capacity to deal with long time horizons, uncertainty, integrated decisionmaking, social equity, and values
that are not easily monetized. Stepping stones, unlike a true environmental ethic, may not provide coherent and complete
responses to these constraints, but by making the issues salient for the public, they may represent a necessary step in any
widespread ethical evolution. Where an environmental ethic might be described as requiring a leap from current dominant
ethics, stepping stones require only a small step. They invite contemplation of change by highlighting the constraints of current
ethics, but they do not demand a complete ethical transformation. To be effective, a stepping stone must have broad resonance
with the public and provide a context for confronting some of the challenges that any environmental ethic will have to
overcome, including long time horizons, scientific uncertainty and the limitations of the dominant economic framework. n42
(^_^)(^_^)
66

Takumi Murayama
Perm SolvencyCalculation Ensures Survival

Engaging in the other is paradoxical because we must use calculation and technological
thought to ensure their survival.
David Campbell, professor of international politics, University of Newcastle. 1999. Moral Spaces: Rethinking
Ethics and World Politics, ed. Campbell and Shapiro, p. 56.
[Takumi Murayama]
104. Ibid., 76-79. Levinas has also argued for a politics that respects a double injunction. When asked "Is not ethical
obligation to the other a purely negative ideal, impossible to realize in our everyday being-in-the-world," which is governed by
"ontological drives and practices"; and "Is ethics practicable in human society as we know it? Or is it merely an invitation to
apolitical acquiescence?" Levinas's response was that "of course we inhabit an ontological world of technological mastery
and political self-preservation. Indeed, without these political and technological structures of organization we would not
be able to feed mankind. This is the greatest paradox of human existence: we must use the ontological for the sake of the
other, to ensure the survival of the other we must resort to the technico-political systems of means and ends." Kearney
and Levinas, "Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas," 28.
(^_^)(^_^)
67

Takumi Murayama
Perm SolvencyGood Eco-Management

The hands-off approach of the alt isnt enough to guarantee alt solvency.
(^_^)(^_^)
68

Takumi Murayama
Perm SolvencyLocal Opposition

Efforts to shif away from ecological modernization need external stimulus and
help, especially from the state.
David Pepper, Professor of Geography at Oxford Brookes University. 12/1/99. Ecological modernisation
or the 'ideal model' of sustainable development? Questions prompted at Europe's periphery,
Environmental Politics, Vol.8, No.4, pp.1-34, pub. Frank Cass, London.
None of which is to suggest that adopting the model would be unproblematic. Kirby recalls how past struggles by
marginalised communities in Ireland have been piecemeal and fragmented. As Friedmann [1992: 158] notes, attempts at
endogenous development are likely to flounder without external stimulus and help, perhaps particularly from the state.
But the Irish state obstructed one of the most notable attempts to establish that economic autonomy which Fotopoulos rightly
identifies as crucial, when it opposed the communistic plans of the Glencolumbcille (Co. Donegal) Communal Farming
Cooperative in the 1960s to pool labour and rights to use local land [Tucker, undated]. Such opposition is indeed likely to be
triggered by attempts to practice IM, since the model is fundamentally incompatible with and often overtly antipathetic
to capitalist dynamics (whether there are roles within it for local markets and a decentralised state constitute open questions,
vigorously debated amongst IM's proponents). It is this, rather than antimodernist sentiments, which mainly distinguishes IM
from Barry's 'collective ecological management', Lang and Hines' 'new protectionism', Christoff's 'strong EM', or Friedmann's
[1992] 'alternative development'. These could all be described as situated around the junction between 'strong sustainability'
and the ideal model in Baker et a/.'s ladder, but distinguishable from IM because they appear to accept global marketisation 'as
a fact' [Friedmann, 1992], seeking to restrain it through intervention. It also follows from most of the analyses reviewed here
that the ideal model is not likely to be sustainable on its own: it cannot be applied to 'peripheries' unless it also applies to 'cores'
since one of its major functions is to eliminate cores and peripheries. Correspondingly, current attempts within ecological
modernisation to encourage community-led SD in EU peripheries via bottom-up 'democratic' rural initiatives are arguably
futile. For they take as read the wider context of the Single Market set within a global market, with their irresistible forces for
concentrating economic power. Expecting the ideal model to develop by 'stealth' in this context could itself be Utopian.
(^_^)(^_^)
69

Takumi Murayama
Perm SolvencyOntological Blindness

The search for ontological truth fails because we allow atrocities to continue- we must
use rationality to improve the status quo but remain critical of our process.
Subject, p. 13-15.
(^_^)(^_^)
70

Takumi Murayama
(^_^)(^_^)
71

Takumi Murayama
Perm SolvencyPoliticization
Every advance in politicization obliges moral reconsideration and
reinterpretation of previously calculated law.
Jacques Derrida, French philosopher and founder of Deconstruction. 1992. Force of Law: The Mystical
Foundation of Authority. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel
Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, p. 28-9.
[Takumi Murayama]
That justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as
an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state or between institutions or states and
others. Left to itself, the incalculable and giving (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst
for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation. It's always possible. And so incalculable justice
requires us to calculate. And first, closest to what we associate with justice, namely, law, the juridical field that one cannot
isolate within sure frontiers, but also in all the fields from which we cannot separate it, which intervene in it and are no longer
simply fields: ethics, politics, economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, literature, etc. Not only must we calculate, negotiate
the relation between the calculable and the incalculable, and negotiate without the sort of rule that wouldn't have to be
reinvented there where we are cast, there where we find ourselves; but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the place
we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the distinction between
national and international, public and private, and so on. This requirement does not properly belong either to justice or law. It
only belongs to either of these two domains by exceeding each one in the direction of the other. Politicization, for example, is
interminable even if it cannot and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism or a triviality, we must
recognize in it the following consequence: each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret
the very foundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited. This was true for example in the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all the emancipatory battles that remain and will have to remain
in progress, everywhere in the world, for men and for women. Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical
emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without
treating it too lightly and forming the worst complicities. But beyond these identified territories of juridico-politicization on the
grand geopolitical scale, beyond all self-serving interpretations, beyond all determined and particular reappropriations of
international law, other areas must constantly open up that at first can seem like secondary or marginal areas. This marginality
also signifies that a violence, indeed a terrorism and other forms of hostage-taking are at work (the examples closest to us
would be found in the area of laws on the teaching and practice of languages, the legitimization of canons, the military use of
scientific research, abortion, euthanasia, problems of organ transplant, extra-uterine conception, bio-engineering, medical
experimentation, the social treatment of AIDS, the macro- or micro-politics of drugs, the homeless, and so on, without
forgetting, of course, the treatment of what we call animal life, animality. On this last problem, the Benjamin text that I'm
coming to now shows that its author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his propositions on this subject remain quite
obscure, if not quite traditional).
(^_^)(^_^)
72

Takumi Murayama
Perm SolvencyPublic Participation

We provide an external stimulus from the state to drive the alt, exposing the
issues of the status quo and raising public interest in environmental ethics.
Thus, it takes a concerted effort to identify what values we are pursuing under our laws. It requires that we wade through the
analysis required under the relevant statutes and regulations for a start. Then, we need to look at how the regulations are
applied and interpreted by agencies and courts, to determine whether some values are systematically favored, while others are
protected in name only. Lawyers and legal scholars already typically engage in this type of analysis, but only up to a point. We
study how the laws, regulations, and policies are interpreted and applied, and analyze whether agency and court decisions are
based on sound reasoning. What I am suggesting is that this analysis needs an ethical dimension -- a translation of what
happens under the law into the language of values. The challenge such a task presents is that it demands work across the
boundary that divides law and philosophy. Both philosophers willing to delve into environmental law and legal scholars
interested in environmental ethics will need to forge the path for this work. The missing analysis would seek to determine what
values and ethics are embedded in Section 404. I have suggested that we need a detailed and systematic analysis. n16 Some
may challenge the notion that detailed work is really necessary. For example, those familiar with Section 404 or with
environmental philosophy might be willing to forgo a close analysis and offer as adequate the following general
characterization: that Section 404 reflects predominantly a human-centered and utilitarian ethic -- that, in general, Section 404
employs a balancing designed to maximize human good. For purposes of considering whether detailed analysis is really
necessary, let us assume that this characterization is generally correct, in this sense: that the values Section 404 advances are
more consistent with a human-centered utilitarianism than with any [*61] other coherent ethic (environmental or not)
that we can identify. Even if this is an accurate generalization, there is a fundamental problem with relying on this general
characterization as a statement of the ethic of Section 404. By virtue of its effort to capture Section 404 in the abstract
vocabulary of pure philosophy, this characterization is misleading. If we look more closely at Section 404, it is quickly
apparent, that as applied, the section incorporates a very incomplete calculation of "the good." Rather than reflecting a pure
and perfect utilitarianism, it reflects what I call a bounded and imperfect utilitarianism. By these qualifiers, I mean that
the analysis is demonstrably inadequate on numerous scores. If one imagines a utilitarian calcPerulus that incorporates the
insights of ecology as perfectly as is humanly possible, that is not the utilitarian calculus we are currently performing. n17 Our
assessment of the benefits provided by wetlands is severely constrained by data gaps as well as by the limits of our
understanding of complex natural systems. This is no surprise to most who study environmental law. Critiques that highlight
the flaws of available analytic techniques are core contributions of legal scholarship. n18 But I submit that we lack and need
analysis that does more than identify the flaws in regulatory and judicial decisions. We need to refocus our attention away
from the consistency and completeness of regulatory and legal analysis, and onto the values advanced by the flawed
analytic techniques as they exist. We need a language to express this, to describe the mix of values that actually emerges from
the flawed utilitarian calculus that our laws so often embrace. This demands a new vocabulary, one that belongs neither to
philosophy nor to law. n19 Philosophers can make a significant [*62] contribution by helping to develop this vocabulary, and
lawyers and legal scholars can contribute by using it. n20 The work to uncover and articulate the values embedded in our laws
represents a significant challenge that will require thinking that transcends disciplinary boundaries -- work and discussion
fostered by symposia like this one. C. What Can We Gain from Unearthing the Ethics in Environmental Law? Having
described the type of work I advocate, let me turn to the question of its worth. Why do we need a better understanding of the
values embedded in our laws? Why do we need to be able to accurately describe the mix of values that Section 404 tends to
protect? I contend that the public and decisionmakers need a better sense of our current bearings in order to validate or
invalidate popular assumptions. Consider the portrait of Section 404 offered above: let us assume for a moment that the most
accurate description of the ethic embedded in it is a bounded and imperfect human-centered utilitarianism -- in other words, a
utilitarianism that does not fully account even for the total value to humans of wetlands. Contrast this with the public narrative
we tell about Section 404. Section 404 is widely viewed as one of the brightest stars of the environmental law constellation.
And rightly so. Wetlands have what we might call "most-favored-ecosystem" status under our legal regime, while many
uplands ecosystems are left relatively unprotected. But the fact that Section 404 is one of our stronger environmental laws does
not mean that it reflects any uniquely environmental values or a unique way of valuing the environment. Yet, the public
narrative may reinforce the assumption that environmental law is a pure reflection of some indistinct but noble set of
environmental values. This may contrast with the reality that our laws, like Section 404, [*63] often protect a wide
array of very traditional human values, and uniquely environmental values or ethics are at best only partially
reflected. What if this is true broadly? What if the values protected by our environmental laws are human values that differ
(^_^)(^_^)
73

Takumi Murayama
only slightly from the values protected by the common law of nuisance, cloaked in the appealing veil of environmentalism? It
is possible that instead of an identity between the values in our laws and those held by the public, there is a significant
disjuncture. n21 At present, I contend that it is difficult for an expert, let alone a lay person, to know if this is the case. Such
ignorance can interfere with democratic participation. The easy equation of environmental laws and environmentalism,
which is reinforced by our inability to describe accurately the values of our laws, discourages serious public discourse about
why we care about the environment. If we do not ever consider or discuss as a society what we value and why, we are like
the rowers I described at the start: backs into the wind, rowing in unison with no idea where we are headed, but convinced it is
where we all mean to go. A clearer picture of the embedded values can correct any erroneous assumptions and validate accurate
ones. Moreover, the discourse involved in providing a more accurate account of the values protected by our laws may promote
wider attention to the ethical questions, challenging people to consider why they support environmental protection. Thus, I
propose that legal scholars and philosophers work to enhance public understanding of the values embedded in our laws. When
members of the public are confronted with a clearer picture of what values are advanced by our current laws and policies,
they can determine whether or not these laws comport with their ethical intuitions. If they find that the laws are consistent
with their ethical intuitions, we will have a stronger public commitment to support existing laws. If not, the public can support
efforts to reform the law in any direction -- to enhance protection of non-environmental human values like autonomy or to
enhance protection of the social or intrinsic [*64] value of the environment, as they see fit. Beyond the democratic benefits of
better public understanding of the values advanced under our laws, this work is important to the long-term efficacy of
environmental law and policy. Engagement with environmental issues by the public and changes in individual and civic
behavior will only result if we care about something at stake. If, as I suggest, the American public lacks clarity about what it
values about the environment, then the public is less likely to be engaged and responsive on issues of environmental policy. As
philosopher James Rachels explains, in describing where ethical argument leads us: As Hume observed, when we come to the
last reason, we mention something we care about. Nothing can count as an ultimate reason for or against a course of conduct
unless we care about that thing in some way. In the absence of any emotional involvement, there are no reasons for action. The
fact that the building is on fire is a reason for me to leave only if I care about not being burned; the fact that children are
starving is a reason for me to do something only if I care about their plight. n22 In short, unless we have a sufficient grasp both
of our own values and of how a law or decision or action affects something we care about, we will not respond. The
process of gaining clarity, of discussing the values at stake, may itself promote more reasoned thinking. n23 Deliberation may
promote ethical development. n24 One does not need to know how [*65] deliberation might affect Americans' views on
environmental values, to believe that greater thought and attention to these issues is a desirable end in itself. Because there is
ultimately no reason for any action, nor for law that regulates action, unless we care, environmental philosophy matters for
environmental law. The steady support for increased regulation to limit our impact on the environment over the past thirty
years suggests that American society does care about some values associated with the environment. If we are to change our
current pattern of conduct with regard to the environment -- including our action through government -- we need both
information and motivation to deliberate. Several characteristics of environmental problems -- their technical complexity,
the scientific uncertainty and extremely long time horizons attending them, and the wide array of values they engage -discourage clear thinking about the relevant values. The possibility that a majority may wish to change our current patterns
makes the effort to clarify our thinking about why we care worthwhile.
(^_^)(^_^)
74

Takumi Murayama
Perm SolvencyScience in Social Context

Combining scientific representations while acknowledging their social context
solves issues of expert knowledge and instrumentalism.
David Demeritt, Department of Geography Kings College London, 6/1/01. The Construction of Global
Warming and the Politics of Science, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91(2), p. 307
337, Blackwell Publishers, InformaWorld.
Unfortunately, public representations of science seldom acknowledge the irreducibly social dimension of scientific
knowledge and practice. As a result, disclosure of the social relations through which scientific knowledge is constructed and
conceived has become grounds for discrediting both that knowledge and any public policy decisions based upon it. This
political strategy of social construction as refutation has been pursued by the socalled climate skeptics and other opponents
of the Kyoto Protocol. It is premised upon an idealized vision of scientific truth as the Gods-eye view from nowhere.
Rather than accepting this premise and being forced to deny that scientific knowledge is socially situated and contingent,
the proper response to it is to develop a more reflexive understanding of science as a situated and ongoing social
practice, as the basis for a more balanced assessment of its knowledge. A richer appreciation for the social processes of
scientific knowledge construction is as important for scientists themselves as it is for wider public credibility of their
knowledge. In the particular case of climate change, heavy reliance upon diverse, highly specialized, and multidisciplinary
bodies of scientific knowledge highlights the problem of trust in knowledge and the expert systems that produce it. As
phenomena, the global climate and anthropogenic changes to it would be difficult even to conceive of without sophisticated
computer simulations of the global climate system. Although satellite monitoring systems as well as instrumental records and
paleoclimatic evidence have also been important, particularly in the identification of historic changes in the climate to date, it is
these powerful computer models that have been decisive in identifying the problem of future anthropogenic climate change and
making it real for policy makers and the public. 2 Ordinary senses struggle in the face of phenomena so extensive in space and
time and incalculable in their potential impacts. For the social theorist Ulrich Beck (1992), this dependence upon science to
make tangible otherwise invisible environmental risks is characteristic of what he calls the modern risk society.
(^_^)(^_^)
75

Takumi Murayama
Perm SolvencyStepping Stone

Citizens cant change their mindset radically. Our perm is the only way to
garner change in the public and therefore any solvency for the kritik.
Initially, the term environmentalism may have served as an adequate focus for our discourse. It captured and expressed the
public desire to embrace a new ethic, new values, and prompted deep thought about our relationship with the environment. But
the meaning of the term has been so diluted over time that commentators have noted that it is now on a par with apple pie and
motherhood, n36 something most people embrace and only a few view unsympathetically. n37 Today, environmentalism seems
to suggest a posture supportive of environmental laws as they exist or with moderate reforms. It may be that
environmentalism today [*69] lacks a core meaning distinct from the dominant human-centered utilitarian ethic. n38 Use
of the word "environmentalism" does not lead to thoughtful engagement with the ethical and practical problems that arise
under the current dominant ethic. It is a question mark too often used as a period. One might argue that to cure this void,
coherent alternative theories are needed and that the theory-building work being done by philosophers is the most urgent need.
However, it seems possible that the leap required of people if they are to understand and embrace a coherent
environmental ethic is too difficult for most, given current attitudes and the limited public discourse about underlying
values. Coherent environmental ethics are compartmentalized as "radical" and rejected, leaving a vast undefined realm of
"mainstream" environmentalism. Most people believe themselves concerned about the environment, even though that
commitment may be one without well-defined content. To challenge the public's comfortable self image as "environmentally
friendly," we may need concepts that are not so radically removed from utilitarianism but which frame the ethical and
practical shortcomings of our current ethics as applied to environmental problems. n39 In other words, concepts that show
the possibility and value [*70] of more ecologically enlightened ethics, but which do not require wholesale acceptance of a
radically altered worldview, may have value. n40 A. Towards a New Ethical Discourse: Stepping Stones This paper emphasizes
the value of an environmental ethics discourse that can reach a wide segment of the public. Concepts that can frame the ethical
issues in a more accessible form may help those who are not completely satisfied with the dominant bounded and imperfect,
anthropocentric utilitarian ethics embedded in our policies and laws. Therefore, I advocate developing concepts that can serve
as points of departure from where the majority is today -- concepts that frame the ethical issues in an accessible form and offer
a new direction for those whose ethical impulses diverge from current dominant norms. n41 Such concepts may fill a gap that
exists between legal scholars' work that is directed at improving decisionmakers' analytic techniques and philosophers' work to
develop coherent ethical theories. Concepts and vocabulary that draw on both philosophy and law may be useful tools that
will help members of the public to understand the full implications of current laws in ethical terms, and to identify or envision
practices and policies consistent with their evolving individual ethical intuitions. Developing these concepts will require that
we broaden the definition of appropriate work for lawyers and philosophers. Philosophers' contribution cannot be limited to
developing and justifying a coherent alternative completely apart from human-centered utilitarianism. And lawyers'
contribution cannot be limited to critiquing current legal standards or decisionmaking techniques. Philosophers must help us to
create a discourse that describes ways of valuing the environment that builds on people's current values, and lawyers must
analyze the extent to which existing and proposed laws are compatible with these values. Ultimately, such concepts may prove
more radical in practice than ecocentric ethical theories, in that they may enable ethical transformation that would otherwise
not occur. Metaphorically, we can think of such concepts as stepping stones -- ideas that help people to find their way past
some of the constraints of [*71] traditional ethics. Such concepts should focus public attention on the constraints imposed by
traditional utilitarian ethics and bring into view the possibility of an ethic that addresses these constraints. These constraints
include inadequate capacity to deal with long time horizons, uncertainty, integrated decisionmaking, social equity, and values
that are not easily monetized. Stepping stones, unlike a true environmental ethic, may not provide coherent and complete
responses to these constraints, but by making the issues salient for the public, they may represent a necessary step in any
widespread ethical evolution. Where an environmental ethic might be described as requiring a leap from current dominant
ethics, stepping stones require only a small step. They invite contemplation of change by highlighting the constraints of current
ethics, but they do not demand a complete ethical transformation. To be effective, a stepping stone must have broad resonance
with the public and provide a context for confronting some of the challenges that any environmental ethic will have to
overcome, including long time horizons, scientific uncertainty and the limitations of the dominant economic framework. n42
(^_^)(^_^)
76

Takumi Murayama
Perm SolvencySustainability
Embracing sustainability prevents reduction to pure cost-benefit analysis while
providing a way of engaging in successful politics and debate based on common
values.
A first question is how to define sustainability. The most widely accepted definition of sustainability is providing for the needs
of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. n46 Decisions or policies are deemed
sustainable only if they [*73] incorporate consideration of three co-equal factors: ecology, economics and social equity. n47
Because of the explicit focus on human needs, the concept is compatible with anthropocentrism. n48 On its face, sustainability
values the environment and economic activity, not intrinsically but for their utility to humans. The explicit valuing of
equity among humans in the allocation of environmental and economic benefits seems to introduce a complementary rightsbased approach. So what is potentially useful about this concept? First, let me be clear about what sustainability does not
accomplish. It does not address the problem that motivates so much of the work in environmental philosophy; that is, it does
not expand the community of morally valued entities beyond humans. n49 To that extent, it is consistent with a calculus of
utility like that employed under many laws today. It does not appeal to any inchoate non-anthropocentric intuitions that
members of the public may possess. However, sustainability has six attributes that endow it with the potential to expand
public discourse and to help us confront problems that must be addressed if any environmental philosophy is to take root. By
framing and focusing public debate on these important issues, sustainability may facilitate future ethical development. First, the
concept of sustainability provides an elegant way to address the critical problem of long time horizons. n50 Legal scholars
have done much that shows the failures of current cost-benefit methodology in dealing with long time horizons. Scholars have
revealed both the controversial value choices about time horizons made in current policies and the flawed technical analysis
sometimes performed under our [*74] current laws, which tends to undervalue future harms. n51 But much of the work is
necessarily very technical and abstract, removed from the concrete conflicts that shape public debate. It may be critically
important that the public be engaged directly with this central moral issue in environmental policy. Sustainability can provide
an anchor for debate about the appropriate time horizon to consider in law and policy. The challenge of extending our ethical
horizon to include a longer timeframe is an enormously important one for anyone who cares about the environment, under
almost any justification for caring. Sustainability is a concept that can perform this heavy lifting. Future generations of humans
are front and center and must be considered. The questions of how far into the future we want to consider and how we weigh
our interest in the future against current needs are not easy. But as Bryan Norton's work shows, sustainability frames the issue
and focuses attention on this key value choice that we must make. n52 Second, by virtue of its explicit focus on environmental
impacts over a long time horizon, sustainability demands that we employ the tools and knowledge of ecology to
understand these consequences. Of course, the same claim could be made of a utilitarian philosophy: accurately determining
the greatest good for the greatest number demands that we employ our best methodologies to determine the human
consequences of our actions. However, sustainability suggests the need for an antidote to current practices in two ways.
First, the emphasis on the environment as an equal factor of consideration alongside economics and equity elevates the
importance of ecological impacts and our analysis of them. Further, sustainability envisions integrated decisionmaking, a
key prerequisite to incorporating ecology effectively into decisions. n53 Again, this is not a panacea, but a spotlight that can
illuminate the issues, bringing them into the public's field of vision. Third, sustainability focuses attention on the role of
uncertainty and the ethical implications of our choices related to burdens of proof. Engaging people on the subject of
scientific uncertainty and burdens of proof is likely to induce glazed eyes; sustainability provides a concrete entry point for
initiating public debate on the relevant moral questions. Inadequate data and limited understanding about the consequences
of [*75] human activity on the environment have long been recognized by scholars as serious challenges to developing
effective environmental policy and law. No matter what our ethical stance, we must all confront the central question of how we
ought to deal with uncertainty. This is not purely a philosophical problem. But as a practical matter, if an approach to
uncertainty is not embedded in the ethical framework we apply, then questions about coping with uncertainty may be
wrongly relegated, as they often are today, to the realm of technical questions, removed from public debate and
concern. Sustainability has promise for bringing the question of uncertainty back into the public eye because it embodies the
premise that all decisions must preserve options for future generations. Sustainability reframes the debate, thus introducing the
possibility for a different approach to uncertainty than that embedded in current law, policy, and ethics. In place of legal
standards that demand proof of harm in the face of uncertainty, sustainability raises the possibility that we should assess human
decisions to see if they are sustainable. As such, the concept of sustainability can expose the significant issue of how to assess
technological optimism in light of what is unknown. n54 Because sustainability provides a positive standard against which to
(^_^)(^_^)
77

Takumi Murayama
measure human activity, it facilitates placing the burden of proof of sustainability on those whose actions deplete
resources rather than on those who advocate protective regulation. Asking whether a given activity is sustainable redirects
the focus from whether human activity causes harm. In the harm prevention context, the relative concreteness of the term
"harm" serves to focus our attention on the issue of harm as the operative inquiry. This focus on whether harm has occurred
gives force to the argument for placing the burden of proof (and thus of uncertainty) on those who would prove harm. Because
sustainability is a positive attribute of a decision, a focus on sustainability may lend at least rhetorical strength to the
argument for shifting the burden of coping with uncertainty to those who seek to justify their activities as sustainable.
n55
Further, the international discourse on sustainability, [*76] which has made the precautionary principle one of its
operational elements, also supports this shift. Of course, just as the argument is made under current law that it is unreasonable
to ask economic actors to prove a negative (that there will be no harm to health or the environment), there will undoubtedly
still be claims that it is unreasonable to ask economic actors to prove such a broad positive (that a decision is sustainable). In
other words, sustainability will not eliminate controversy over policies on the burden of proof and how to cope with
uncertainty. But broader adoption of the concept of sustainability would remind us that this is a value question and not a
technical issue. It may, therefore, renew public interest in, and attention to, the question of the burden of proof in light of
uncertainty. Fourth, sustainability embraces the reality that a broad array of human values must inevitably be weighed
along with values associated with the environment, whether in a traditional or a non-traditional ethical framework. Other
human values do not simply disappear when values related to interactions with the nonhuman environment appear. n56
Resolving conflicts that exist among values is perhaps the most important context in which environmental values are invoked.
n57
Advocates on all sides of environmental debates may not always want to highlight the fact that environmental protection
measures that make us feel virtuous often serve our self-interest as well. But the prevailing polarized discourse and false
dichotomies impede mature debate about environmental ethics and may undermine long-term support for environmental law.
Sustainability may provide an antidote for extreme polarization by recasting the debate to emphasize that decisions
affecting the environment inevitably affect other human values. Sustainability makes a virtue of this necessary tension by
acknowledging the need to consider other values. Recognizing that environmental statutes and an environmental
worldview already incorporate rather than exclude these other values is an important step. Incorporation of a broad array
of values, linked with a long time horizon, ecological principles, and social equity, may have tremendous power to enrich
public debate. There is an obvious risk that comes with the inclusion of non-environmental human values alongside
environmental values. The risk is that despite the nominal embracing of the environment, other more [*77] easily quantifiable
values will outweigh non-economic environmental values. Many commentators have pointed out this failing under current laws
that mandate cost-benefit analysis. If this critique of sustainability proves correct, sustainability will produce decisions no
different than those we have today or worse. For this reason, embracing the broad range of values associated with
sustainability may justifiably be rejected by many advocates in the polarized debate on environmental law and policy. But the
work of philosophers, scientists, and legal scholars can help us avoid this peril by giving the concept of sustainability
meaning and preventing its dilution. n58 The fifth promising aspect of sustainability is its inclusion of social equity as a
third factor to be considered along with the environment and economic s. By including social equity, sustainability
introduces a human value that, although not necessarily in tension with valuing of the environment, is often excluded from
consideration and ignored in environmental law and policy. The breadth and depth of the environmental justice movement has
demonstrated the importance of social equity in the allocation of environmental benefits and burdens. n59 Sustainability
incorporates concern about environmental justice rather than relegating it to a separate domain. Finally, there is one practical
advantage sustainability has: accessibility. Sustainability may be a particularly strong starting point from which to
reach people who are interested in the environment because it comports with people's current ethical intuitions. Results
of a recent survey showed that the top justification people gave for caring about environmental protection was the current
generation's responsibility to future generations. n60 The reason selected most [*78] frequently as being a "very important
reason" to protect biodiversity was biodiversity's value in providing natural services to humans. n61 Thus sustainability shows
promise as a stepping stone from current ethics and values held by the public. It builds both on the utilitarian justification
most people identify as foremost among their reasons for caring about the environment , and on their concern for future
generations. In addition, sustainability seems compatible with views that are grounded in a sense of religious duty. If the
public is broadly committed to protecting the environment for future generations and for spiritual reasons, as surveys suggest,
n62
the concept of sustainability will help citizens to evaluate whether certain policies and decisions are consistent or
inconsistent with widely shared values.
(^_^)(^_^)
78

Takumi Murayama
Alternate CausalityPatriarchy
Sexual difference and patriarchy drive the domineering character of modern
technology.
Modernity, p. 251.
[Takumi Murayama]
Heidegger's account of the development and character of modern technology has been widely influential, but is only one of
many such accounts. Marxists, Hegelians, liberals, theologians, anthropologists, and feminists (among others) offer competing
accounts. Heideggereans have accused such alternative accounts of being trapped within metaphysical discourse, but
such an argument presupposes the validity of Heidegger's own critique of the history of productionist-foundationalist
metaphysics. many of these alternative accounts question the validity of Heidegger's own "meta-narrative" of Western
history. Here, I shall address only one of the above-mentioned alternatives, namely, the feminist one. Many feminists agree
with Heidegger regarding the domineering character of modern technology, but they argue that this character stems from
blindness not to the ontological difference but rather to the sexual difference. The contemporary drive for total control,
then, may be regarded as a late stage in the patriarchal quest to exclude, repress, and deny all difference, all otherness
which threatens the security of the masculinist ego. By de-centering Heidegger's self-enclosed narrative, the feminist
narrative reveals that there may be a totalizing and thus a metaphysical impulse at work in the thinker most famous for his
critique of metaphysics.
(^_^)(^_^)
79

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodCommunication

Calculative thought is key for communication about feelings with others, and
even ourselves.
[Takumi Murayama]
What is true of blue, cars, dogs, chairs and other objects of outer senses is also true for experiences of inner sense, e.g.,
pain, happiness, depression, frustration. Each of these experiences acquires meaning in precisely the same way. For
instance, we are as successful in teaching children the words for internal sensations as we are for words that name objects in
the world. We identify grimaces, cries, smiles, and other observable behavior relative to contexts, then infer appropriate
descriptions of internal states. Thus talk of 'pain' is meaningful and we can successfully communicate about pain
(including qualitatively different kinds of pain) even though your internal experience and mine cannot be directly compared.
Imagine, for instance, trying to explain to another what it means to be in pain if you could only point to your internal
experience, if there were no behavioral, contextual, empirical features that another could use to know you were in pain, if
>pain= were only the internal experience. Now imagine that the meaning of words like >cars,= >dogs,= etc. depended upon
the internal experience one has when one sees a car or a dog. After all, experience of physical objects like cars and dogs is,
from the point of view of perception, as internal as our experience of pain. Thus if one thinks meaning is connected to
unique features of private sensations, then communication between persons would be impossible.
It becomes increasingly plausible that none of our words point to unique, private experiences in order to get their meaning.
Rather word meaning depends upon the public, generalizable features of experience. Indeed if meaning and
communication depended on internally pointing to private experience, we could not possibly succeed in communicating
with others or even with ourselves. If you doubt this, try describing happiness to someone who says she doesn't know what it
is and is not sure if she has ever experienced it. What do you come up with? If you are like others, you describe the behavioral
displays of happy people and the circumstances in which they generally feel happy. Happy people like to jump for joy, laugh,
giggle, embrace others. People often experience happiness when when they satisfy significant desires, achieve hard-won goals
or fortuitously get what they have wanted. This kind of connection to objective conditions allows us to teach and correct a
child who misidentifies her internal states. It also permits us to help her make fine distinctions, e.g., between boredom and
disappointment, regret and remorse. As with color words, we have no knowledge of others' internal experiences, and need not
have any.
Yet it might be objected that the experience of pain or blue is certainly indispensable to the meaning and the use of terms like
'pain' and 'blue.' Therefore, isn't the centrality of private sensations vindicated? To see how the objection misses the mark
consider the fact that animals experience pain and perceive the world even if they do not have language. Certainly language
and the capacity to form meaning is not a necessary condition of sensation. But it is the necessary condition for
'knowing' we are having a sensation or a perception. As Kant puts it (1965, A51/B75), "Without sensibility no object would
be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought."
(^_^)(^_^)
80

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodDebate

Objective reason is necessary for any refutation between people.
[Takumi Murayama]
First, only in objective language does the assertion of a predicate 'is red' and its denial 'is not red' constitute genuine
disagreement. For if one persons asserts 'X seems red' and another 'X does not seem red,' no disagreement exists at all. For
these two individuals are not talking about the same thing. Each is only reporting on her internal states and no contradiction
arises in embracing the truth of both subjective claims. If all language were subjective language, no contradictions would
ever arise. For in the subjective language of appearance, our statements about objects turn out to be reports of internal states.
Without external reference, we never confront the question of deciding between claims of different persons; the external
world evaporates; and so interestingly enough does the question of relativism. If all claims are subjective then relativism
never arises. For our statements are never incompatible because we never speak of the same thing. This is the selfdefeating nature of subjectivist relativism.
(^_^)(^_^)
81

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodEmancipation

Relativism alone cannot liberate or emancipate one from domination. It is selfdefeating and prevents acceptance of the objective reason that is essential to
defeat power.
[Takumi Murayama]
Of course, deciding whether the Locoians are wrong is distinguished from deciding whether one should respect Locoian beliefs
and customs, and whether one should tell them they are wrong. Relativism goes awry because of its tendency to confuse
distinct categories and issues. In this case it confuses an epistemic issue with a normative one. Normatively, post-positivist
relativism tells us that the universalism and objectivity of science and ethics seem insensitive to non-Western cultures or
even subordinate subcultures, groups, and classes within Western societies. It reminds us that 'knowledge is power,' and
that power is frightful. It commends relativism to those excluded groups and recommends that each group recapture
the 'fleeting images' and 'subjective memories' that constitute its group meanings and form the basis for social and
political solidarity. Each community is encouraged to articulate values implicit in such archeology (Giroux 1991).
Perhaps these are commendable prescriptions, especially if we believe there is value in solidarity and in capturing meanings
that make life in a community worthwhile. But by themselves these are inadequate prescriptions for liberation or
emancipation from domination. If the subordinate groups have one set of values and the dominant groups have another; if
the subordinate groups have their fleeting images and the dominant groups have another; if the subordinate group has its
collective memories and the dominant group theirs, then the question of politics and morals is, which values and images should
rule? If subordinate groups find objectivity hostile, then they deny a common ground that is prior to or takes precedence
over the parochial differences in beliefs and values. If they can only appeal to that which is unique in their group, if they
can appeal to values that move only them, then they fail. They fail to appeal to the values of the dominant group; they
fail to make any claim upon the dominant group; and thereby concede to a struggle that is simply a matter of power.
Unfortunately, the dominant group, by definition has power. Thus the normative prescriptions of relativism are practically
as well as logically self-defeating.
(^_^)(^_^)
82

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodEmotional Epistemology

A public, calculative framework is necessary for any successful epistemology.
Without it, we can never discuss emotions, feelings, or even everyday
experience.
[Takumi Murayama]
Once we appreciate that aconceptual knowledge is impossible, we find ourselves standing in the same relation to both
inner and outer experience. To know our own pain requires that we stand apart from it and in an act of intellection
conceptualize it. One fails to grasp this point if one thinks that the argument means we cannot experience pain without
conceptualizing it. Of course, we can and do, but we neither know we are experiencing nor know what our experience is an
experience of without the transcendent act of becoming an observer of our own pain. Knowing our inner experiences requires
objectifying them according to the logic required by concepts.
The process that moves human beings beyond mere sensation is the possibility of meaning through conceptualization. The
mistake of relativism is to think that our ability to conceptualize and give meaning to terms like "red" and "blue," "pain" and
"happiness" depends upon what is going on in our heads or our guts. This is surely wrong. It is wrong as an account of
linguistic meaning and ultimately bankrupt as a guide to epistemology. For the preceding argument demonstrates that
communication between individuals, translations between languages and shared transcultural meanings are contingent upon the
rule-like or logical features of semantics and on the objective and public nature of reference. In particular, the conditions of
objectivity make it possible to share meanings and acquire other languages precisely because no meaning in any language
could be a matter of private sensations.
Consequently, while we can never be in the position of experiencing a pain that is not our own, we can understand
another's pain precisely because we objectify our own pain in order to know it as pain. The meaning of pain for me as
for you rests upon our ability to connect different experiences of it and to connect those experiences to characteristic
behaviors. In this way, to share the pain of another is to resonate with a similar pain, but also to be aware of what one feels
and why. Making these cognitive connections is a logical affair and is something we must do if we are to understand (not just
experience) our own pain. In this sense our meaningful experiences are cognitive, not experiential matters and depends
upon concepts. This is what Kant (A69/B94) means when he argues, "thinking is knowledge by means of concepts."
Now one need only add that concepts are in principle public, not private. For the condition of a concept is that its use must
conform to the logic of a rule or standard. Therefore, whether we share standards with others or not, our concepts and our
meanings are necessarily public. They are in principle public, because logic and semantic consistency, the necessary
conditions for meaning, are not reducible to feelings, sensations or any other private matter. Put simply, meanings, concepts
and language necessarily cannot be private because logic and consistency are not a function of willing or intending. This is
what Putnam, ala Wittgenstein, means when he says, "meanings aren't in the head."
Finally, our most startling and counterintuitive conclusion is that our capacity to identify and express subjective states
derives from our capacity for objectivity, and in turn objectivity depends upon a capacity to form and observe rulegrounded distinctions. Given the arguments against private language, any effort to construct a more coherent version of
relativism must presuppose a public language and a capacity for objectivity. Indeed, if some form of relativism is to be
coherent, it must accord meaning to terms such as, 'true,' 'false,' 'objective,' and 'right.'
(^_^)(^_^)
83

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodMeaningful Discourse (1)

Reason and objectivity are necessary for any coherent epistemology, equality,
justice, and respect. Relativists concede that meaningful discourse requires
objective reason.
[Takumi Murayama]
(^_^)(^_^)
84

Takumi Murayama

Truth and meaning is only coherent through objective language.
[Takumi Murayama]
Perhaps the final recourse for the relativist is to challenge the distinction between subjective and objective by denying the
validity of the distinction between psychology and epistemology. At this point, we can again call upon the private language
argument.8 For it does not matter whether relativists want to grant the possibility of objective distinctions, so long as
competent language users make objective distinctions. For instance, the notion of an object is implicit in the simple capacity to
say 'the ball is round.' Without the ability to objectify impressions of balls and roundness, no language and no communication
would be possible. Therefore language presupposes objectivity and objectivity presupposes truth. But this is not truth
with a capital 'T.' That ideal is the strawman of relativism. The truth condition is a condition of meaningful language.
Truth in the sense used here is the analog of meaning. It is the condition which must necessarily be satisfied if claim like
'I am in pain' or 'grass is green' are to be understood as meaningful. For if there is no condition in which 'I am in pain'
can be said to be correctly used or incorrectly used, then the assertion cannot be meaningful? The ability to identify
correct and incorrect uses (even if gray areas persist) entails a primitive notion of truth as a condition of meaning. In
this sense, without truth we could not coherently speak. Indeed the capacity to challenge the truth of any claim
presupposes a capacity for truth and by implication objectivity. Therefore to challenge truth or objectivity is by its
nature self-refuting.9
(^_^)(^_^)
85

Takumi Murayama

Objective reason is what establishes standards, and implies a meta-standard of
universality. Key for any meaningful discourse.
[Takumi Murayama]
For example, consider how a concept or standard cannot create a truth or deny a truth. A Fahrenheit thermometer serves as a
standard for a meaningful notion of 'temperature.' Nothing deters us from creating hollow cylinders filled with equal amounts
of mercury and calibrated in equal interval segments. Yet if the use of the thermometer did not yield consistently comparable
results, then it would not be a standard and one could not speak of objective truths concerning temperature or thermodynamics.
Thus Toulmin (1958) tells us that if persons reading well-made thermometers measuring the boiling point of water failed to
report the same results, and if we cannot account for this difference by pointing to failings in an individual's use or reading of
the thermometer or in relevant differences in the conditions under which the water boiled or the thermometer is observed, then
thermometers would not serve as a standard for measuring temperature nor serve as a way of ascertaining thermodynamic
relationships. The chief failure of relativism seems to reside in its mistaken emphasis on the conventional (in effect non-a
priori) nature of norms and standards. Relativism needs to recognize that while standards are necessary for meaning
and truth, meaningful standards are not whatever we will them to be. Instead the possibility of a standard is dependent
upon objectivity, which in principle implies universality.
Relativism's mistake derives from a confusion concerning how objectivity relates to the use of standards and frameworks.
Public use of a rule or standard presumes that different people are capable of coordinating their behavior in otherwise
inexplicable ways to arrive at a common set of meanings and beliefs. Such behavior implies objectivity at least to the extent
that simple psychological agreement can explain logically consistent usage of language. Objectivity implies a meta-standard
and is presupposed in the capacity to identify subjective beliefs and statements. For example the ability to objectively
identify red (i.e., to objectify red) is presupposed in our ability to say 'X seems red.' Objectivity also makes rational
justification possible, so that the law of gravity (F = Gm1m2a2 ) can be asserted as universally true even if unknown
or unrecognized by the Azande, Seventh Day Adventists or high school seniors.
Universality via objectivity applies not only to scientific and descriptive discourse, but to all discourse that makes the
pretense of having an objective referent or objective criteria. In fact, even normative discourse is not in the first place a
matter of internal, subjective reference. For the meaning of words are conditional upon consistent usage (i.e., logical
consistency) and objectivity. These conditions exercise their hold in such a fashion that even normative claims have more
objective content than is often recognized. If so, then normative words such as, 'best,' imply a standard and achieve meaning
in the same way thermometers do. Consider the claim, "Babe Ruth is the best baseball player ever." To prove this claim, I
must explain its meaning and in particular the meaning of the term 'best.' What I mean by 'best' will determine whether the
statement is true. For instance, I may simply mean, "Babe Ruth is my favorite baseball player." If so, then claiming Babe Ruth
is best does not conflict with Jones claiming "Willie Mays is best." or Smith's claim that "Reginald Blithers is best."
(^_^)(^_^)
86

Takumi Murayama

Objectivity is implicit in any framework or language, allowing communication
and accessibility to meaning.
[Takumi Murayama]
In this paper I have tried to show that the relativist fails to appreciate the obligatory epistemic status of objectivity and
logical consistency. Relativists fail to understand that while objectivity is implicit in any framework or language, and
while frameworks and languages are human conventions, objectivity is not. In other words, whether we call blue, 'blue' or
'grue' is a matter of volition; but that the condition for meaningful reference to blue is that we can pick out the same color and
use the same color terms in a consistent fashion, and this is not simply a matter of volition. This is the precondition for
metaphorical, ironic, sarcastic claims as well, if we are to get their meaning, irony, etc. And this point holds for every
language. Language (the most open of frameworks) makes meaning possible; and particular languages make certain
meanings more available, more easily expressible than others, but no language creates new things in the world to which
other language users cannot, in principle, have access, and no language makes purely private experiences a matter for
only parochial communication.
(^_^)(^_^)
87

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodMorality (1)

Objective reason and logical consistency are necessary for any meaningful
morality or ethics.
[Takumi Murayama]
Now the conditions of ordinary meaning that make objectivity and logical consistency possible are also necessary for
meaningful moral claims. Therefore, all moral claims must satisfy these conditions. The relativist cannot object these
are simply conditions for one among many moralities; nor can she object that the criteria for objectivity and logical
consistency are simply elements of a Western (or a male oriented) moral framework that is neither meaningful nor
obligatory for persons who subscribe to another moral framework. The objection is not relevant because I am not trying
to appropriate any 'magic meaning' for the term moral. My claim is valid if logical consistency and objectivity are elements
of any framework. This has already been shown to be the case.
(^_^)(^_^)
88

Takumi Murayama

Morality requires logical consistency and objective rationality. Otherwise, it is
arbitrary and yields inconsistencies.
[Takumi Murayama]
Clearly, morality must mean something more than preference. Preference cannot ground moral claims, e.g., that "I like
artichokes" is not a moral claim. Surely if moral claims prescribe obligatory actions for other persons, then Jones'
declaration of dislike is not a moral claim. It prescribes nothing. Nor is it a reason to deny black human rights any more
than the fact that I like artichokes is a reason why everyone should be obliged to eat them. Or put otherwise, the claims 'I like
X' and 'everyone ought to recognize X is right' must rest upon different kinds of grounds. 'I like X' is not a reason anyone else
should accept 'X' and by definition, fails to justify, 'X is right'. Conversely, if morality provides reasons everyone should
accept, then it must rest upon universally acceptable grounds, namely grounds of logical consistency and objectivity.
Consequently, all the racist can be saying is that she does not wish blacks to be granted equal rights. Such a claim is admittedly
subjective and relative, and therefore not objective or universalizable. If so, no conflict or contradiction exists when I assert, 'I
prefer all persons, including blacks, be accorded equal rights.' Neither claim is moral, for morality without reason is
arbitrary and given diversity of preference, it inherently yields inconsistencies when generalized, and if it cannot be
generalized in what sense can it justify or assert what is right. Thus the racist fails or refuses to satisfy conditions of reason
and consistency may persist in wishing to deny rights to some human beings, but the racist must concede that the claim is
groundless and lacks rational justification.
(^_^)(^_^)
89

Takumi Murayama

A sense of morality must stem from rationality; otherwise, it can be any
relativistic wish or will.
[Takumi Murayama]
Of course, affectively the racist will not concede to the conclusion, and while that is an important matter for practical purposes,
it is irrelevant for epistemic purposes. The racist internal states are not what make his or her beliefs justified or right. The
problem is not different than the one Wittgenstein raises when we asks us to consider what is involved in trying to mean 'hot'
when we say 'cold.' The racist, clenching her teeth and willing with all her might cannot will that 'racism is justified' nor can
'feeling an intense preference and strong disposition in favor of X' entail that 'X is right.' But neither does the relativist make
egalitarianism right by clenching her teeth and willing it. To the extent that justice requires equality, it does so on grounds
much stronger than wish and will. Thus the issue here is not simply that racism is wrong, but that grounded on internalism
and relativism it becomes incoherent if it seeks justification. The sad and ironic fact is that the post-modern thinks her
argument from relativism refutes racism, when in fact the racist and the relativist occupy the same epistemic niche.
Now I am not suggesting that relativists are racists. On the contrary, the relativists of whom I speak are as committed to the
proposition that racism is bad and equality is good as are those who embrace more objective epistemologies. In fact, let us
assume the relativist and the objectivist advocate the same egalitarian principles. Let us even assume both agree that ordinary
people would more surely become egalitarians if we seduced them with clever manipulation, rather than reason. That is not the
question. The question is whether the relativist can give a 'reason' why manipulation of public opinion for egalitarian ends is
superior to the manipulation of public opinion for personal, self-interested or racist ends? The relativist response that no theory
is superior to any other and therefore equal respect should reign is a response that invites scorn. For given the premise,
relativism cannot offer compelling reasons for its conclusion. The racist stands on good grounds if she claims to be
unconvinced.
Relativism offers no bar to the prescriptions of Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Nietzsche, for each offers a framework. If
frameworks by their nature make no universal claims, then a framework of justice or compassion creates no obligation
for those who do not subscribe to it. Machiavelli's, Hobbes', and Nietzsche's prescriptions carry as much legitimacy as any
other. Princes, leviathans, and supermen would have as much a claim to moral and political legitimacy as does democracy,
mutuality, or egalitarian justice. Most importantly the failing moral and political relativism derives directly from
relativism's epistemic failing, from relativism's failure to acknowledge what it cannot deny, namely that the standards of
logical consistency and objectivity are implicit in any framework and, as such, create groundings no one is free to deny.
These groundings are not volitionally chosen conventions, but meta-principles that apply to any framework.
(^_^)(^_^)
90

Takumi Murayama

Objective reason makes universal moral and political claims that are
irrefutable. Abandonment of this universality leads to a foolish, imprudent, and
unwise moral and political program.
[Takumi Murayama]
Alternatively, objective principles of justice and mutual respect make moral and political claims which ought to be
honored by all persons, nations, and cultures. These are universal claims, the only sorts of claims which assert
obligation on those who are dominant as well as those who are subordinate. Only universal claims of justice are the
kind that cannot be discharged by the rejoinder, 'those are simply your tastes and preferences, not mine,' because only
universal claims are grounded on the fundamental commonality of human beings and human societies, not upon the
ineradicable differences between them. Such universality resides in the common reason and common truths (empirical and
moral), which make differences possible as well as shared understanding and appreciation.
Finally, identifying, understanding and appreciating differences between groups and individuals depends the universal
capacity for logical consistency and objectivity that every language user possesses. By this means I recognize that
'happiness,' 'pain,' 'frustration,' 'friendship,' 'commitments' and 'beliefs about justice' matter not only to me but to
others. I recognize that 'happiness' is desirable not because it occurs in me, but because happiness is a desirable experience in
whomever it occurs. I recognize that if these matters are reasons to advance my interests or the interests of my society, they are
also reasons to advance the interests of others and other societies. It is our commonality and universality that forms the
basis for understanding and solidarity. Abandoning the common and the universal, as post-positivists, poststructuralists, and post-moderns do, not only rests upon a series of epistemic mistakes, but leads to a moral and political
program that is as foolish as it is imprudent and unwise.
(^_^)(^_^)
91

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodNecessary for Coherent Framework (1)

Reason is a necessary condition for a coherent framework
[Takumi Murayama]
In other words, for the claims within a framework to be true, they must rely upon framework standards. But these
standards are themselves subject to objective determinations. Thus the standards of geology do not guarantee the truths they
support, for the standards do not claim validity sui generis. They rely upon good reason, and reason is not itself a
framework, but a precondition for any framework, a meta-condition. Indeed reason is a meta-condition requiring
coherence between frameworks as well. Without reason neither the standards nor the framework are understandable.
But even an internally coherent framework that fails to cohere with others fails the standard of understanding and
reason. In terms of particulars, this means the truths of geology are not undone because some individuals don't know, don't
understand, don't like or don't play the geology game. But neither do these truths stand simply because some do know,
understand, like, and play the geology game. At the meta-level all players who employ meaning play the same game.
(^_^)(^_^)
92

Takumi Murayama

Frameworks must both be coherent and communicable.
[Takumi Murayama]
However, the arguments in this paper entail that there is no either/or choice in considering the role of correspondence and
coherence. Without correspondence we would be driven back to the problem of talking about blue when blue is only a private
internal experience, we would be driven back to the absurdity of private language. Frameworks must have both coherence
and correspondence. An incoherent framework cannot correspond to the world; while a framework that purports to be
about the world but fails to correspond with it will assign a value of true to incompatible claims within the framework,
claims that in context must be considered incoherent. Bridge principles or rationalizations can be offered to reconcile the
incompatibility, but these efforts are likely in the long-run to produce even more incompatibility and incoherence. Because
frameworks purport to be about the world and because they must disvalue contradictions and inconsistencies, it follows that no
framework freely permits agents to choose what is coherent or what corresponds with observation. For coherence and
truth are the meta-conditions of a framework.
(^_^)(^_^)
93

Takumi Murayama

As the basis for language, objective reason is the only way to have any coherent
framework.
[Takumi Murayama]
Therefore, if we choose to make 'blue' mean the color blue, it will not mean 'car' when I point to a car and call it blue, nor mean
'wall' when I point a wall and call it blue, even if at the moment I point I intend my utterance of 'blue' to mean 'car' or 'wall'. In
this sense my intentions are insufficient for meaning. So too if, in the premises of an argument, morality means that
which is 'only a reason for me,' then it will not mean 'a reason for anyone' in the conclusions of the argument, simply
because I would like it to be so. In effect, I can make any term mean what I like, if I choose an objective (publicly available,
nonprivate) standard and use it in a logically consistent fashion. In that sense meaning is volitional, but it will only have the
meaning I will it to have if I use it in the same way each time. Hence the necessity of logical consistency. For these reasons,
meaning is not volitional. This is the lesson of the private language argument and the reason one may say, "make your
standards what you will, you cannot conclude whatever you like." This is the case because the condition of uttering a
meaningful statement depends upon logically consistent usage (i.e., use according to a standard) without which linguistic
meaning is impossible.
All meaning frameworks entail principles of logical consistency and objectivity because logical consistency and
objectivity are necessary conditions for meaning. Therefore framework relativism cannot hold because logical consistency
and objectivity constitute universal meta-standards which in practice are validated by the conformity implicit in all
language use. It matters not that there are an infinite number of norms and standards, or that the norms and standards
themselves are not given or prescribed a priori. It matters not, because although one may make standards as one likes, one
cannot reach whatever conclusion one likes. Since logical consistency and objectivity are implicit in any language or
framework, yet not given or stipulated by the framework, logical consistency and objectivity constitute universal standards
that constrain meanings and claims within any framework.
(^_^)(^_^)
94

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodPerversion of Incalculable Justice

Justice requires us to calculate to prevent perversion of incalculable justice.
Jacques Derrida, French philosopher and founder of Deconstruction. 1992. Force of Law: The Mystical
Foundation of Authority. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel
Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, p. 28-9.
[Takumi Murayama]
That justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as
an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state or between institutions or states and
others. Left to itself, the incalculable and giving (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst
for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation. It's always possible. And so incalculable justice
requires us to calculate. And first, closest to what we associate with justice, namely, law, the juridical field that one cannot
isolate within sure frontiers, but also in all the fields from which we cannot separate it, which intervene in it and are no longer
simply fields: ethics, politics, economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, literature, etc. Not only must we calculate, negotiate
the relation between the calculable and the incalculable, and negotiate without the sort of rule that wouldn't have to be
reinvented there where we are cast, there where we find ourselves; but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the place
we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the distinction between
national and international, public and private, and so on. This requirement does not properly belong either to justice or law. It
only belongs to either of these two domains by exceeding each one in the direction of the other. Politicization, for example, is
interminable even if it cannot and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism or a triviality, we must
recognize in it the following consequence: each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret
the very foundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited. This was true for example in the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all the emancipatory battles that remain and will have to remain
in progress, everywhere in the world, for men and for women. Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical
emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without
treating it too lightly and forming the worst complicities. But beyond these identified territories of juridico-politicization on the
grand geopolitical scale, beyond all self-serving interpretations, beyond all determined and particular reappropriations of
international law, other areas must constantly open up that at first can seem like secondary or marginal areas. This marginality
also signifies that a violence, indeed a terrorism and other forms of hostage-taking are at work (the examples closest to us
would be found in the area of laws on the teaching and practice of languages, the legitimization of canons, the military use of
scientific research, abortion, euthanasia, problems of organ transplant, extra-uterine conception, bio-engineering, medical
experimentation, the social treatment of AIDS, the macro- or micro-politics of drugs, the homeless, and so on, without
forgetting, of course, the treatment of what we call animal life, animality. On this last problem, the Benjamin text that I'm
coming to now shows that its author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his propositions on this subject remain quite
obscure, if not quite traditional).
(^_^)(^_^)
95

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodPrevents Violence

Calculative thought is imperative to preventing violence. The alt justifies
Hitlerlike and Maolike revolutions.
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others:
Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, p. 196.
[Takumi Murayama]
My own view is that this is a feasible, if difficult, project: that one can do both of the things Foucault was crying to do, one
can be a knight of autonomy. But I wish that Foucault had been more willing to separate his two roles - more willing to
separate his moral identity as a citizen from his search for autonomy. Then he might have had more resistance to the
temptation to which Nietzsche and Heidegger succumbed - the temptation to try to find a public, political counterpart of
this latter, private search. This, I think, was the temptation which led to his quasi-anarchism, to his refusal to be complicit
with power, even when power is stretched so far that it loses any contrastive force and becomes vacuous. That anarchism
seems to me the result of a misguided attempt to envisage a society as free of its historical past as the Romantic intellectual
hopes to be free of her private past.
The Romantic intellectuals goal of self-overcoming and self-invention seems to me a good model (one among many other
good models) for an individual human being, but a very bad model for a society. We should not try to find a societal
counterpart to the desire for autonomy. Trying to do so leads to Hitlerlike and Maolike fantasies about creating a new
kind of human king. Societies are not quasi-persons, they are (at their liberal, social democratic best) compromises between
persons. The point of a liberal society is not to invent or create anything, but simply to make it as easy as possible for
people to achieve their wildly different private ends without hurting each other. To work out the details of the continually
shifting compromises which make up the political discourse of such a society requires a banal moral vocabulary - a vocabulary
which is no more relevant to one individuals private self-image than to anothers. In a liberal society, our public dealings with
our fellow citizens are not supposed to be Romantic or inventive; they are supposed to have the routine intelligibility of the
marketplace or the courtroom.
Publicly discussable compromises require discourse in a common vocabulary, and such a vocabulary is required to
describe the moral identities a liberal society asks its citizens to have. They are asked to have this moral identity for public
purposes, and to have it irrespective of whatever other, private identities they may also have. Only if one refuses to divide the
public from the private realm will one dream of a society which has gone beyond mere social democracy, or dream of
total revolution. Only then will anarchism begin to seem attractive. Only then will one be tempted to use a pejorative
term like discourse of power to describe the results of any social compromise, any political balancing act.
(^_^)(^_^)
96

Takumi Murayama
Calculative Thought GoodRejection of Genocide

We must put ethics before ontology to prevent Heideggerean consent to gas chambers
and death camps.
Arnold I. Davidson, co-editor of Critical Inquiry, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Member of the
Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the
University of Chicago. Winter 1989. Questions Concerning Heidegger: Opening the Debate, Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2, p. 424-426.
[Takumi Murayama]
I understand Levinas' work to suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that leads through or toward other
human beings:
The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face.... Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is
enacted- in our relations with men.... The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is
disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. It is our relations with men ... that give to theological
concepts the sole signification they admit of.35
Levinas places ethics before ontology by beginning with our experience of the human face; and, in a clear reference to
Heidegger's idolatry of the village life of peasants, he associates himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he
encountered men to the country with its trees.36 In his discussion of skepticism and the problem of others, Cavell also aligns
himself with this path of thought, with the recovery of the finite human self through the acknowledgment of others:
As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldn't the other suffer the fate of God? ... I wish to understand how the other now
bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem
of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God. [CR, p. 470] 37
The suppression of the other, the human, in Heidegger's thought accounts, I believe, for the absence, in his writing after
the war, of the experience of horror. Horror is always directed toward the human; every object of horror bears the
imprint of the human will.38 So Levinas can see in Heidegger's silence about the gas chambers and death camps "a
kind of consent to the horror."39 And Cavell can characterize Nazis as "those who have lost the capacity for being
horrified by what they do."40 Where was Heidegger's horror? How could he have failed to know what he had consented
to?
Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valery's aphorism, "'Les evenements ne sont que l'cume des choses' ('Events are
but the foam of things')."41 I think one understands the source of her intuition. The mass extermination of human beings,
however, does not produce foam, but dust and ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop.
(^_^)(^_^)
97

Takumi Murayama
Discourse Doesnt MatterDoesnt Shape Reality

Our discourse does not shape the world; it is only what is necessary to discuss
it. Relativism fails; reason is a meta-principle that universally applies.
[Takumi Murayama]
Although different standards and frameworks determine what we say about the world, they do not determine the world.
To illustrate this analogically we need only recognize that while having a microscope is the precondition for discovering very
small objects, very small objects are the precondition of perceiving them in the microscope. In other words, frameworks are
chronologically prior to our descriptions of the world, but the world is the epistemic condition for the possibility of
frameworks. Or put somewhat differently, while learning language is chronologically prior to expressing meaning, the
possibility of meaning is epistemically prior to language. Relativism confuses chronological and epistemological order of
knowledge, or what Aristotle would have called the formal and material conditions of knowledge. By failing to appreciate
the distinction between chronology and epistemology, relativism commits a genetic fallacy. By confusing the formal and
material conditions of knowledge relativism is guilty of the confusion of discernibles. Thus relativism fails.
If follows that the possibility of frameworks and languages presupposes universal meta-principles. These meta-principles
are not determined by the framework, but are the preconditions for meaning and the constraints upon what can be validly said.
Because common meta-principles condition any framework, not only are meanings universally accessible, but the
constraints of reason universally apply. For instance, assume a language, Loco, in which all Locoians believe the earth is a
two dimensional plane. This belief, X, is, in fact, false, any outside observers who know Loco can correctly assert, in Loco, 'X
is false' even though no native Locoian believes it (assuming no mistake in translation). Why should unanimity among
Locoians cause us any doubt? The epistemic problem of asserting this across frameworks is no greater than the problem of
asserting scientific truths within a culture in which some persons persist in pre-scientific beliefs. The underlying conditions of
logical consistency and objectivity, our knowledge of Locoian physics and modern Western physics, our evidence from
satellites allow us to judge truth in this matter.
(^_^)(^_^)
98

Takumi Murayama
Framework GoodReconcile Truth

Framework allows different interpretations of truth to be reconciled. Relativism
only confuses the situation by failure to distinguish the subjective and the
objective.
[Takumi Murayama]
The implication of this analysis locks meanings and truths inside frameworks. Because the truth of one framework is not
superior to another, the task of knowledge is not to acquire truth, but to acquire understandings of different
frameworks and of different ways to view the world. Hence the relativist prescriptions for attunement, appreciation, and
equal respect. The conclusions of framework relativism allegedly flow from the following claims:
1 because frameworks are human conventions, they can be other than they are;
2 because frameworks determine standards, meanings and truth, different meanings and truths become possible within
different frameworks;
3 nothing obliges one to accept the standards, meanings or truths that emerge within a given framework unless one voluntarily
accepts the framework.
Of course, the woolly relativist may believe every framework yields legitimate notions of true or right and that along
such an avenue one might 'justify' anything from infanticide to witchcraft. But such belief only points back to the
persistent failing of relativism in all its varieties, namely the confusion of objective and subjective. In the arguments above
this confusion takes the form of a failure to distinguish between what is subjective and what is objective and a
conflation of discernibles.
(^_^)(^_^)
99

Takumi Murayama
Science GoodClimate Change (1)

The negs rejection of the affs representations prevents any useful action or
knowledge garnered from science. Without science, theres no hope for
survival.
One of my intentions in this article is to show how the technical practices of science have constructed the problem of global
warming for us in materially and politically significant ways. This goal requires some discussion of the philosophical
implications of such a constructionist argument. Demystifying scientific knowledge and demonstrating the social relations
its construction involves does not necessarily imply disbelief in either that knowledge or the phenomena it represents.
Given its vital role in helping to make sense of environmental problems such as climate change, there simply can be no
question of doing without science. Rather, the challenge is how to understand and live with it better. In this regard,
constructionist accounts of science are important but incomplete (Demeritt 1996). By calling attention to the social
relations involved in producing scientific knowledge of the natural world, theories of social construction challenge
empiricist, positivist, and realist epistemologies. 4 The practical and political implications of this philosophical critique
have not always been articulated clearly.
(^_^)(^_^)
100

Takumi Murayama

We shouldnt reject science because its not objective; its impossible not to be
reductionist. Science is the only way to make the public understand and curtail
climate change.
Still, blindness does have its benefits, even for a progressive environmental politics. Although it is fashionable in many
circles to bemoan the reductionism of science as an unmitigated evil, it is important to recognize where we would be
without it. 7 Physically reductionist computer-simulation models have been crucial in identifying the physical effects of
continued GHG emissions on the climate system. Their alarming red-orange visualizations of a future hothouse earth
have played a vital role in bringing these risks to widespread public attention. To be sure, troubling exclusions are built
into this epistemic community. The discipline and expertise required to participate meaningfully in its scientific debates restrict
not only who is authorized to speak but also what and how things can be spoken about. 8 Important as it is to be reflexive
about the exclusions that abstraction necessarily entails, there can be no escaping them entirely, for knowledge is always
situated, partial, and incomplete (Haraway 1991, 183201). Thus a climate model, no matter how sophisticated, can only
ever provide a partial window on a much more complicated reality that it must, as a form of abstract reasoning, reduce to some
analytically simplified set of physical processes. One way to distinguish the practice of abstraction involved in this kind of
physical reductionism from a more general sense of Reductionism is to say that Reductionism commits the epistemic fallacy
(Bhaskar 1978, 36). It loses sight of the fact that its abstractions are merely analytical constructions, conveniently isolated from
the flux of totality, and reduces reality to the terms of its own analytical abstractions. 9 This distinction between pernicious
Reductionism and the physical reductionism of science has occasionally been lost on science critics within cultural
studies and critical human geography. All too often, social constructionist critiques of particular scientific abstractions
come across, whether intended as such or not, as rejections of science and refutations of its specific knowledge claims.
Such antiscience polemicism can be as sweepingly Reductionist as the very thing it opposes. Although the particular
abstractions of global climate modeling may not tell us everything that we need to know, they deserve more credit than
they sometimes receive from their critics. Physical process modeling has certain undeniable advantages. For one thing, the
physically reductionist abstractions that it involves render the world analytically manageable. Only by dramatically
simplifying the messy social relations driving GHG emissions and focusing narrowly on their physical and chemical
properties have scientists been able to understand the effects of increasing GHG concentrations on the climate system.
Oversimplistic as this way of seeing may be, it is still probably something that we cannot do without. Climate models
provide one of the most important tools for exploring the physical relationships among GHG emissions, concentrations,
and climate changes. The task, therefore, is to better appreciate the partial insights that these models provide without falling
into Reductionism and losing sight of the limitations of physical process modeling.
(^_^)(^_^)
101

Takumi Murayama

Technology is the only way we can fix climate change, and we must use it as
well as we can.
Technology is one of the few human endeavors that has the power to transform the world as we know it. If we are to
stand a chance against climate change, perhaps the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, we must embrace
technology, and harness its power to the best of our ability. We will never be able to predict all the ways technology will
change the world, but that mystery is part of what it means to be human here on earth.
(^_^)(^_^)
102

Takumi Murayama
Science GoodPublic Environmental Awareness

Technology is healthy to our perspective on the world. Examples include PCs
and Satellites.
Stewart Brand, author, editor, and creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly, Biology
major, Stanford. 1991. Forward, Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution. William Morrow and
Company, Inc. http://www.foresight.org/UTF/Unbound_LBW/index.html p. 2
[Takumi Murayama]
I've been watching the development of Eric Drexler's ideas since 1975, when he was an MIT undergraduate working on space
technologies (space settlements, mass drivers, and solar sailing). Where I was watching from was the "back-to-basics" world of
the Whole Earth Catalog publications, which I edited at the time. In that enclave of environmentalists and world-savers one
of our dirty words was technofix. A technofix was deemed always bad because it was a shortcutan overly focused
directing of high tech at a problem with no concern for new and possibly worse problems that the solution might create.
But some technofixes, we began to notice, had the property of changing human perspective in a healthy way. Personal
computers empowered individuals and took away centralized control of communication technology. Space satellitesat
first rejected by environmentalistsproved to be invaluable environmental surveillance tools, and their images of Earth
from space became an engine of the ecology movement.
(^_^)(^_^)
103

Takumi Murayama
Science GoodTruth
Criticizing science undermines the alt and destroys the possibility of truth.
[Takumi Murayama]
Consider the case of Western science. If truth is only relative to standards and standards must be chosen to be binding,
then explaining scientific truth becomes problematic. How after all can the framework relativist account for the fact that the
principles of aerodynamics work in all cultures at all times? In this case the scientific beliefs of avionics engineers arguably
depend upon the truths of aerodynamic principles and not just the enculturation of engineers. How else can we account for the
fact that airplanes do not fall from the sky even if the engineer, the pilot and the passengers forget or become confused about
the principles of aerodynamics while the plane is in flight. The plane does not stay up because contemporary engineers believe
in the principles of aerodynamics and the canons of Western science. The plane stays up because some propositions are true
whether or not the principles of aerodynamics are believed, because there is an indubitable difference between the psychology
of belief and the epistemology of belief.
Relativist efforts to escape this dilemma fail. For example, since science is the bete noire of relativism, relativists typically
adopt a Kuhnian view of science arguing that scientists are conditioned to believe in certain principles. Scientific beliefs,
therefore, reflect personal and professional investments, so that on this account scientists do not believe in their theories
because the theories provide an 'objectively' better fit with world. The issue is not why the plane stays aloft, but whether the
account of why it stays aloft can be grounded on objective belief? Argued in a Kuhnian fashion the relativist reconstructs the
scientist's own discourse about objectivity and offers a meta-analysis, i.e., a reconstruction of what the scientists actually
mean. But here is the rub. Relativists cannot be consistent with their own principles and also offer a meta-analysis.
In two important ways any effort at meta-analysis is problematic for relativists. First, meta-analysis violates critical normative
principles that are central to relativism. Because meta-analysis implies that the scientists' misunderstand what they do
when they judge theories and beliefs true or false. By reinterpreting the scientists' claims, the relativist employs an
external standard to give new meanings to what the scientists say. These meanings are not the meanings given or
acknowledged by the scientists themselves. But relativists always object when this sort of reinterpretation is applied to other
cultures, e.g., the beliefs of the Azande or the Neuer. Thus meta-analysis violates the relativist's normative principle that
prescribes attunement.
Perhaps we can give the relativist an exemption on the normative issue in this case. Perhaps for the sake of argument we can
offer an exclusive exemption with respect to Western science only. We might do so on normative grounds for the purpose of
preserving the rule in all other cases and therefore remaining attuned to the indigenous meanings of other cultures. However,
this is not the only rule the relativist must violate. For in order pull off the reinterpretation, they must also violate their
epistemic standard. To show that scientists' understandings of themselves cannot be sustained at a deep level, the
relativist must apply a trans-systemic standard and assert what is the case. Now either the relativist is applying a
preferred framework to trump Western science or they claim a transcendental point of view, one that assures us that it
is true the Western science misrepresents itself on matters of objectivity and truth. This transcendental view is not
embedded in a particular culture or a particular history. Now if the relativist is applying only a preferred standard and
framework, then the relativist's analysis can be discharged as framework bound and the assertions of relativism are thereby
undercut; or the relativist makes a transcendental claim that is framework independent and the so the assertions of relativism
are undercut.
The result is a self-defeating paradox. If relativists judge science from a relativist framework, then their framework leaves
them unable to comprehend or criticize the objectivity and truth of Western science; but if they judge Western science from a
nonrelative framework, then they undermine relativism. Either way, relativism loses, for it must be the case that the relativist
either has a meta-case or the relativist does not. If the relativist has a meta-case, then the meta-case demonstrates the falsity of
relativism. If the relativist does not have a meta-case, then Western science demonstrates the falsity of relativism. Either way,
relativism is demonstrably false.
(^_^)(^_^)
104

At Heidegger Alternative Energy DDI KO 2008

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

At Heidegger Alternative Energy DDI KO 2008

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Heidegger AFF Answers

DDI 2008 Kernoff/Olney

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

3. Turn Antihumanism Letting things be empirically leads to genocide; only the

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

5. Perm Do Both we can engage in constructive policy while still remaining

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

13. Impact This notion of authenticity justifies the imposition of totalitarian

Heidegger AFF Answers

3. Turn Antihumanism Letting things be empirically leads to genocide; only the

Heidegger AFF Answers

4. Perm Do Both we can engage in constructive policy while still remaining

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

6. We aren't the instrumental rationality they describe we are a specific instance of

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

B. Impact This notion of authenticity justifies the imposition of totalitarian

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

TurnKey to Ontology (1)

Heidegger AFF Answers

TurnKey to Ontology (2)

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

TurnOntology First Bad

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

Heidegger AFF Answers

TurnValue to Life (1)

Heidegger AFF Answers

TurnValue to Life (2)

Heidegger AFF Answers