ASU Cards Round Double Octas

1NC

1
A. Interpretation and violation Legalization is disctinct from
decriminalization - they alter criminal status without
implementing regulation
EMCCDA 01 European monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction,
Decriminalisation in Europe?: Recent developments in legal approaches to drug use November 2001
http://eldd.emcdda.org/databases/eldd_comparative_analyses.cfm

Concept and Definition of Decriminalisation Decriminalisation. Decriminalisation

takes away the status of criminal law from those acts to which it is
applied. This means that certain acts no longer constitute criminal offences. With
regard to drugs, it is usually used to refer to demand; acts of acquisition,
possession and consumption. Following decriminalisation, it still is illegal to use,
possess, acquire or in certain cases import drugs, but those acts are no
longer criminal offences. However, administrative sanctions can still be applied; these
can be a fine, suspension of the driving or firearms licence, or just a warning. In contrast, legalisation
is the process of bringing within the control of the law a specified activity
that was previously illegal and prohibited or strictly regulated. Related to drugs,
the term is most commonly applied to acts of supply; production,
manufacture or sale for non-medical use. Legalisation would mean that
such activities, and use and possession, would be regulated by states
norms, in the same way that it is legal to use alcohol and tobacco. There can still exist some administrative
controls and regulations, which might even be supported by criminal sanctions (e.g. when juveniles or road traffic

any form of legalisation would be contrary to

the current UN conventions.
are concerned). From a legal point of view,

B. Reasons to Prefer
1 counterplan ground decriminalization should be neg
ground its the core neg counterplan for small affs on this
topic also its the only way to get into regulation debates,
which are especially key on marihuana if they get decrim, we
dont get legalization because its plan plus and they can perm
everything
2 K and DA ground their interp allows the aff to be a
negative action that removes a ton of our link arguments
about why its bad for the government to set up new systems
like K arguments predicated on the state establishing new
markets
3 bidirectionality they can opt who follows decrim and who
doesnt whereas legalization forces them to override other
laws that would make it illegal also, they leave in place
citations and fines neg should be able to say those are good
thats not predictable
4 predictability legalization means that the baseline of every
aff is forced to be legal across the whole spectrum
5 Topical version of the aff is to make it legal and to regulate
it
D Topicality is a voting issue for fairness and education

2
The affs faith in legalization ignores the ontological position of
the slave. Expanding autonomy within civil society can never
include Blackness because it is founded in contradistinction to
it their humanism is birthed from the murder of the slave.
Wilderson 10
[Frank, Associate Professor at UC Irvines Department of Drama and African
American Studies, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms, pp. 21-23, RSR]
Again, what is important for us to glean from these historians is that the preColumbian period, the Late Middle
Ages, reveals no archive of debate on these three questions as they might be related to that massive group of
Black-skinned people south of the Sahara. Eltis suggests that there was indeed massive debate which ultimately led
to Britain taking the lead in the abolition of slavery, but he reminds us that that debate did not have its roots in the
late Middle Ages, the post-Columbian period of the 1500s or the Virginia Colony period of the 1600s. It was, he
asserts, an outgrowth of the mid- to late-18th century emancipatory thrustintra-Human disputes such as the
French and American Revolutionsthat swept through Europe. But Eltis does not take his analysis further than this.
Therefore, it is important that we not be swayed by his optimism of the Enlightenment and its subsequent

the discourse that elaborates the

justification for freeing the slave is not the product of the Human beings
having suddenly and miraculously recognized the slave. Rather, as Saidiya Hartman
argues, emancipatory discourses present themselve s to us as further
evidence of the Slaves fungibility: [T]he figurative capacities of
blackness enable white flights of fancy while increasing the likelihood of
the captives disappearance (Scenes22). First, the questions of Humanism were elaborated in
abolitionist discourses. It is highly conceivable that

contradistinction to the human void, to the African-quachattel (the 1200s to the end of the 17th century). Then, as
the presence of Black chattel in the midst of exploited and un-exploited Humans (workers and bosses, respectively)

exploited Humans (in the throes of class conflict with un-exploited Humans)
seized the image of the slave as an enabling vehicle that animated the
evolving discourses of their emancipation, just as un-exploited Humans had seized the flesh
of the Slave to increase their profits. Without this gratuitous violence, a violence that marks
everyone experientially until the late Middle Ages when it starts to mark the Black ontologically , the socalled great emancipatory discourses of modernitymarxism, feminism,
postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement political discourses predicated on
grammars of suffering and whose constituent elements are exploitation
and alienation, might not have developed.vi Chattel slavery did not simply
reterritorialize the ontology of the African. It also created the Human out of culturally
disparate entities from Europe to the East. I am not suggesting that across the globe Humanism
developed in the same way regardless of region or culture; what I am saying is that the late Middle Ages
gave rise to an ontological categoryan ensemble of common existential
concernswhich made and continues to make possible both war and
peace, conflict and resolution, between the disparate members of the human race, east and west. Senator
became a fact of the world,

Thomas Hart Benton intuited this notion of the existential commons when he wrote that though the Yellow race
and its culture had been torpid and stationary for thousands of years [Whites and Asians] must talk together,
and trade together, and marry together. Commerce is a great civilizersocial intercourse as greatand marriage
greater (The Congressional Globe. May 28, 1846). David Eltis points out that as late as the 17th century,
[p]risoners taken in the course of European military actioncould expect death if they were leaders, or
banishment if they were deemed followers, but never enslavementDetention followed by prisoner exchanges or
ransoming was common (1413). By the seventeenth century, enslavement of fellow Europeans was beyond the
limits (1423) of Humanisms existential commons, even in times of war. Slave status was reserved for non-

Christians. Even the latter group howeverhad some prospect of release in exchange for Christians held by rulers
of Algiers, Tunis, and other Mediterranean Muslim powers (emphasis mine 1413). But though the practice of
enslaving the vanquished was beyond the limit of intra-West wars and only practiced provisionally in East-West
conflicts, the baseness of the option was not debated when it came to the African. The race of Humanism (White,
Asian, South Asian, and Arab) could not have produced itself without the simultaneous production of that walking

through chattel slavery the

world gave birth and coherence to both its joys of domesticity and to its
struggles of political discontent; and with these joys and struggles, the Human was
destruction which became known as the Black. Put another way,

born, but not before it murdered the Black, forging a symbiosis between
the political ontology of Humanity and the social death of Blacks. In his essay
To Corroborate Our Claims: Public Positioning and the Slavery Metaphor in Revolutionary America, Peter Dorsey
(in his concurrence with cultural historians F. Nwabueze Okoye and Patricia Bradley) suggests that, in mid- to late18th century America, Blackness was such a fungible commodity that it was traded as freely between the exploited
(workers who did not own slaves) as it was between the unexploited (planters who did). This was due to the
effective uses to which Whites could put the Slave as both flesh and metaphor. For the Revolutionaries, slavery
represented a nightmare that white Americans were trying to avoid (359). Dorseys claim is provocative, but not
unsupported: he maintains that had Blacks-as-Slaves not been in the White field of vision on a daily basis that it
would have been virtually impossible for Whites to transform themselves from colonial subjects into
Revolutionaries: Especially prominent in the rhetoric and reality of the [Revolutionary] era, the concepts of freedom
and slavery were applied to a wide variety of events and values and were constantly being defined and redefined
[E]arly understandings of American freedom were in many ways dependent on the existence of chattel slavery
[We should] see slavery in revolutionary discourse, not merely as a hyperbolic rhetorical device but as a crucial and
fluid [fungible] concept that had a major impact on the way early Americans thought about their political future
The slavery metaphor destabilized previously accepted categories of thought about politics, race, and the early
republic. (355) Though the idea of taxation without representation may have spoken concretely to the idiom of
power that marked the British/American relation as being structurally unethical, it did not provide metaphors
powerful and fungible enough for Whites to meditate and move on when resisting the structure of their own
subordination at the hands of unchecked political power (354). The most salient feature of Dorseys findings is not
his understanding of the way Blackness, as a crucial and fungible conceptual possession of civil society, impacts
and destabilizes previously accepted categories of intra-White thought, but rather his contribution to the evidence

even when Blackness is deployed to stretch the elasticity of civil

society to the point of civil war, that expansion is never elastic enough to
embrace the very Black who catalyzed the expansion. In fact, Dorsey, building on
Patricia Bradleys historical research, asserts that just the opposite is true. The more the political
imagination of civil society is enabled by the fungibility of the slave
metaphor, the less legible the condition of the slave becomes: Focusing primarily
that,

on colonial newspapersBradley finds that the slavery metaphor served to distance the patriot agenda from the
antislavery movement. If anything, Bradley states, widespread use of the metaphor gave first evidence that the
issue of real slavery was not to have a part in the revolutionary messages (359). And David Eltis believes that this
philosophical incongruity between the image of the Slave and freedom for the Slave begins in Europe and pre-dates
the American Revolution by at least one hundred years: The [European] countries least likely to enslave their own
had the harshest and most sophisticated system of exploiting enslaved non-Europeans. Overall, the English and
Dutch conception of the role of the individual in metropolitan society ensured the accelerated development of
African chattel slavery in the Americasbecause their own subjects could not become chattel slaves or even
convicts for lifeThere may be something to be said for expanding a variation of Edmund Morgans argument to
cover the whole of the British Atlantic, in the sense that the celebration of British libertiesmore specifically,

The circulation of
Blackness as metaphor and image at the most politically volatile and
progressive moments in history (e.g. the French, English, and American Revolutions),
produces dreams of liberation which are more inessential to and more
parasitic on the Black, and more emphatic in their guarantee of Black suffering, than any dream of
human liberation in any era heretofore. Black Slavery is foundational to modern
Humanisms ontics because freedom is the hub of Humanisms infinite
conceptual trajectories. But these trajectories only appear to be infinite. They are
finite in the sense that they are predicated on the idea of freedom from
some contingency that can be named, or at least conceptualized. The contingent rider could be
liberties of Englishmendepended on African slavery. (Emphasis mine 1423)

freedom from patriarchy, freedom from economic exploitation, freedom from political
tyranny (for example, taxation without representation), freedom from heteronormativity, and so
on. What I am suggesting is that first, political discourse recognizes freedom as a
structuring ontologic and then it works to disavow this recognition by
imagining freedom not through political ontology where it rightfully beganbut
through political experience (and practice); whereupon it immediately loses its
ontological foundations. Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone start off with, quite literally, an
earth-shattering ontologic and, in the process of meditating on it and acting through it, reduce it to an earth
reforming experience? Why do Humans take such pride in self-adjustment, in diminishing, rather than intensifying,

I contend, in allowing the

notion of freedom to attain the ethical purity of its ontological status, one
would have to lose ones Human coordinates and become Black. Which is
to say one would have to die. For the Black, freedom is an ontological,
rather than experiential, question. There is no philosophically credible way
to attach an experiential, a contingent, rider onto the notion of freedom
when one considers the Blacksuch as freedom from gender or economic oppression. The kind of
contingent riders rightfully placed on the non-Black when thinking freedom. Rather, the riders that one
could place on Black freedom would be hyperbolic though no less true
and ultimately untenable: i.e., freedom from the world, freedom from
humanity, freedom from everyone (including ones Black self). Given the reigning episteme, what
the project of liberation (how did we get from 68 to the present)? Because,

are the chances of elaborating a comprehensive, much less translatable and communicable, political project out of
the necessity of freedom as an absolute?

Gratuitous freedom has never been a

trajectory of Humanist thought, which is why the infinite trajectories of
freedom that emanate from Humanisms hub are anything but infinitefor
they have no line of flight leading to the Slave.

The gratuity of suicide leaves the body of the slave as an

remnant to the history of thought: the becoming-human of
medical society involves just the transcendence of its animal
element, which guarantees the production of anthropoporous
bodies like the slave
Agamben 04 (Giorgio, Italian Continental Philosopher and current Professor at
Accademia di Archiettura Mendrisio, The open: Man and animal, Stanford
University Press, pg. 10-12)//DS
The definitive annihilation of man in the proper sense, howev- er, must
also entail the disappearance of human language, and its substitution by
mimetic or sonic signals comparable to the lan- guage of bees. But in that case,
Kojeve argues, not only would phi- losophythat is, the love of wisdom
disappear, but so would the very possibility of any wisdom as such. At this
point the note articulates a series of theses on the end of history and on the
present state of the world, in which it is impos- sible to distinguish between
absolute seriousness and an equally absolute irony. We thus learn that in the
years immediately fol- lowing the writing of the first note, the author understood
that the Hegelo-Marxist end of history was not a future event but something
already completed. After the battle of Jena, the vanguard of humanity virtually
reached the end of mans histori- cal evolution. Everything that followedincluding
two world wars, Nazism, and the sovietization of Russiarepresented noth- ing but

a process of accelerated alignment of the rest of the world with the position of the
most advanced European countries. Yet now, repeated trips to the United States and
Russia, taken between 1948 and 1958 (by which time Kojeve had become a high
func- tionary in the French government), convinced him that, on the road toward
reaching the posthistorical condition, the Russians and the Chinese are only
Americans who are still poor but are rap- idly proceeding to become richer, while
the United States has already reached the final stage of Marxist communism.2
This then led him to the conclusion that the American way of life was the type of
life proper to the post-his- torical period, the current presence of the United States
in the World prefiguring the future eternal present of all humanity. Thus, mans
return to animality appeared no longer as a possibility that was yet to come, but as
a certainty that was already present In 1959, however, a trip to Japan brought
about a further shift in perspective. In Japan, Kojeve was able to see with his own
eyes a society which, though living in a condition of posthistory, had nevertheless
not ceased to be human. Post-historical Japanese civilization undertook ways
diametrically opposed to the American way. No doubt, there were no longer in
Japan any Religion, Morals, or Politics in the European or histor- ical sense of
these words. But Snobbery in its pure state created dis- ciplines negating
the natural or animal given which in effective- ness far surpassed
those that arose, in Japan or elsewhere, from his- torical Actionthat is,
from warlike and revolutionary Struggles or from forced Work. To be sure, the peaks
(equalled nowhere else) of specifically Japanese snobberythe Noh theatre, the
ceremony of tea, and the art of bouquets of flowerswere and still remain the
exclu- sive prerogative of the nobles and the rich. But in spite of persistent
economic and social inequalities, all Japanese without exception are currently in a
position to live according to totally formalized values that is, values completely
empty of all human content in the his- torical sense. Thus, in the extreme,
every Japanese is in principle capable of committing, from pure snobbery,
a perfectly gratuitous suicide (the classical sword of the samurai can be
replaced with an air- plane or a torpedo), which has nothing to do with the risk of life
in a Struggle waged for the sake of historical values that have social or political
content. This seems to allow one to believe that the recently begun
interaction between Japan and the Western World will finally lead not to a
rebarbarization of the Japanese but to a Japanization of the Westerners
(including the Russians). Now, since no animal can be a snob, every
Japanized post-his- torical period would be specifically human. Hence
there would be no definitive annihilation of Man properly so called, as
long as there were animals of the species Homo sapiens that could serve
as the nat- ural support for what is human in men.4 The farcical tone, for
which Bataille reproached his teacher every time Kojeve attempted to describe the
posthistorical condi- tion, reaches its peak in this note. Not only is the American
way of life equated with an animal life, but mans survival of history in the form of
Japanese snobbery resembles a more elegant (if, perhaps, parodic) version of that
negativity with no use that Bataille sought to define, in his certainly more
ingenuous way, and that to Kojeves eyes must have seemed in bad taste. Let us
try to reflect on the theoretical implications of this post- historical figure of the
human. First of all, humanitys survival of its historical drama seems to introduce

between history and its enda fringe of ultrahistory that recalls the messianic reign
of one thousand years that, in both the Jewish and Christian tradi- tions, will be
established on Earth between the last messianic event and the eternal life (which is
not surprising in a thinker who had dedicated his first work to the philosophy of
Solovyev, itself imbued with messianic and eschatological themes). But what is
decisive is that in this ultrahistorical fringe, mans remaining human presumes the
survival of animals of the species Homo sapi- ens that must function as his support.
For in Kojeves reading of Hegel, man is not a biologically defined species, nor is he
a sub- stance given once and for all; he is, rather, a field of dialectical ten- sions
always already cut by internal caesurae that every time sepa- rateat least
virtuallyanthropophorous animality and the humanity which takes bodily form in
it. Man exists historically only in this tension; he can be human only to the
degree that he transcends and transforms the anthropophorous animal
which supports him, and only because, through the action of negation, he
is capable of mastering and, eventually, destroying his own animality (it is
in this sense that Kojeve can write that man is a fatal disease of the animal).5 But
what becomes of the animality of man in posthistory? What relation is there
between the Japanese snob and his animal body, and between this and the
acephalous creature glimpsed by Bataille? Kojeve, however, privileges the aspect of
negation and death in the relation between man and the anthropophorous ani- mal,
and he seems not to see the process by which, on the con- trary, man (or the State
for him) in modernity begins to care for his own animal life, and by which natural life
becomes the stakes in what Foucault called biopower. Perhaps the body of the
anthro- pophorous animal (the body of the slave) is the unresolved remnant that idealism leaves as an inheritance to thought, and the aporias of
the philosophy of our time coincide with the aporias of this body that is
irreducibly drawn and divided between animali- ty and humanity.

Anti-black violence structures how oppression works within

civil society. Other oppressions are historically contingent
while anti-blackness represents the gratuitous violence that
society was founded upon. Any attempt at reformist politics
that ignores the anti-black foundations of civil society makes
racialized state power inevitable.
Sexton, Director and Associate Professor in African American Studies at UC Irvine,
10
[Jared, People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery, Social Text 103,
Vol. 28, No. 2, RSR]
If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond, the
United States seems conditional to the historic instance and functions at a
more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant and
limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and
short-lived or that the latter is exhaustive and unchanging) . If pursued with some

the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would likely

impact the formulation of political strategy and modify the demeanor of
our political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct
altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task. Yet
all of this is obviated by the silencing mechanism par excellence in Left
political and intellectual circles today: Dont play Oppression Olympics!
The Oppression Olympics dogma levels a charge amounting to little more
than a leftist version of playing the race card. To fuss with details of
comparative (or relational) analysis is to play into the hands of divide-andconquer tactics and to promote a callous immorality.72 However, as in its
conservative complement, one notes in this catchphrase the unwarranted
translation of an inquiring position of comparison into an insidious posture
of competition, the translation of ethical critique into unethical attack.
This point allows us to understand better the intimate relationship
between the censure of black inquiry and the recurrent analogizing to
black suffering mentioned above: they bear a common refusal to admit to
significant differences of structural position born of discrepant histories
between blacks and their political allies, actual or potential. We might,
finally, name this refusal people-of-color-blindness, a form of
colorblindness inherent to the concept of people of color to the precise
extent that it misunderstands the specificity of antiblackness and
presumes or insists upon the monolithic character of victimization under
white supremacy73 thinking (the afterlife of) slavery as a form of exploitation or colonization or a
species of racial oppression among others.74 The upshot of this predicament is that
obscuring the structural position of the category of blackness will
inevitably undermine multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical
opposition and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation back
to the center of discussion. Every analysis that attempts to understand the
complexities of racial rule and the machinations of the racial state without
accounting for black existence within its framework which does not
mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents or returning to it as an
afterthought is doomed to miss what is essential about the situation.
consistency,

Black existence does not represent the total reality of the racial formation it is not the beginning and the end of
the story but it does relate to the totality; it indicates the (repressed) truth of the political and economic system.
That is to say, the whole range of positions within the racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage
point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual variance under patriarchal and heteronormative

What is lost for the

study of black existence in the proposal for a decentered, postblack
paradigm is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature of black
suffering and of the struggles political, aesthetic, intellectual, and so on
that have sought to transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of
nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and
nature of its material and symbolic power relative to the category of
blackness.76 This is why every attempt to defend the rights and liberties
of the latest victims of state repression will fail to make substantial gains
regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and queer.75

insofar as it forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks , the prototypical targets of the
panoply of police practices and the juridical infrastructure built up around them. Without blacks on

board, the only viable political option and the only effective defense
against the intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with an
antiblack civil society and further capitulation to the magnification of
state power. At the apex of the midcentury social movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in
their 1968 classic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that black freedom entails the necessarily total
revamping of the society.77 For Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African diaspora in this context, the
necessarily total revamping of the society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an entirely new world:
I knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave my past behind. I would never
be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a
history of terror had produced that identity. Terror was captivity without the possibility of flight, inescapable

There was no going back to a time or place before slavery,

and going beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous than
yet another revolution .78
violence, precarious life.

The alternative is to embrace fugitivity this politic of stealing

back the body of the slave is an impossible demand that allows
for a rupture of hegemonic epistemologies empirics prove the
strength of fugitive movements.
Dillon, PhD Candidate at the University of Minnesota, 13
[Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral
State, May 2013,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/153053/1/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.p
df, RSR]
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of two new voices
within national debates about racism, imperialism, poverty, and civil
rightsthe prisoner and the fugitive. As more and more members of the 1960s liberation
movements were imprisoned or went underground, a new body of knowledge emerged from both of these figures

While Fugitive Life tells a story

about post-civil rights feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism, it focuses
on these two figures and two corresponding spaces: the prison and the
underground. In response to police repression in the form of incarceration,
sabotage, and assassination, and in order to deploy illegal tactics,
hundreds of activists in the 1970s left behind families, friends, jobs, and
their identities in order to disappear into a vast network of safe houses,
under-the-table jobs, and transportation networks. In fact, before she was imprisoned,
Davis herself spent many months underground in order to hide from the FBI. While there has been a
resurgence of interest in many of these groups (prompted by and
reflected in the anxiety about Obamas connections to Weather
Underground member Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential election),
their significance to the post-civil rights landscapeas structured by the
prison and neoliberalismhas only begun to be explored. The books of
imprisoned authors like Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and Malcolm X
(which sold hundreds of thousands of copies) exposed something about
the United States that only they could know . In the original introduction to Jacksons
that negated national narratives of progress, equality, and justice.

Soledad Brother, Jean Genet wrote that Jacksons prison writing exposed the miracle of truth itself, the naked truth
revealed.20 For Genet and many readers of this literature,

the prisoner had access to a unique

formation of knowledge which led to alternative ways of seeing and

knowing the world. Indeed, scholars like Dylan Rodrguez, Michael-Hames
Garcia, and Joy James have argued that the knowledge produced by the
prisoner exposes a truth about the United States that cannot be accessed
from elsewhere .21 The prisoner could name what others could not even
see . At the same time, thousands of political fugitives wrote devastating critiques of the United States as they
bombed and robbed their way to what they hoped would be a better world . Underground
organizations like the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, and
George Jackson Brigade did more than attack symbols of state violence;
they also wrote poetry, stories, memoirs, communiqus, magazines, and
made films. These groups understood culture as foundational to the
production and survival of alternatives to things as they were. In this way,
culture became a site for the emergence of alternative forms of
knowledge. I turn to the cultural products of imprisoned and underground
activists as a record of what has been forgotten by hegemonic
epistemologies. As Roderick Ferguson writes, Epistemology is an economy of information privileged and
information excluded under which national formations rarely disclose what they have rejected.22 Yet, the
prisoner and the fugitive index the histories and forms of knowledge that
were erased and excluded by law and order and neoliberal economics.
Fugitive Life explores the ways that imprisoned and underground activists responded to the changing operations of
(and new technologies central to) racialized and gendered power under late capital. In addition, I contrast the forms
of knowledge arising from the underground to the epistemologies central to build-up of the neoliberal-carceral

I argue that the prisoner and the fugitive are figures that
produced epistemologies that undermined the political and historical
fictions underpinning this process. For example, while law and order politicians argued that
state. In this way,

policing and penal technologies were instruments of safety and liberty, and neoliberal economists argued that
poverty was the outcome of individual pathology, Davis and countless others labored to name the racialized and
gendered violence cloaked by these new discourses.

3
Text: The United States should legalize suicide, but how it is
made legal, when, and in what particular form are all
secondary questions to WHY it should be legalized. We affirm
the legalization of suicide within the generative context of a
symbolic reorientation of death.
Medicalizing suicide grants power over death to physicians,
legitimizing the control of culture by medicine and causing the
physicians role to inflate inappropriately
Salem 99 (Tania, Associate, Hospital Operations & Compliance at The Advisory
Group W.L.L., Physician-Assisted Suicide: Promoting AutonomyOr Medicalizing
Suicide? Hastings Center Report, Volume 29, Issue 3, May-June 1999, pgs 30-36)
Medicalizing suicide also points to the fact that if legalized, physicianassisted suicide as a legitimate practice would become the prerogative of
physicians . Indeed, Jack Kevorkian has seen the exclusive right as the foundation for a new medical
subspeciality of obitiatry.17 This monopoly leads to the more general question of
why aid in dying should be provided only by a medical practitioner . Why,
that is, should assistance in suicide be understood as requiring medical
authority rather than, for instance, a community of family or friends? The
most obvious answer is that physiciansand only physicianshave the necessary technical skills to ensure a
rapid and painless death. But as some critics have noted, Assisted

suicide does not even

require medical skill. If freeing up patients truly is the goal, then
assisted suicide's advocates disserve patients when they do not advocate
ending the physician's exclusive power to prescribe medication. Ironically,
the advocates of patients rights end up empowering doctors more than
they do patients .18 Yet even those who maintain that technical knowledge is imperative do not confine
their justification of physician-assisted suicide to this reason. Placing suicide under the stewardship of medicine is
further defended as a way of enhancing public accountability of the practice and protecting against abuse.19

From the patient's perspective, the request for aid in dying may mean a
desire for companionship in pursuing a difficult course of action, a wish
for confirmation of a decision about which the patient is unsure or simply
a cry for help (pp. 8889, note 42). Moreover, since suicide is still
stigmatized, seeking a physician's assistance may be a way of trying to
remove that stigma.20 But inasmuch as cultural preconceptions and
loneliness (whatever its source) are far from being exclusively medical
issues, we must ask why we expect doctors to respond to them. Two possible
answers come to mind: either medicine is moving beyond its proper role, or the
scope of medical competence has already been extended beyond
appropriate boundaries. It seems reasonable to conclude that ceding
monopoly of assistance in suicide to doctors is anchored in an inflation of
the physician's role, as well as in the extreme idealization of physicians
character and the relationships they establish with patients. The bond
physicians establish with patients is supposedly effective, collaborative,

and committed.21 Both this idealization and the willingness to delegate to

physicians the exclusive right to assist suicide bespeaks the social and
symbolic power already conferred on medicine and medical professionals
in our societies. In other words, it is not (or not only) the need for technical expertise that impels us to
physician-assisted suicide. Rather, our culture, so impregnated by medicalization, takes for granted
that assisted suicide should fall under the control and supervision of
medicine.

The right to suicide solves the aff it demedicalizes voluntary

death and challenges the states power over life.
Szasz 99 [Thomas S. Szasz, M.D. Psychiatrist and philosopher,
SUICIDE AS A MORAL ISSUE, published in The Freeman, 49: 41-42
(July), 1999, accessed 7/30/14, <http://www.szasz.com/iol2.html>]
//pheft
"Suicide is an event that is a part of human nature. However much may
have been said and done about it in the past, every person must confront
it for himself anew, and every age must come to its own terms with it."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Behind Goethe's simple statement lies a
profound truth: dying voluntarily is a choice intrinsic to human existence.
It is our ultimate, fatal freedom. That is not how the right-thinking person
today sees voluntary death: he believes that no one in his right mind kills
himself, that suicide is a mental health problem. Behind that belief lies a transparent
evasion: relying on physicians to prevent suicide as well as to provide suicide -- and thus avoid the subject of

Not long ago the right-thinking

person believed that masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and other
"unnatural acts" were medical problems whose solution was delegated to
doctors. It took us a surprisingly long time to take these behaviors back from physicians, accept them
comfortably, and speak about them calmly. Perhaps the time is ripe to rethink our
attitude toward suicide and its relation to the medical profession, accept
suicide comfortably, and speak about it calmly. To accomplish this, we
suicide -- is an evasion of personal responsibility fatal to freedom.

must demedicalize and destigmatize voluntary death and accept it as a

behavior that has always been and will always be a part of the human
condition . Wanting to die or killing oneself is sometimes blameworthy, sometimes praiseworthy, and
sometimes neither; it is not a disease; it cannot be a bona fide medical treatment; and it can never justify

Increasing life expectancy, advances in medical technology,

and radical changes in the regulation of drug use and the economics of
health care have transformed how we die. Formerly, most people died at home. Today, most
people die in a hospital. Formerly, patients who could not breathe or whose
kidneys or livers or hearts failed to function died. Now, they can be kept
alive by machines, transplanted organs, and immunosuppressive drugs.
These developments have created choices not only about whether to live
or die but also about when and how to die. Birth and death are unique phenomena. Absent
deprivation of liberty.

celibacy or infertility, practicing birth control -- that is, procreating voluntarily -- is a personal decision. Absent
accidental or sudden death, practicing death control -- that is, dying voluntarily -- is also a personal decision. The
state and the medical profession no longer interfere with birth control. They ought to stop interfering with death
control. Practicing birth control and practicing death control as well as abstaining from these practices have far-

reaching consequences, for both the individual and others. Birth control is important for the young, death control,
for the old. The young are often entrapped by abstaining from birth control, the old, by abstaining from death

As individuals, we can choose to die actively or passively, practicing

death control or dying of disease or old age. As a society, we can choose
to let people die on their own terms or force them to die on terms decreed
by the dominant ethic. Camus maintained that suicide is the only "truly
serious philosophical problem." It would be more accurate to say that
suicide is our foremost moral and political problem , logically anterior to
such closely related problems as the right to reject treatment or the right
to physician-assisted suicide. Faced with a particular personal conduct, we can approve, facilitate,
control.

and reward it; disapprove, hinder, and penalize it; or accept, tolerate, and ignore it. Over time, social attitudes
toward many behaviors have changed. Suicide began as a sin, became a crime, then became a mental illness, and
now some people propose transferring it into the category called "treatment," provided the cure is under the control

Is killing oneself a voluntary act or the product of mental illness?

Should physicians be permitted to use force to prevent suicide? Should they be
of doctors.

authorized to prescribe a lethal dose of a drug for the purpose of suicide? Personal careers, professional identities,
multi-billion dollar industries, legal doctrines, judicial procedures, and the life and liberty of every American hangs

Answering such questions requires no specialized

knowledge of medicine or law. It requires only a willingness to open our
eyes and look life -- and death -- in the eye. Evading that challenge is
on how we answer these questions.

tantamount to denying that we are just as responsible for how we die as

we are for how we live.

The person who kills himself sees suicide as a solution. If the observer views it

as problem, he precludes understanding the suicide just as surely as he would preclude understanding a Japanese
speaker if he assumed that he is hearing garbled English. For the person who kills himself or plans to kill himself,
suicide is, eo ipso, an action. Psychiatrists, however, maintain that suicide is a happening, the result of a disease: as
coronary arteriosclerosis causes myocardial infarction, so clinical depression causes suicide. Set against this mind
set, the view that, a priori, suicide has nothing to do with illness or medicine, which is my view, risks being
dismissed as an act of intellectual know-nothingness, akin to asserting that cancer has nothing to do with illness or

The evidence that suicide is not a medical matter is all around us.
We are proud that suicide is no longer a crime, yet it is plainly not legal; if
it were, it would be illegal to use force to prevent suicide and it would be
legal to help a person kill himself. Instead, coercive suicide prevention is considered a life-saving
treatment and helping a person kill himself is (in most jurisdictions) a felony. Supporters and
opponents of policies concerning troubling social issues -- such as slavery,
pornography, abortion -- have always invoked a sacred authority or creed to justify
the policies they favored. Formerly, God, the Bible, the Church; now, the
Constitution, Law, Medicine. It is an unpersuasive tactic: too many deplorable social policies have
been justified by appeals to Scriptural, Constitutional, and Medical sanctions. The question of who
should control when and how we die is one of the most troubling issues
we face today. The debate is in full swing. Once again, the participants
invoke the authority of the Bible, the Constitution, and Medicine to cast
the decisive ballot in favor of their particular program . It is a spineless gambit:
medicine.

persons who promote particular social policies do so because they believe that their policies are superior to the
policies of their adversaries. Accordingly, they ought to defend their position on the grounds of their own moral

For a long time,

suicide was the business of the Church and the priest. Now it is the
business of the State and the doctor. Eventually we will make it our own
business, regardless of what the Bible or the Constitution or Medicine
supposedly tells us about it.
vision, instead of trying to disarm opponents by appealing to a sanctified authority.

Case
Turn legalizing PAS radicalizes neoliberal biopolitics and
ableism
Golden 5 [Marilyn Golden Policy Analyst for Disability Rights and Education
Fund, Why Assisted Suicide Must Not Be Legalized, Im pretty sure it was
published on 11/17/5, accessed 8/1/14, <http://law.scu.edu/wpcontent/uploads/socialjustice/why_assisted_suicide_must_not_be_legalized.pdf>]
//pheft

The movement for legalization of assisted

suicide is driven by anecdotes of people who suffer greatly in the period
before death. But the overwhelming majority of these anecdotes describes
either situations for which legal alternatives exist today, or situations in
which the individual would not be legally eligible for assisted suicide . It is
A very few helped - a great many harmed.

legal in every U.S. state for an individual to create an advance directive that requires the withdrawal of treatment
under any conditions the person wishes. It is legal for a patient to refuse any treatment or to require any treatment
to be withdrawn. It is legal to receive sufficient painkillers to be comfortable, even if they might hasten death. And if
someone who is imminently dying is in significant discomfort, it is legal for the individual to be sedated to the point
that the discomfort is relieved. Moreover, if someone has a chronic illness that is not terminal, that individual is not
eligible for assisted suicide under any proposal in the U.S., nor under the Oregon Death with Dignity Act (Oregon is
the only state where assisted suicide is legal). Furthermore, any individual whose illness has brought about
depression that affects the individual's judgment is also ineligible, according to every U.S. proposal as well as
Oregon's law. Consequently, the number of people whose situations would actually be eligible for assisted suicide is
extremely low.

The very small number of people who may benefit from

legalizing assisted suicide will tend to be affluent, white, and in

possession of good health insurance coverage. At the same time, large
numbers of people, particularly among those less privileged in society,
would be at significant risk of harm.

Managed care and assisted suicide - a deadly mix.

Perhaps the most significant problem is the deadly mix between assisted
suicide and profit-driven managed health care . Again and again, health
maintenance organizations (HMOs) and managed care bureaucracies have
overruled physicians' treatment decisions. These actions have sometimes hastened patients'
deaths. The cost of the lethal medication generally used for assisted suicide
is about $35 to $50, far cheaper than the cost of treatment for most longterm medical conditions. The incentive to save money by denying
treatment already poses a significant danger. This danger would be far
greater if assisted suicide is legal. Assisted suicide is likely to accelerate
the decline in quality of our health care system. A 1998 study from Georgetown
University's Center for Clinical Bioethics underscores the link between profitdriven managed health care and

research found a strong link between costcutting pressure

on physicians and their willingness to prescribe lethal drugs to patients,
were it legal to do so. The study warns that there must be "a sobering degree of caution in legalizing
assisted suicide. The

[assisted suicide] in a medical care environment that is characterized by increasing pressure on physicians to

The deadly impact of legalizing assisted

suicide would fall hardest on socially and economically disadvantaged
control the cost of care" (Sulmasy et al., 1998).

people who have less access to medical resources and who already find
themselves discriminated against by the health care system . As Paul Longmore,
Professor of History at San Francisco State University and a foremost disability advocate on this subject, has stated,
"Poor people, people of color, elderly people, people with chronic or progressive conditions or disabilities, and
anyone who is, in fact, terminally ill will find themselves at serious risk" (Longmore, 1999). Rex Greene, M.D.,
Medical Director of the Dorothy E. Schneider Cancer Center at Mills Health Center in San Mateo, California and a

"The
most powerful predictor of ill health is [people's] income . [Legalization of
assisted suicide] plays right into the hands of managed care." 2 Supporters of
leader in bioethics, health policy and oncology, underscored the heightened danger to the poor. He said,

assisted suicide frequently say that HMOs will not use this procedure as a way to deal with costly patients. They cite
a 1998 study in the New England Journal of Medicine that estimated the savings of allowing people to die before
their last month of life at $627 million. Supporters argue that this is a mere .07% of the nation's total annual health
care costs. But significant problems in this study make it an unsuitable basis for claims about assisted suicide's
potential impact. The researchers based their findings on the average cost to Medicare of patients with only four
weeks or less to live. Yet assisted suicide proposals (as well as the law in Oregon) define terminal illness as having
six months to live. The researchers also assumed that about 2.7% of the total number of people who die in the U.S.
would opt for assisted suicide, based on reported assisted suicide and euthanasia deaths in the Netherlands. But
the failure of large numbers of Dutch physicians to report such deaths casts considerable doubt on this estimate.
And how can one compare the U.S. to a country that has universal health care? Taken together, these factors would
skew the costs much higher (Rowen, 1999). Fear, bias, and prejudice against disability. Fear, bias, and prejudice
against disability play a significant role in assisted suicide. Who ends up using assisted suicide? Supporters
advocate its legalization by arguing that it would relieve untreated pain and discomfort at the end of life. But all but
one of the people in Oregon who were reported to have used that state's assisted suicide law during its first year
wanted suicide not because of pain, but for fear of losing functional ability, autonomy, or control of bodily functions
(Oregon Health Division, 1999). Oregon's subsequent reports have documented similar results. Furthermore, in the
Netherlands, more than half the physicians surveyed say the main reason given by patients for seeking death is

This fear of disability typically underlies assisted

suicide. Said one assisted suicide advocate, "Pain is not the main reason we want to
die. It's the indignity. It's the inability to get out of bed or get onto the
toilet ... [People] ... say, I can't stand my mother my husband wiping
my behind.' It's about dignity" (Leiby, 1996). But as many thousands of people
with disabilities who rely on personal assistance have learned, needing
help is not undignified, and death is not better than reliance on
assistance. Have we gotten to the point that we will abet suicides because
people need help using the toilet? Diane Coleman, President and Founder of Not Dead Yet, a
grassroots disability organization opposed to legalizing assisted suicide, has written that the "public image
of severe disability as a fate worse than death become(s) grounds for
carving out a deadly exception to longstanding laws and public policies
about suicide intervention services Legalizing assisted suicide means
that some people who say they want to die will receive suicide
intervention, while others will receive suicide assistance. The difference
between these two groups of people will be their health or disability
status, leading to a two-tiered system that results in death to the socially
devalued group" (Coleman, 2002).
"loss of dignity" (Birchard, 1999).

PAS legalization ensures societal racism is manifest in violence

and pressure against black and poor bodies to prematurely
end their lives, reifying racist violence
Pittman 97 Assistant Professor of Law at Mississippi Law

(Larry J., Physician-Assisted Suicide in the Dark Ward: The Intersection of the
Thirteenth Amendment and Health Care Treatments Having Disproportionate
Impacts on Disfavored Groups, pp. 792-793, NG)
the only state interest that arguably might outweigh a terminally ill
persons desire for self-induced death is the interest in protecting a
patient from the adverse consequences of legalized physician-assisted
suicide. This interest assumes added importance where the protection of
disfavored African Americans and other minorities are concerned because they are generally
more vulnerable to physicians abuses and coercion. In furtherance of their patient- protection interests,
states might be concerned about the undue influence and coercion that
physicians, family members, and other persons might assert to force or improperly persuade
terminally ill persons to relinquish their remaining lives in order to reduce
health care expenditures, speed up the conferment of inheritances, and conserve health care resources for healthier patients.
Therefore,

In Compassion in Dying, the Ninth Circuit held that the States interest in preventing those abuses did not outweigh a terminally ill patients interest in
having physician-assisted suicide. That conclusion was based primarily on an assumption that physician-assisted suicide does not expose patients to the
above-stated risk any more than the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments. This analysis sounds more like an equal protection argument than a

Even if one
were to accept the Ninth Circuits conclusion that the terminally ill
patients short life expectancy and the presence of an impartial
physician mitigate against family abuses, there is still the possibility of
physicians and hospitals unmitigated potential for abuses in advocating
physician-assisted suicide to conserve health care costs and to perpetuate
their own racial prejudices.
balancing of the states interests in avoiding abuses against the terminally ill patients interests in physician-assisted suicide.

Physician-assisted suicide occurs against the backdrop of the

biopolitical management of life and health care. Assuming
that PAS is a gesture against biopolitics actually completes the
politicization of life and death by effacing humanitys
expropriation of bare life as the very condition of its entry into
political life.
Kubiak 13 (Anna E., Faculty Member at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology
at Polish Academy of Sciences, Assisted dying in the context of biopower, Interdiscipinary.net: A global network for dynamic research and publishing,
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/wpcontent/uploads/2013/10/kubiaksspaper.pdf, pg. 8-9)
the debate over assisted dying is a continuation of biopower .
Debating in the context of medical rationalisation and legislation submits
issues of life and death into the hands of life administrators, juridicomedical network. Assigning doctors as executors is giving power to
representatives of the medical authority () here, significance lies in
In some sense,

taking away the possibility to decide about oneself and giving it to

somebody else , as no one can freely decide about his own life and death,
each of us has to obtain a social permit for it. It is even necessary to forbid dependence of
life and death on a biological incidence, as it would be a some dose of freedom. Thus, our main moral
imperative is not only do not kill but also do not die at least not in a

way chosen by you you can only die provided that law, supported by
medicine allows you.36 Using Baudrillards words, the issue of death being
not socialised and facing new challenges, becomes an object of
calculations on the political level. The problem of lack of socialising is the
consequence of the biopolitical system. It closes most gates for
decisions against biopower. For example, an individual does not have access to medicaments
causing death (assuming that one knows what is needed and what doses to take to guarantee the expected
result), unless the doctor prescribes it. Further, the doctor will not agree to deliver recipes if it is forbidden by law.
From the other side, the possibility to save ones life by the means of transplantations is an economical argument

It is illusory that an apparent yes to assisted dying is an

opposition to biopower, as it constitutes shortening life. Capitalisation of
health and life in the form of economical calculations, revealed facts of
excessive financial resources assigned for supporting life. In some cases, these are
very high amounts. As Baudrillard writes: It is necessary to make a kind of economical
choice, which is Euthanasia, the half-official doctrine and practice so far.
Philosopher undermines humanitarian aspect of assisted dying as according to him- it perfectly
matches the medium and long-term logics of the system itself. The aim in
this case is empowering the social control. Death is still managed at
controlling institutions: priests are doctors, equipped in life supporting
devices, deciding whether or not to push a button (e.g., a respirator
switch-off) and having means for prolonging or terminating life. National
authorities: courts, coroners, and parliaments, take part in ultimate
decisions. In debates over decisions on terminally ill, they are presented in
categories of bare life. They are mentioned only in the context of the somatic side of life, advantages
for assisted dying.

and losses. The paternalistic way of speaking is also revealed in the discourse of mercy arguments.

Agamben, in his work Homo Sacer, referring to modern debates on

assisted dying, focuses on extreme cases - coma depasse, brain death (in
order to expose bare life), when a person is not able to express their own will.
Decisions regarding these beings, located in an uncertainty zone,
between life and death, seem to be evident examples of how concepts of
life and death become political terms, which acquire a specific meaning
only on the basis of legal decisions.39 Agamben draws a suggestive
image: A reanimation room, in which between life and death neomortos
float, patients in coma de passe and faux vivants (a living body from the
classical definition of death point of view, ready to provide organs for
transplantations - AEK), determines a space of exception, in which bare
life is first manifested, fully controlled by humans and their
technology.40 Thus, it seems evident that assisted dying - lying in the
hands of medical and juridical appliances - is a continuation of biopower.
In fact, many authors share this view .

2NC

PIC
Medicalization is the FRAMEWORK in which thanatopolitics
may exert violence -- increasing the power of physicians over
life gives justification for the creation of bare life and war
Stuart Elden, politics at University of Warwick, 2/29/2002 [The War of Races and
the Constitution of the State: Foucault's Il faut dfendre la socit and the Politics
of Calculation, Boundary,
http://boundary2.dukejournals.org/content/29/1/125.full.pdf]
The reverse side is the power to allow death . State racism is a recoding of
the old

mechanisms of blood through the new procedures of regulation. Racism, as

biologizing , as tied to a state, takes shape where the procedures of intervention

" at

the level of the body , conduct, health , and everyday life, received their
color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the
purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race" (VS, 197; WK, 149). 37 For
example, the old anti-Semitism based on religion is reused under the new rubric of state racism. The integrity and
purity of the race is threatened, and the state apparatuses are introduced against the race that has infiltrated and
introduced noxious elements into the body. The Jews are characterized as the race present in the middle of all races
(FDS, 76). 38

The use of medical language is important . Because certain

groups in society are conceived of in medical terms , society is no longer in

need of being defended from the outsider but from the insider: the
abnormal in behavior, species, or race. What is novel is not the mentality
of power but the technology of power (FDS, 230). The recoding of old problems
is made possible through new techniques. A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a
division or incision between those who must live and those who must die . The
"biological continuum of the human species" is fragmented by the apparition of
races, which are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified as good or inferior, and so forth. The species
is subdivided into subgroups that are thought of as races. In a sense, then, just as
the continuum of geometry becomes divisible in Descartes, 39 the human continuum is divided, that
is, made calculable and orderable, two centuries later . As Anderson has persuasively
argued, to suggest that racism has its roots in nationalism is a mistake. He
suggests that "the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation:
above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to blue' or white' blood and breeding among aristocracies." 40 As
Stoler has noted, for Foucault, it is the other way around: "A discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of
races." 41 But it is a more subtle distinction than [End Page 147] that. What Foucault suggests is that discourses of
class have their roots in the war of races, but so, too, does modern racism; what is different is the biological spin
put on the concepts. 42 But as well as emphasizing the biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive,
to live, one must be prepared to massacre one's enemies, a relation of war. As a relation of war, this is no different
from the earlier war of races that Foucault has spent so much of the course explaining. But when coupled with the
mechanisms of mathematics and medicine in bio-power, this can be conceived of in entirely different ways.

power is able to establish, between my life and the death of the other, a relation that is
warlike

or confrontational

Bionot

but biological : "The more inferior species tend to disappear,

the more abnormal individuals can be eliminated, the less the species will be degenerated, the more Inot as an
individual but as a specieswill live, will be strong, will be vigorous, will be able to proliferate." The death of the
other does not just make me safer personally, but the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the degenerate
or abnormal, makes life in general healthier and purer (FDS, 22728). " The

existence in question is
no longer of sovereignty, juridical ; but that of the population, biological . If

genocide is truly the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a

return today of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and
exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population"
(VS, 180; WK, 136). "If the power of normalization wishes to exercise the ancient sovereign right of killing, it must

if, inversely, a sovereign power, that is to say a power with the right of life and
wishes to function with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology
of normalization, it must also pass through racism" (FDS, 228). This holds for
indirect deaththe exposure to deathas much as for direct killing . While not
pass through racism. And
death,

Darwinism, this biological sense of power is based on evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial relations, the
necessity of wars, criminality, phenomena of madness and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth. The link to
colonialism is central: This form of modern state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The

theme of

the political enemy is extrapolated biologically. But what is important in the shift at the
end of the nineteenth century is that war is no longer simply a way of securing one race by eliminating the other
but of regenerating that race (FDS, 22830). As Foucault puts it in La volont de savoir: [End Page 148]

Wars

are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended;

they are waged on behalf of the existence of all; entire populations are
mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life
necessity . Massacres have become vital [vitauxunderstood in a dual sense, both as essential and
biological]. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that
so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many
men to be killed. (VS, 180; WK, 136)

PAS is an affirmation of the act by official state sanction within

regulation
Yuill 13
Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Sunderland; author, Assisted Suicide: The Liberal Humanist
Case Against Legalization) Kevin https://kevinyuill.wordpress.com/tag/assisted-suicide/

the only real difference between assisted dying and

assisted suicide is that the former has been officially sanctioned by
doctors and by legality . Someone in Oregon with, according to two
doctors, five months left to live who ingests poison is , according to Compassion and
Choices, Dignity in Dying, other proponents of a change in the law and, since 2006, the Oregon Department of Human Services, is
an assisted death. Someone who is dying but has seven months to live who
ingests the same poison is, according to the same sources, an assisted
suicide. The change in terminology, then, is not simply political correctness but
an indication of a new role that proponents envisage for doctors . Importantly,
the rejection of the term suicide implies that the moral taint of suicide in
particular circumstances that are determined by officials, lawmakers and doctors is to
Second, and much more importantly,

be removed . The action of taking ones life is no different in the two scenarios. But the former is given official imprimatur and is therefore an
assisted death (good) instead of a suicide (bad). Such a change has important implications. The obvious one is that, as priests and other religious officials
have departed the deathbed scene, their place has been filled by doctors. For it would be difficult to deny that, in the scenarios outlined in the
introduction, doctors play a spiritual role only. As we shall explore in future chapters, suicide may be accomplished without the aid of official medicine so
they play only an officiating role whereby they dispense deadly drugs that the patient might have bought herself, like a priest placing wafers on the
tongues of his flock. The fact that the doctor gives the poison ritualizes the action within a set of bureaucratic guidelines. The implication for the patient,
similarly, is validation of their suffering. In the past, religious figures comforted the dying by rationalizing suffering as part of Gods plan. Now, should
assisted suicide be institutionalized, physicians will provide an end to depression and mental suffering (as we shall see, physical suffering plays very little
role in requests for assisted suicide) by offering death as a medical treatment. The change in terminology reflects an important shift away from moral
responsibility for the act. Whereas the right to die, self-determination and assisted suicide all imply that the individual involved takes full responsibility for
the act, assignation of moral responsibility for assisted dying is more diffuse. Importantly, such an apparently facile change lumps together very different

things in moral terms killing another person and suicide. Suppose I make a pact with my friend that, should I ever support a soccer team other than
Arsenal, he should kill me and, twenty years later, I arrive to meet him with a Tottenham Hotspur shirt and he kills me. Alternately, suppose I agreed, upon
meeting him with the offending shirt, that I should be killed for my lack of loyalty and for now supporting such a ridiculous football team. Suppose I then
asked him for his gun and shot myself. These two very different acts might be construed as assisted dying (to satisfy Dignity in Dying criteria, let us also
say that, at the time, I had less than six months to live), though, in a court of law, the former would be murder and the latter suicide. Though the effect
would be the same for me (and, being dead, the question of my responsibility moot) and though my friend might bear some responsibility even if I pulled
the trigger, the two acts are profoundly different for him. Yet the concept of assisted dying essentially equates these two different acts. In fact, as we shall

courts, where individuals are tried to

determine the degree of their responsibility for a crime , are less
appropriate than professional regulatory tribunals, where the question
becomes whether or not a set of regulations has been followed properly.
Rather than self-determining actors who choose our own fates, we become points
discuss in Chapter 6, negating moral responsibility means that

on an increasingly complex flow chart, requiring a huge apparatus of bureaucratic experts. If we accept Dignity in Dyings
suggestion that assisted dying involves only those who are considered to be dying, an essentially philosophical question is
determined by a professional regulatory body. There is little agreement on this issue even between advocates. Oregons and
Washingtons legislation (and that contained in proposed UK legislation) define the dying as those with a terminal illness and six
months to live whereas the UK Commission on Assisted Dying recommended that the subject be terminally ill and have 12 months
or less to live. If the phrase suffering unbearably is employed as it was in the proposed UK legislation, how will that be determined?
Again,

there is little clarity and great scope for regulations at every step of

the process .[18] The assisted suicide legislation and proposed legislation has created a new identity in the dying. But the division between
the dying whether they have six or 12 months to live and the rest of us is false. Who is not dying one day at a time? We are all terminal, and the
worth of our lives should not be crudely measured by the time we have left. Nor is dying a medical act; long before any medical intervention occurred,
people were dying without any intervention at all. As Daniel Callahan has noted, there is now a tendency to view death as something that is done to us
rather than something that occurs, as if death were now our fault, the result of human choices, not the independent workings of nature. As the old joke
has it, life itself is a sexually transmitted disease that is always fatal. The difference between someone with less than six months to live and someone with
many years is quantitative rather than qualitative. The dying as a category are, in actuality, those who have little time left or, more controversially, as we
shall explore in the next chapter, the elderly.[19] Such a term also obscures the historically different motivations behind the campaign. Autonomy, in the
classical sense, implies the freedom to terminate ones own life with no intrusion by the state or anyone else. Compassion might (mistakenly) motivate
people to support a campaign for the dying to be put out of their misery. As expressed in the example above, if we support legalization of assisted dying,
either we support selective suicides or selective killings. As we shall see in the next chapter, the movement for assisted dying builds upon distrust of
medical personnel; none of the campaigns in the English-speaking world call for more power for doctors. As Professor Ray Tallis, prominent patron of the
English proponent of a change in the law Dignity in Dying, notes, It is one of the fundamental principles of medicine that you should be allowed to
determine what is in your own best interest when you are of sound mind. Nobody elses views should be able to over-ride this right.[20] Yet the voices of
doctors, should assisted suicide be institutionalized, will, as we will see in Chapter 6, will be the loudest in these decisions. Criticisms of this re-branding of
suicide are not all from the anti-assisted suicide side. Such seasoned advocates of assisted suicide/dying as Derek Humphry have also questioned it.
Reacting to news that the Oregon Department of Human Services chose in 2006 to replace references to assisted suicide with assisted dying, Humphrey
noted: To wrap up our support for physician-assisted suicide in fancy language invites our critics to say that we are trying to change the law covertly and
that we are ashamed of being frank about what we really want, neither of which is true. The Commission on Dying also refused to jettison the term
assisted suicide, referring to assisted dying as both assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia.[21 ]

The real issue at the

heart of the debate one which is obscured by the term assisted dying
is suicide, not dying. The question at the heart of this debate is whether
we wish to pre-approve suicide in certain circumstances .

An affirmation of death through thanatopolitics can explode

the exceptional limits of biopolitics.
Murray 2008 [Stuart, Thanatopolitics: Reading Agamben in Rejoinder to
Biopolitical Life, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 5.2]
Foucault marks the important shift from classical biopower to modern biopolitics. Classical biopower is summed up
as the sovereign decision to take life or let live, whereas modern biopolitics is conceived as the power to make
live and let die.8 The decision to kill or let live is replaced with a productive biopolitics that is twofold, that
makes live and lets die. Death becomes a consequence*a necessary part*of living. Such death is too easily
elided and dismissed. Nobody is killed, at least not directly, and nobodys hands are bloodied, at least not that we
can see; the crimes are outsourced to penal colonies, through extraordinary rendition become ordinary,
obfuscated by State bureaucracy, and covered up by one media spectacle after another. These deaths are never
caused as such; officially, they are merely allowed, a passive event, collateral damage. But biopolitical logic
requires them. In order that 204 S. J. Murray we may live, live well and live fully, they must die, the distinction
between the virtuous citizen and the other excluded as bare life, disposable life. Here we might think of the
neomort kept alive for organ harvesting, the deaths resulting from pharmaceutical testing in poorer parts of the
globe, or the repatriated corpses of US soldiers forbidden from entering public speech through a media
moratorium. In the space that remains, I will take up the question of death in order to protest the biopolitical logic
that continues to define its terms. I believe that

Agambens conception of biopolitics is not

radical enough because it is informed by the logic of the exception-essentially a juridical logic derived from Schmitt . Agamben states that the exception is
an inclusive-exclusion or an exclusive-inclusion,9 both included and excluded from the juridical.10 Here the
juridical appears to be more originary and encompassing than the political .
This follows from what some might call a problematic reading of Aristotle on Agambens part, and so I will return to
Aristotle to suggest how both the living and the dead fall within the sphere of the political, marking a threshold
(one of Agambens frequently used terms) that is perhaps not just within the sovereigns power to bridge juridically.
In other words, Aristotles more radical conception of the political allows us to see how death exceeds, in some

we might look toward what I

would call the productive bafflement of death as a way to interrupt, to
momentarily suspend, or to meaningfully subvert biopolitical logic through
thanatopolitics. While space does not here permit a full discussion of whether Aristotle includes zoe within
sense, the juridical logic of the exception. Following recent work,11

the sphere of the political, it is worth citing a passage that Agamben himself cites when he distinguishes the
simple fact of living from politically qualified life,12 zoe from bios. The polis, according to Aristotle, comes into
being for the sake of living [tou zen], but continues to be for the sake of living well [tou eu zen].13 Thus, it is the
good life, happiness, or Aristotelian eudaimonia that binds a community together, and sustains that community

While Agamben begins with and focuses exclusively

on life and its negation through juridical decisionism (to take life or let
live), it is important to note that for the Ancient Greeks life and death go
hand-in-hand. Attic tragedy makes this clear, and we glimpse this in Aristotle, too, when
he reflects on eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics. Should eudaimonia
be attributed to the dead? While he defines eudaimonia as virtuous
activity of the soul, and thus not properly a part of death, Aristotle
nevertheless admits that he is baffled when describing what causes eudaimonia: It would be
odd . . . if the dead man were to share in these changes and become at
one time happy, at another wretched; while it would also be odd if the
fortunes of the descendants did not for some time have some effect on the
happiness of their ancestors.14 Certainly, these effects make sense if we believe that our honors
over time as a polis, politically.

and disgraces are intimately entwined with those of our friends and relatives, both living and dead. Surely we lose
some of our humanity if we see death as no more than the cessation or negation of life, little more than the
registration and identification of determinate biometrical data. Indeed, Aristotle proceeds to claim that we who are
Thanatopolitics 205 living must be mindful of our actions and how they will affect the dead because to fail to do so

Eudaimonia seems to
cross the threshold of life and death, suggesting a kind of political agency
in death itself, a power that might act on us to bind together or to sustain
a living community in friendship and shared beliefs and values. While we
might deride or dismiss this as ancient superstition, we must wonder why
we turn our faces from the dead, why the Bush Administration forbids us
to see images of the war dead, why they cover up photographs from Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo, and why there is a taboo against the defilement
of the dead. And what should we make of those lives that are martyred and exalted only in death? How are
would be too unfriendly [lian aphilon] and would contravene accepted beliefs.15

they memorialized? Do we not have a responsibility, a calling, a regard for the dead? Might this ethic promise an
alternative political representation, one that refuses the negation of embodied experience and challenges the
seemingly absolute morality of biopolitical life? A politics of death might, then, be a strategy for the productive
rethinking of biopolitics, from the technological apparatus that kills to the media apparatus that defines its terms
and mobilizes public perception and morality. Agamben writes: What the State cannot tolerate in any way . . . is
that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any
representable condition of belonging.16 Across the threshold that separates life and death, we might accept the
living and the dead as co-belonging in such a way that thwarts the concretion of identity, identity politics, and
representability. We might appreciate in death a pre-political community ethic that is more than the negation of life
or the moral failure to live, more than the production of biopolitical life that is presumed to be foundational.

First, their first Hanafin article says that the foundation of

liberalism is vitapolitics the only way to resist is to stylize our
own death the aff is just part of a broader narrative of state
control that the PIC solves.
Hanafin 9 [Hanafin, Patrick, University of London, Birkbeck College, School of
Law, "Rights of passage: law and thebiopolitics of dying" Deleuze and Law: Forensic
Futures. (2009),
http://www.academia.edu/3323193/Rights_of_passage_law_and_the_biopolitics_of_d
ying, RSR]
When an individual goes before the law to claim this right not to live,
judges, in a futile effort to put death on hold , talk, animatedly and
excitedly, about life. It is vital from the point of view of legal and political
elites that the insubordinate citizen is seen to be managed. The ultimate
threat to a legal order built on death control is the individual who refuses
to accept laws prohibition and seeks to self-style her death . She refuses
to be styled by laws speech . In self-styling ones death one is choosing to affirm ones life and the
desire not to live a degraded existence.1 This act is lost on those blinded by a conservative morality which opposes

This majoritarian politics of survival or vitapolitics attempts to

arrest death by composing a narrative which valorises Life . In other words, the
death to life.

states interest in preserving life becomes the interest in preserving the

life of the state . The state attempts to put death to work in the service of life. However, as Lars Iyer
reminds us, every attempt to put death to work is contested by dying itself, that is, by the other Lazarus who
refuses to rise and come towards us (Iyer, 2004, p. 153). A STRANGE KIND OF PROSOPOPOEIA2

The liberal

social compact is built on the desire to survive . In this schema man looks constantly
ahead to the moment of his death and his legacy. This becomes the be all and end all of life in the shadow of death.

it becomes the foundation of the modern liberal order with the

creation of the social contract as a means of survival, as a temporary
immunity from death (see further Cavarero, 1995, pp. 5790). The legal regulation of choosing how one
Indeed

dies reveals that the individuals power to decide how she lives or dies is ignored at best or curbed at worst. The

The terminally ill

person who desires to die is prevented from doing so by legal obstacles .
This is part of a wider management of individual lives or what Jean
power to decide is taken from the individual in the name of an abstract notion of Life.

Baudrillard has termed death control . In this paradigm what we witness is: a forced life for
lifes sake agony prolonged at all costs whether we execute people or compel their survival the essential
thing is that the decision is withdrawn from them

anyhow

(Baudrillard, 1993, p. 174).

you shall not die, not in any old way,

Next, their Smith evidence also a neg card says that we

have to challenge the distinction between active and passive
death we do that.
Smith 8 [Steven D. Smith, Law prof, "De-Moralized: Glucksberg in the Malaise"
Michigan Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 8, Symposium on Glucksberg and Quill at Ten:
Death, Dying, and the Constitution (Jun., 2008), pp. 1571-1591, RSR]
The failure of the Courts efforts to justify the distinction between killing and letting die in Washington and New
Yorks laws might tempt us to conclude that these laws were unconstitutional on equal-protection or substantivedue-process grounds. This was precisely what the appellate courts had concluded.33 Still, it is, or should be, no light
matter to dismiss as irrational a distinction that has been so long and so widely embraced.34 So perhaps a second

Might there be more to the killingletting die distinction than

meets the eye? We might begin by noticing a slightly different formulation
that continually pops up in this context: proponents of the traditional
distinction suggest that administering a lethal drug is killing while
refusing life-sustaining treatment is merely letting nature take its
course. In this vein, Chief Judge Griesa of the Southern District of New York observed in Quill that it is
hardly unreasonable or irrational for the State to recognize a difference
between allowing nature to take its course, even in the most severe
situations, and intentionally using an artificial death-producing device .35
look is in order.

The locution implies that there is a normative dimension intrinsic to something like a natural course of life and
that actions are distinguishable by whether they artificially interfere with that natural course or instead respect and
defer to it.

This again is an elusive notion . But we may get some help from a surprising source

Ronald Dworkin. We believe, Dworkin asserts, that a successful human life has a certain natural course. It starts
in mere biological developmentconception, fetal development, and infancybut it then extends into childhood,

These stages
combine to form a natural course of human life.37 And the termination
of life at any stage before natural death is regrettable as a kind of
cosmic shame.38 This last phrase is quietly and perhaps inadvertently portentous. It transforms what might
adolescence, and adult life . . . . It ends, after a normal life span, in a natural death.36

otherwise be taken as a purely descriptive statementas a matter of empirical fact, human lives often follow a
pattern of conception, infancy, adolescence, and so forthinto a deeply normative claim. But that transformation

The view outlined by Dworkin seems to commit the

classic fallacy of deriving an ought from an is . Human lives often do in fact
follow a typical course; therefore, Dworkin seems to say, human lives
should follow that course, and it is a cosmic shame if they do not . At least
since Hume, we know that such inferences of moral ought norms from natural is facts
reflect a fundamental error in reasoning . Dont we? Indeed, the attempt to draw normative
would provoke strenuous objections.

conclusions from biological facts seems a particularly egregious form of this error. Isnt this much like the kind of
preKitty Hawk thinking that insisted, If humans had been meant to fly, wed have been given wings? Isnt it the
same type of thinking that leads some people to draw dubious inferences about the proper role of womenor the
natural form of sexuality, or the impermissibility of some kinds of genetic research or technologyfrom mere
biological facts? Perhaps. Surely one plausible response to Dworkins assertion is that even if his statement is
accurate as a description of widely held opinions, those opinions are transparently fallaciousand hence incapable
of providing a normative justification for a law restricting liberty. Before peremptorily dismissing the appeal to

we might pause to notice that

even the judges in Glucksberg and Quill who rejected the states
reasoning and who most insisted on personal autonomy as the decisive
criterion quietly betrayed a lingering commitment to the same kind of
logic. These judges tacitly agreed that there is a vital and normatively
significant difference between some self-chosen deaths that are natural
and others that are not. Although favoring a right to physician-assisted suicide, they carefully limited
natures course as a basis for normative judgments, however,

that right to terminally ill patients.39 And their explanations for this limit were terse but suggestive. Judge
Rothstein, the district judge in Glucksberg, ruled against the state but explained that the right to assistance in dying

the State has a strong, legitimate

interest in deterring suicide by young people and others with a significant
natural life span ahead of them.40 Judge Wright, dissenting from the Ninth Circuits panel
should be limited to the terminally ill because [o]bviously,

decision reversing Judge Rothstein, conceded the states interest in preserving life and preventing suicide but
argued that this interest diminishes as natural death approaches.41 Judge Reinhardt, writing for the en banc Ninth
Circuit majority, declared the Washington prohibition an unconstitutional infringement on the liberty of terminally ill
patients. But

he also emphasized that the state has a valid interest in

discouraging suicide by those who are not terminally ill because in these
instances, suicide would amount to the senseless loss of a life ended
prematurely .42 Conversely, suicide in the case of a terminally ill person is not tragic or senseless, Judge
Reinhardt opined, because death does not come too early.43 These pronouncements were in
tension with these judges heavy emphasis on individual autonomy as the
decisive consideration and their dismissal of the states own naturalcourse logic. Nonetheless, the assumption running through these comments is discernible: human
beings enjoy a natural life span, and even a competent persons selfchosen death that occurs before the fulfillment of that natural span is
normatively to be regretted. Such a death is senselessperhaps even a cosmic shame?
because it is premature or too early, and the state is accordingly entitled to discourage or prevent such
unnatural deaths.

When death is controlled it becomes a material description of

our being, where the state can threaten life to make us
productive. The social body is its own politic, and permitting
relative control over life enables the social body to be
rendered incapable of productive activity and thus
exterminated
Crome 9( Kieth, senior lecturer in Philodophy at Manchester Metropolitan
University, Parrhesia Journal, Number 6, 46-61 The Nihilistic Affirmation of Life:
Biopower and Biopolitics in The will to Knowledge accessed 9/15/14 KR)
In the 197576 lecture course Society Must be Defended, Foucault succinctly
summarised the two-fold orientation of power that I have just outlined, declaring
that:
To say that power took possession of life in the nineteenth century, or to
say that power at least takes life under its care in the nineteenth century, is to say
that it has, thanks to the play of technologies of discipline on the one hand and
technologies of regulation on the other, succeeded in covering the whole
surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between body
and population.35 The point of Foucaults analysis has been understood in two
ways. First, and as Foucault himself says, he sought to reverse the traditional
understanding of modernity in which the exercise of power in both philosophical and
political terms has been seen as overwhelmingly seeking to deny the reality of the
body in favour of the soul, consciousness, ideality. In fact, as Foucault shows,
nothing is more material, physical, corporeal, than the exercise of power

in modernity. Second, the discovery of biopower and in particular

biopolitics is taken to affirm that there is increasingly an identity between
man as a political being and man as a living being: the furtherance of pure
life has increasingly become the sole object and end of all politics. What I
now want to show is how the bio-political affirmation of pureor merelife both
transforms and reveals the historical being of the Occident. In order to do this I will
turn to the matter that gave this essay its title, namely the question of the relation
between life and death under the bio-political regime. For Foucault, the emergence
of biopower is instrumental to the development of capitalism. Crucially, what
occurred in Western countries in the eighteenth century was, according to Foucault,
the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of
knowledge and power (Foucault, 141 42). Certainly, the biological had always
exerted a pressure on the history of cultures and civilisations; but the drama of its
history had always been a drama of death, a drama played out on its vastest stage
through the forms of famine and epidemic. The economic developments of the
early classical age allowed some relief from these threats, whilst the
knowledge concerned with life, permitting a relative control over life and
the aversion of the threat of death. The hold of death was checked. In the
space opened-up power and knowledge were able to assume greater
responsibility for life processes, and to undertake to modify and control
them. The fact of living, Foucault writes, was no longer an inaccessible substrate
that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality;
part of it passed into knowledges field of control and powers sphere of
intervention (Foucault,142). Knowledge-power became biopower: a series of
mechanisms, techniques and technologies that transformed human life. Whilst the
great institutions of the state ensured the maintenance of the relations of
production, biopolitics and anatomo-politics as techniques of power ensured the
development of the economic processes and the forces that supported those
processes. That is, if the disciplinary techniques that emerged in the classical age
facilitated the insertion of bodies into the processes of industrial production,
ordering and mechanising bodies, increasing their productivity, maximising their
utility without at the same time making them harder to govern, then the techniques
and technologies of biopower enabled the adjustment of the population to the same
economic processes. However, where the focus of disciplinary techniques is to train
the individual by working at the level of the body, the focus of biopower is upon
regularising the basic phenomena affecting species life. In this sense, biopower is
not only concerned with demographics, but also with a whole series of
related phenomena which affect, or better incapacitate, individuals,
rendering them incapable of productive activity, of labouring in order to
obtain the basic conditions requisite for continuing to live, such as
accidents, illnesses and old-age. Thus as an expression of biopower there is the
wide-spread development of such measures as insurance, individual and collective
savings, and safety measures,36 all of which were not mere epiphenomena of
capitalism, but intrinsic to its possibility. It is in relation to the development of
biopower and biopolitics that one must situate Marxism, and it is an index of both
the greatness and the limitation of Marx that his thought can be so situated. The
political project that is formulated by Marx challenges the general system of power,

not by articulating a return to former rights, or by the ideal of the restoration of a

Golden Age; nor so much by articulating the coming of a kingdom of the poor, but
by demanding life, understood as the basic needs, mans concrete essence, the
realisation of his potential, a plenitude of the possible (Foucault, 145). If this was a
mark of Marxs greatness it is because it was a concrete intervention within the field
of forces that were coming to propel the political agenda of Western countries, since
life as a political object was taken at face value and turned back against the
system that was bent on controlling it (Foucault, 145). If it was a mark of Marxs
limitation it is because the political and strategic efficacy entailed a certain
blindness to the basic dynamic that made it possible, Marx being unable to grasp
the level at which history and the political was being effectively shaped. As far as I
am aware Foucault does not himself explicitly make this judgement about the
limitations of Marxs thought, or at least he does not do so in The Will to Knowledge.
Whilst I think there are good grounds for supposing the claim to be warranted in
terms of Foucaults work I have not yet said enough to support my own making it.
Before doing so, and in order to do so, it is necessary to remark that it is not a
matter of making a judgement about the adequacy or inadequacy of Marxs
thought, since what is at issue is what Foucault called the epistemic conditions of
that thought, that is, the archaic level which makes possible both knowledge itself
and the mode of being of what is to be known.37 It is the intrinsic epistemic
finitude of thought that at once makes Marxs discourse true, effective and limited.
What is at issue in this limitation, then, is not a cognitive or philosophical
inadequacy that could be overcome by thought alone. Rather, it is an historical
limitation that binds Marxs work to the fate of the political in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. In order to draw this out, or at least provide the grounds that
might justify such a judgement, it is necessary to turn once more to the
question of life and death, this time less to situate what Foucault says
about biopower and biopolitics, but to make clear the nature of the
historical and political consequences that emerge from it. Traditionally,
power has always measured itself in relation to death . The ancient patria
potestas, the power of the patriarch as a power over, was, Foucault
observes, essentially the power to dispose of the life of his children and
slaves, the power to take life or let live. So too in Plato, prior to the Roman
formulation of the right of the despot to demand the life of his slaves and children,
the individual was empowered, intellectually as well as politically, through a direct
confrontation with death. In the Phaedo Socrates performs all the necessary
religious observances prior to his execution, including the versification of Aesops
fables, because his daimon had always instructed him to make music. Whilst he had
thought philosophy the highest form of music, he is now not sure if he performs
these religious duties because in death he is returned to the gods whose possession
he is. For Socrates, then, in death we return to those whose subjects and
possessions we are; the direct sovereignty of the state gives way to the
direct sovereignty of the gods. Nevertheless, if in this sense death
deprives us of power, in another sense, for Socrates, it does not: it is by
confronting death that we are empowered , enjoying or coming to enjoy
an authority over ourselves in the sense that we divest ourselves of the

despotic authority of the body, and place the soul in charge of itself . This
characteristic privilege of sovereign power to decide life and death,
as Foucault puts it, was greatly diminished by the classical theoreticians.
No longer could the sovereign exercise his power in an absolute way; the
right to decide life and death was hedged and qualified. Only when his or
her life was in danger could the sovereign demand the life of his or her
subjects. If he or she were threatened by external enemies then the
sovereign could demand that those over whom he or she ruled risk their
life in defence of the state. On the other hand, if the sovereigns subjects
directly threatened his or her life, or his or her laws, then he or she could rightfully
demand their life: punishing them by execution. Diminished or undiminished,
qualified or absolute, the right to life and the right to death are dissymmetrical: the
sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill or by refraining
from killing (Foucault, 136). The power over life is effective only through
death. As part of the mutation that Foucault describes in terms of the emergence
of biopower, a power that is bent on generating forces, making them grow, and
ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit,
or destroying them (Foucault, 136), there is a shift in the exercise of power over
death and life. Instead of death-dealing, power becomes life-administering. The
social body has the right to ensure, maintain or develop its life, and where
the sovereign, or sovereign state, demands death this is always a demand
issued in terms of, or with the aim of, the furtherance of life . What happens,
then, when the furtherance of life becomes an end-in-itself? For Foucault there is a
profound shift in the nature of the political projects of the Occident: for millennia,
he remarks, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the
additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics
places his existence as a living being in question (Foucault, 143). As is well-known,
for Aristotle, the end of politics is the good-life, but (and as has been pointed out by
many thinkers, Arendt and Agamben among them) he distinguishes between
simple, natural life and its good or goods, and political life and its good.38 The good
of simple, natural life concerns merely the pleasant, the good of political life
concerns goodness and justice. The good of simple, natural life, that is, the
pleasant, is a good shared by all animals; the good of political life, goodness as
such, and justice, is peculiar to man, who is zoon politikon. We can, then, answer
the question about what happens when the furtherance of life becomes an end-initself, by way of another question: what happens when human life identifies the
good-life with the prolongation of life itself? Or, and at the risk of piling question on
question: what is the condition of the political when its condition, in the
Foucauldian sense, is simply the furtherance of mere life? In short, the
answer is that what happens to the political in these circumstances is that it falls
out of its own essential element, and is incapable of maintaining itself as
what it is. Foucaults invocation of the Aristotelian definition of the human
being as zoon politikon and its transformation is instructive. The Greeks,
Aristotle among them, distinguished between the political life, which was concerned
with a good that did not relate to necessity, but to freedom, and the life of the
household, the oikos, in which the role of the despotes was to secure the necessities

for the sustenance and reproduction of mere life. With the transformation of which
Foucault speaks, the political declines into the merely economic: the sustenance of
a life of freedomboth the precondition and the telos of the political for the Greeks
becomes supplanted by the administration of mere, biological, life. Although to
my knowledge Foucault rarely, if ever, speaks of or in terms of what, following
Nietzsche, philosophy has designated as the nihilism of Occidental history, here we
find something that it would not be wrong to designate by such a name, if it is right
to maintain that the political, for the Greeks, was one of the highest ways of life (a
bioi in the true sense of the word), grounded on and grounding human freedom. For
this movement, this transformation, is nothing other than the devaluation of the
highest values, and the expression of a political will that wills the end of politics.
Such a will heralds the advent of what Nietzsche called the last man, that type of
human who solely wills his own preservation, and thus wills not to will. Doubtless
this is why Foucault is moved to conclude that what emerges from out of this
transformation of politics, power, and the relation between power and life and death
is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political
techniques.39 In a sense it would be to press a point, but in effect this is what
constitutes the historical limitation of Marxs work, for Marx is unable to see this
devaluation of the political, and is not himself a political thinker, but an economic
one. I can underline this devaluation of politics, the nihilism of the fate of the
political in the Occident, which Foucaults work traces, by coming back, once more,
to the question of life and death. As Arendt has pointed out, for the Greeks entry
into the political realm required that one be prepared to put ones life at stake; one
attained to freedom by risking ones life, first because, leaving the realm of the
household in order to attend to the affairs of the city, was to leave behind
that realm in which one secured the necessity requisite to survival, and
secondlyand doubtless for associated reasonstoo great an attachment
to life was a sign of slavishness.40 Might one not say, then, that what emerges
from out of a politics that is concerned with the preservation of life is and this is an
inappropriate term, given what I have just said, but I can think of no othera
politics of ressentiment, a truly re-active politics (and thus not a politics at all). It is
only by recognising this that it is possible to understand the paradox of the
biopolitical. As Foucault remarks, if since the classical age, the mechanisms of
power of the West have undergone a profound modification, seeking to generate
forces, make them grow and ordering them, rather than functioning negatively, as a
power of deduction; if, moreover, power has, in the form of biopolitics,
become life-administering, it is nevertheless the case that wars were
never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all
things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their
own populations (Foucault, 136-7).

1NR

Case
Profit incentives for hospitals ensure legalized physician
assisted suicide will be deliberately used on the poor
population - causes massive social stratification.
Watts 10 -

faculty of the School of Social Work of the University of Texas at Arlington (Thomas, The For-Profit
Social Welfare Policy Sector and End-of-Life Issues: A Troublesome Ethical Mixture, Published in VOL. 101, NO. 1-2
January-February, 2010, http://socialjusticereview.org/articles/the-for-profit-social-welfare-policy-sector-and-end-oflife-issues-a-troublesome-ethical)

The for-profit orientation is so strong that even life-and-death concerns often

get run over quite easily by human-service corporations, eager to make a profit.
Wesley J. Smith notes that Dutch euthanasia policies are carried out in a welfare-state health care system of virtually universal health coverage. 21 This contrasts with the highly

For-profit HMOs in the U. S. are known to

punish physicians financially for providing care that the HMO deems
unnecessary, when in fact such care is necessary in the overall treatment plan. This is all taking place in a rapidly
privatized, corporate U. S. health care system, where large numbers of people have no coverage.

changing and financially imperiled health care system. Rising costs and declining coverage by employers are occurring at the same time. 22 Interestingly, Wesley Smith goes on to say

The U. S. experience with the death culture would likely be far worse than that in the
Netherlands. 23 Whether this would in fact be the case may be open to discussion. But assuredly, the profit motive in American
health care is so powerful as to seem to throttle other considerations. The
culture-of-death environment, now more troublesome and far-reaching with the advent of cloning, embryonic stem cell research and other
developments, paves the way for profit-oriented health care to blaze new and
deleterious paths. This mix of corporate for-profit health care with growing numbers of the aged and growing numbers of survivors of serious accidents and
that because of all these factors,

diseases makes for a troublesome brew. The late Michael Harrington once said that medical technology is wondrous, yet it somehow comes back to haunt us. Medical technology is
keeping people alive longer and longer, creating the future possibility of unprecedented social-welfare policy challenges. There is talk of a coming generational storm. 24 Caring for a
growing aged population may indeed call for the wisdom of Solomon, 25 and we are warned of major financial and other challenges ahead. 26 Huge fiscal debts compound the
problems we are facing. As of this writing, the national debt is $8.36 trillion, and Congress is preparing to raise the federal debt limit for the fifth time in four years, to nearly $10 trillion.
This is almost double the $5.7 trillion gross federal debt of fiscal 2001, when President George W. Bush took office. With all of this, many economists fear that a debt crisis lies ahead. 27
Indeed, the cost to the U. S. of two protracted wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, amounts to $10 billion a month, up from $8.2 billion only a year ago. Costs were $48 billion in 2003, $59 billion
in 2004, $81 billion in 2005, and an anticipated $94 billion in 2006. 28 The war in Iraq is consuming over $1.4 billion a weekor $200 million a day. . . The war has cost $200 billion
already. Economists have estimated the wars ultimate bill will be $1-2 trillion. . . 29 The war is taking a terrible toll on the Iraqi people and our military personnel, as well as on the
region, our nation, and the world. 30 The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has stated that the very costly conflict in Iraq demands a major commitment of human and
financial resources, but Iraq cannot become an excuse for ignoring other pressing needs at home and abroad, especially our moral responsibilities toward the poor in our nation and in
developing countries. 31 Social Security and Medicare face significant challenges in the years ahead. The Dependency Ratio is the number of workers paying into the Social Security
system to support one retired recipient. It has changed significantly, from 5-to-1 in 1960 to 3.4-to-1 in 2001, with projections of 2-to-1 in 2025. 32 Medicare may face even more
formidable challenges than Social Security in the years ahead. The combination of rapidly-increasing health care costs, a growing aged population, sophisticated medical technology,
prescription drug costs and other factors has contributed to the pressures on Medicare. Medicare benefit payments have taken an increasing share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over
the years, from 0.74% in 1970 to (projected) 4.7% in 2030 and 9.0% in 2075. 33 The sheer size of Medicare is enormous. After Social Security, Medicare is the largest social insurance
programme in the U. S., and the largest public payer for health care (about one-fifth of all health care spending in 2000). 34 Both Medicare and Medicaid contribute to for-profit social
welfare coffers. Payments for nursing-home-care accounts are a significant share of the Medicaid budget. The federal government and the states share in covering Medicaid costs, and
the burden is growing yearly. Increasing Medicaid costs are one of the biggest challenges facing states today. The growth of the for-profit nursing-home industry has paralleled the growth
of Medicaid expenditures. For-profit hospitals are also heavily dependent on Medicare money. The mixed economy of welfare 35 implies the coexistence, as the major components of
social welfare, of the governmental, the voluntary non-profit, and the corporate for-profit sectors. The two latter are private-sector entities, both heavily dependent on governmental
revenues. They can be ethically compromised by the governments laws, financial support, and philosophical assumptions. The following cardinal example of this ethical compromise has
been explicated well by John B. Shea, M.D. 36 The National Research Act of 1974 resulted, by Congressional order, in the production of the Belmont Report, a seminal document which
espoused a set of ethical principles that has permeated all dimensions of medical ethics. The Belmont ethics derive from the philosophy of Kant, Mill and Rawls, and contradict Catholic
ethics. Natural law and divine law are ignored, and medical ethics today have come into thrall to a postmodernist ideology with Kantian roots. Kant espoused a critical philosophy
[which] undermined the status of metaphysics [and] revolutionized epistemology. 37 For Kant, who has been called the father of postmodernism, one cannot achieve either rational or
empirical knowledge of the first principles of metaphysics. 38 Kant has had a significant impact on social welfare policies. 39 One can see where this might be leading, vis--vis social
policiesto an ultimate denial of objective truth and the natural law, moving toward the slippery slope of euthanasia policies that enshrine human freedom and autonomy (a Kantian
ideal) with such dicta as the right to die (paralleling the right-to-choose language of the pro-choicers). According to Kant, the death of dogma is the beginning of morality. 40
Richard C. Eyer states that there are three things that are characteristic of postmodern medicine: the shift from moral to ethical medicine, the shift from community to autonomy, and
the shift from healing to relief of suffering. He goes on to say that Hume and Kant introduced the notion of autonomy into modern ethics, so much so that in medicine today, the
autonomy of the patients self-legislating will is recognized as the methodology of ethics. 41 Perhaps the liberal euthanasia legislation of the Netherlands and some other European

The driving acquisitive force of the profit motive trumps end-of-life

concerns, and causes the natural law to be ignored. But business enterprises have an obligation to consider the good of persons and not only the increase of profits. 42
countries is an example of this kind of thinking.

And Pope John Paul II quotes St. Thomas Aquinas on natural lawthe rational creatures participation in the eternal lawgoing on to say that the Church has often made reference to
the Thomistic doctrine of natural law, including it in her own teaching on morality. 43 Unfortunately, the prevailing tide of Kantianism, postmodernism and secularism has blinded many
Catholics to these great truths. Thus, we have a concatenation of forces besieging medical ethics and health policiesthe profit motive of the for-profit social welfare sector; a
postmodernist philosophical climate, growing aged populations; and rapidly increasing health care costs. These and other factors all contribute to a troublesome ethical mixture which
could become worse in the future, with inevitable Medicare and Medicaid cuts by government, reducing the bottom line for for-profit hospitals and producing cuts by these hospitals for

If assisted suicide
were legalized, managed-care providers would inevitably embrace it as a moneysaving technique, notes Eric Pavlat. He continues by stating that a study reported that doctors who are costconscious and practice resource-conserving medicine were six times more likely to write illegal, lethal
prescriptions for their terminally ill patients. He discusses the experience of the physician-assisted suicide programme in
Oregon, and asks whether there is any doubt how profit-minded managed-care providers would react if assisted suicide were legalized throughout the United States? We
would see a new stratification of society, where the underinsured would be
advised to settle for assisted suicide, while those with better insurance could
perceived extraneous items. (This is already happening.) The U. S. may see euthanasia come in by the back door as a result.

get the medical assistance they needed. 44 Such a result is surely unethical and unjust, going directly against Church
teaching in manifest ways.

They falsely assume the cause of their impacts is a fear of

death rather than fear of weakness ableism exists in a far
broader and pervasive sense
Knoll 12, Kristine Knoll studies Gender and Womens studies at the University of
Washington, Feminist Disability Studies: Theoretical Debates, Activism, Identity
Politics, & Coalition Building,
https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/20505/Knoll
_washington_0250E_10341.pdf.txt?sequence=2
symbolic systems of oppression in relation to disability , disability
images often invoke pity. What symbols or stereotypes come to mind when one thinks of disability, or
particular disabilities? Some common stereotypes of disability, aside from pity , are
Regarding

weakness/helplessness , evilness/possession , non-sexual , not parents

(or should not be), less intelligent and/or child-like , and as having qualities
we want to cure or eradicate. As Hill- Collins explains, Central to this process is the use of
stereotypical or controlling images of diverse race, class and gender groups (pp. 59-60). Unfortunately, she
neglects to recognize disability.

There are many disability stereotypes that

contribute to the pervasive system that prevents people with disabilities

from climbing institutional and social ladders (such as finding a partner and
having children). Finally, oppression can also occur on an individual level. Negative images
and symbols of disability (stereotypes, or lack of representation) are
everywhere , and we all encounter the institutions that subordinate
certain groups of people, while privileging others. This impacts us on the
individual level, regardless of whether they are conscious or subconscious
beliefs and actions. We externalize these beliefs onto Others , and also
turn it inward on ourselves

(e.g. internalized oppression). The pervasiveness of discrimination alerts

us to where and how oppression is occurring, and

this highlights where we need to break

down barriers . Feminist theories challenge us to look at disability from a minority group model, rather than
always using the masters tools to try to understand and deconstruct disability oppression. Another
feminist theorist, Peggy McIntosh, provides great tools for understanding the ways in which privilege and oppression
operate on individual levels; although, of course, these are still linked to symbolic and institutional forces of
oppression. Although McIntosh does not address disability within her work, the tools she provides in her article,
White Privilege and Male Feminist Disability Studies 23 Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See the
Correspondences through Work in Women Studies (2001), are easily transferable to disability issues.

They pick the wrong starting point The temporarily able body
fears disability more than death. Also, they lead to a slippery
slope
Peace 11 (William Peace, Bad Cripple, Assisted Suicide: No Assistance Wanted,
MARCH 31, 2011, http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2011/03/assisted-suicide-noassistance-wanted.html)

I have been preoccupied with end of life issues since I read an article by Neil Shapiro in the Monterey Herald
entitled Right to Die Gives Dignity to the Disabled (3/21/11).

What strikes me as remarkable is

the universal social support people with disabilities receive if they

express a desire to die . Why is help to die given so willingly when social
supports that are needed to live a full and equal life with a disability
despised . Do not doubt me on this. Think for yourself. Read about
draconian budget cuts sweeping the nation that adversely affects people
with disabilities. Better yet talk to a parent of a child with a severe
disability. They can regale you with horror stories about how they have
to fight tooth and nail for the most basic support. Talk to a person with a
disability who has no job or health insurance and as a result cannot afford
a good wheelchair or cushion to prevent a pressure sore from developing .
Many disability studies scholars have explained why people with a
disability are not valued. They argue knowledge is socially situated and
has inherent logic to its members. Identities are socially constructed and
fit into the aforementioned socially constructed knowledge. Certain
bodies, disabled bodies (my body) are excluded from dominant social
ideologies. The disabled body is inherently flawed. The person with a
disability must be in pain, physical or mental. The person with a disability
must be unhappy with his or her flawed body. The person with a disability
has thus lost their dignity. The person with a disability has lost control
and independence. This, for Americans, is a fate worse than death. So it
makes sense to put the poor bastards out of their misery? Ah, no it does
not . What the above reasoning utterly fails to consider is why. Why are
people with disabilities shut off from routine social interaction? Instead
of addressing this vexing question we have people
the kindness

of his hearts

like Neil Shapiro

who out of

want s to help people with a disability die . He also thinks

Dr. Kevorkian was a quirky Michigan doctor. Shapiro wrote: It seems to me that the right to decide that one has
suffered enough, that whatever joy remains in life is outweighed by that suffering and that it is time to die, is one of
the most fundamental of human and civil rights. Why should one's neighbors be able to dictate that one should not
be able to terminate one's unbearable pain? But unless we follow Oregon and Washington, we may never have this
right. There is a great irony in all of this. Those who are not incapacitated are physically able to commit suicide, and
need no assistance. Those who require, but are routinely denied, that assistance are the disabled. We spend billions
of dollars making sure that they have the same right as the rest of us to shop, visit the beach and the like, but we
deny them the right to die with dignity. Go figure.

neighbors

as Shapiro puts it ,

Where do I begin ? If it were up to my

I would have been denied an education. I would

not be able to get on a bus or plane . I would not have a job or be father.
We people with a disability had to fight for these fundamental rights .
Even though we people with a disability are supposedly equal I have
never felt that wayever. The idea of equality for people with a disability
is illusive at best. As for the billions of dollars spent on access, which Shapiro

has saved countless lives, mine included. But just because we

spend money on access and inclusion does not mean we value the people
who are supposedly equal and included. When it comes to disability
seems to resent,

rights, as a society we merely pay lip service to these inherent civil rights
most take for granted. We do not in reality accept the presence of people
with a disability. If we did I would not be forced to enter the back of so
many buildings or have to call ahead to ask about access on a regular basis. Simply put,
the disabled body remains unwanted and is perceived as defective .
Worse yet, the disabled body is costly. Hospitals remain grossly
inaccessible . Efforts to be inclusive are often ignored or belittled. The
message society sends is not subtle. There is a word that comes to mind
oppression . Add in an illness, social isolation, dependence upon others
and the logical leap to thinking my life is not worth living is dangerously
short . Thus it is ever so easy to write one wants to control the way we die
and the circumstances surrounding death. This desire is understandable
but in my estimation dangerous for people with a disability . We need to
take a much closer examination of the pros and cons to assisted suicide.
When we do sentiments such as those expressed by Shapiro will be deemed not
only dangerous but simply wrong.

The impact is the extermination of the cognitively disabled

Smith 13 (Wesley J. Smith, writing for the National Review Online, Of course
euthanasia is about mental illness 04 Nov 2013
http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/363016/course-euthanasiaabout-mental-illness-wesley-j-smith) sbb
the media continue to assume that assisted
suicide/euthanasia is only for the terminally ill. Heres the latest example: Hemlock
It really is astounding how

Society founder Derek Humphry was in Arizona advocating for assisted suicide for the mentally ill, and Arizona Star
columnist Tim Steller is shocked! From the article: If you think the idea of assisted suicide is controversial, welcome
to the farthest frontier in the debate. Announcing his visit to Tucson for two Nov. 23 presentations, Derek Humphry,
a pioneer in the movement for legal assisted suicide, broached this shocking notion: assisted suicide for those
In the Netherlands, the
mentally ill are euthanized. Indeed, the mental health community is looking
forward to getting in on the euthanasia action. In Belgium, the mentally ill
are euthanizedand harvested for their organs. In Switzerland, the
Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to assisted suicide for the
mentally ill: Quebecs new euthanasia legislation would allow euthanasia
of the mentally ill. There is a strong movement within the mental health
professions to legitimize rational suicide. The most prominent backers of legalizing

suffering from mental illness and unable to get better. Furthest frontier?

assisted suicide internationally have always promoted opening the door to the mentally ill, from Kevorkian to
Nitschke, to Humphryall heroes of the euthanasia movement. Some obscure this latter goal for reasons of political
expediency, but realize that is the tactic, not the goal. Why arent these facts on the ground more widely reported?
The media has taken sides on this issueand advocate-journalists know what they dont want you to know. I am
also convinced that

the grass roots of the assisted suicide movement are

enthusiastically on board with the eventual spread of euthanasia to

mentally ill people. For example, two years ago I debated the issue at the Santa Barbara Natural History
Museum: When a self-declared mentally ill woman went to the microphone and said she
should have the right to be made dead toomost of the audience burst into
strong applause. Death-on-demandexcept for those with a transitory desire to dieis what
the euthanasia issue is really all about. An honest debate would be waged over thatnot about
defining phony restrictions that are intended to give false assurance of control and then collapse as society
embraces the killing agenda.