Contention 3 – Our Framing

The Tyranny of Survival

a. Extensive empirical evidence indicates that

placing human survival at the top of a hierarchy of
impacts results in the worst impacts.
Callahan, 1973 [Co-Founder and former director of The
Hastings Institute, PhD in philosophy from Harvard University,
Daniel, “The Tyranny of Survival”, p 91-92]:

The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not

for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of
survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed
against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The
purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades
fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no
matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native
Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to
detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court
in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a
threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly
unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official
legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government
of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most
elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of
the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of
survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But
it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a
final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers
in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and
conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques
Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we
overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political
system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put
forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of
offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some
have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good
by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those
suffering from such common genetically based diseases as
diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more
diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no
better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high
dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to
contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to
surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-
control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise
over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There
seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not
willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights,
liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress.

b1. OR THE COVIELLO EVIDENCE)

b2. Apocalyptic predictions are constructed by

alarmists and game-players with no policy
influence for the sole reason of advancing
personal interests
Kurasawa, 2004 Associate Professor of HYPERLINK
"http://www.arts.yorku.ca/soci/" \t "_blank"Sociology, Political Science, and
Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, (Fuyuki Karasawa,
“Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and The Work of Foresight”, NM,
HYPERLINK "http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Kurasawa
%20Articles/Constellations%20Article.pdf" \t
"_blank"http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Kurasawa%20Articles/Constellations
%20Article.pdf)

transnational socio-
Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that
political relations are nurturing a thriving culture and
infrastructure of prevention from below, which challenges
presumptions about the inscrutability of the future (II) and a
stance of indifference toward it (III). Nonetheless, unless and until it is
substantively ‘filled in,’ the argument is vulnerable to misappropriation since
farsightedness does not in and of itself ensure emancipatory
outcomes. Therefore, this section proposes to specify normative criteria and
participatory procedures through which citizens can determine the ‘reasonableness,’
legitimacy, and effectiveness of competing dystopian visions in order to arrive at a
socially self-instituting future. Foremost among the possible distortions
of farsightedness is alarmism, the manufacturing of
unwarranted and unfounded doomsday scenarios. State and
market institutions may seek to produce a culture of fear by
deliberately stretching interpretations of reality beyond the
limits of the plausible so as to exaggerate the prospects of
impending catastrophes, or yet again, by intentionally promoting certain
prognoses over others for instrumental purposes. Accordingly, regressive
dystopias can operate as Trojan horses advancing political
agendas or commercial interests that would otherwise be
susceptible to public scrutiny and opposition. Instances of this
kind of manipulation of the dystopian imaginary are plentiful:
the invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism and an
imminent threat of use of ‘weapons of mass destruction’; the
severe curtailing of American civil liberties amidst fears of a collapse of ‘homeland
security’; the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state as the only remedy for an
ideologically constructed fiscal crisis; the conservative expansion of
policing and incarceration due to supposedly spiraling crime
waves; and so forth. Alarmism constructs and codes the future
in particular ways, producing or reinforcing certain crisis
narratives, belief structures, and rhetorical conventions. As
much as alarmist ideas beget a culture of fear, the reverse is
no less true.

The ballot should only be used to assess decisions

for which we are morally responsible. The
question of moral responsibility must be asked
because it is key to any community’s efforts to
achieve public goods. Ignoring the moral
responsibility of individual actors or undermining
it's importance with consequences of intervening
actors outside the agent of the plan ultimately
destroys the decision-making skills of all members
of society by reducing them to infinitely
regressive calculi based on an infinite number of
equally ludicrous options.
Gauthier 2K (Candace, PhD Associate Professor in the Department of
Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina, Kennedy
Institute of Ethics Journal)

Instances of coercion and constraint also may exempt agents from

judgments of moral responsibility. Coercion and constraint, as used here,
should be understood as the imposition of some external force that compels or
precludes a particular choice or a particular action itself. Certainly there are
degrees of coercion and constraint, and consideration of the form and
degree of external force imposed can affect the extent to which one
considers an action to have been less than voluntary. The greater the threat
imposed by some external force, the more it eliminates or controls choice. Some
external threats are so great as to totally bypass choice, leading directly to
action, while others may control choice to the extent that a particular
action is virtually ensured. Finally, some threats reduce the voluntariness
of an action by making any other choice extremely difficult for an individual
to make in the face of the relevant threat. Thus, the greater the coercion or
constraint, the less likely we will be to consider the action voluntary and the less
moral responsibility we will assign to the agent. [End Page 343] When the
autonomy of those who have the capacity for rational agency is respected,
they are permitted to make choices and act according to their beliefs and
values, to the extent that their actions pose no risk of harm to individuals
or to the community. In the absence of overwhelming coercive factors or
controlling constraints, we hold these autonomous individuals morally
responsible for their choices and actions. This does not mean that those beliefs
and values are themselves totally chosen. Certainly, moral responsibility
can be and is assigned with the understanding that the person who has
voluntarily chosen and acted is the product of a family, a community, and
all of the other societal influences that make individuals who they are. The
assignment of moral responsibility is part of an important method of social control
through which the community furthers common ends and interests (Smiley 1992,
pp. 238-54). Although moral responsibility in the first sense discussed here is
a neutral judgment, recognizing both causality and moral agency, it is the
basis for praise and blame, reward and punishment. These are essential ways in
which communities may effect personal change in their members toward behavior
that is more in concert with communal values and ends. For example, if
judgments of praise and blame are internalized, they create the "social
emotions" of guilt, shame, and pride that contribute to the development of
conscience (Gaylin and Jennings 1996, pp. 137-49). As part of the social
control provided by praise and blame, the assignment of moral
responsibility operates within a pluralistic democratic society by permitting
areas of life in which the individual may choose and act, free of coercion
and constraint, but with the understanding that these choices and actions
are subject to judgment and criticism by others in the community. However,
communitarians sometimes appear to go even farther, to seek even more
social control based on a shared vision of the good life that is determined
either by the majority or by the elites. This tendency is an "excess" of the
communitarian movement that may lead to a "tyranny of the majority." Pushing the
laudable communitarian concern with shared values and the common good
to this extreme would destroy the individual, create persons "constituted by the
group's shared aims," and "leave little or no room for criticism of the group will"
(Kuczewski 1997, pp. 106-8). Moreover, without individuals who are free to
make choices based on their traditions, histories, and a variety of communal
influences as well as their own consideration of all of these factors, moral
responsibility has no meaning. Once the force of law is behind shared values and how
they are to be honored in individual lives and decisions, we would have a level of
control through legal coercion that would leave little room for moral responsibility
based on the voluntarily chosen actions of moral agents. Thus, the imposition of
communal values, in all areas of life, would jeopardize the social practice of
assigning moral responsibility for individual action.

Finally of the infinite number of equally ludicrous

options treat the risk of great power wars and
extinction via rapid and unexplained escalation as
zero – global commerce, military modernization,
and conflict norms render it obsolete.
Fettweis, prof – national security decision making
– Naval War College, 03 [DR. CHRISTOPHER J., “REVISITING
MACKINDER AND ANGELL: THE OBSOLESCENCE OF GREAT POWER
GEOPOLITICS”, COMPARATIVE STRATEGY, VOL 22 ISSUE 2, APRIL]

Mackinder can be forgiven for failing to anticipate the titanic changes in the fundamental nature of the
international system much more readily than can his successors. Indeed, Mackinder and his
contemporaries a century ago would hardly recognize the rules by which the world is run today—most
unlike their era, ours is one in which the danger of major war
significantly,
has been removed, where World War III is, in Michael Mandelbaum’s words,
“somewhere between impossible and unlikely.”25 Geopolitical and geo-
strategic analysis has not yet come to terms with what may be the
central, most significant trend of international politics: great
power war, major war of the kind that pit the strongest states against each other, is now
obsolete.26 John Mueller has been the most visible, but by no means the only, analyst arguing that
the chances of a World War III emerging in the next century are next to
nil.27 Mueller and his contemporaries cite three major arguments supporting this revolutionary, and
clearly controversial, claim.
First, and most obviously, modern military technology has made major war too
expensive to contemplate. As John Keegan has argued, it is hard to see how
nuclear war could be considered “an extension of politics by other
means”—at the very least, nuclear weapons remove the possibility
of victory from the calculations of the would-be aggressor.28 Their value as
leverage in diplomacy has not been dramatic, at least in the last few decades, because nuclear
threats are not credible in the kind of disagreements that arise
between modern great powers. It is unlikely that a game of nuclear
“chicken” would lead to the outbreak of a major war. Others have argued that,
while nuclear weapons surely make war an irrational exercise, the destructive power of modern
conventional weapons make today’s great powers shy away from direct conflict.29 The world wars
dramatically reinforced Angell’s warnings, and today no one is eager to repeat those experiences,
especially now that the casualty levels among both soldiers and civilians would be even higher.
Second, the shift from the industrial to the information age that seems to be gradually occurring in
many advanced societies has been accompanied by a new definition of power, and a new system of
incentives which all but remove the possibility that major war could ever be a cost-efficient exercise. The
rapid economic evolution that is sweeping much of the world, encapsulated
in the “globalization” metaphor so fashionable in the media and business communities, has been
accompanied by an evolution in the way national wealth is accumulated.30 For millennia, territory
was the main object of war because it was directly related to national prestige and power. As early as 1986
Richard Rosecrance recognized that “two worlds of international relations” were emerging, divided over
the question of the utility of territorial conquest.31 The intervening years have served only to strengthen
major industrial powers, quite unlike their less-developed neighbors,
the argument that the
revolutionary conclusion that territory is not
seem to have reached the
directly related to their national wealth and prestige. For these states, wealth and
power are more likely to derive from an increase in economic, rather
than military, reach. National wealth and prestige, and therefore power, are no longer directly
related to territorial control.32 The economic incentives for war are therefore not as clear as they once
may have been. Increasingly, it seems that the most powerful states pursue prosperity rather than power.
geopolitics is slowly being replaced by
In Edward Luttwak’s terminology,
“geoeconomics,” where “the methods of commerce are displacing
military methods—with disposable capital in lieu of firepower, civilian
innovation in lieu of military–technical advancement, and market penetration in lieu of garrisons and
bases.”33 Just as advances in weaponry have increased the cost of fighting, a socioeconomic evolution has
reduced the rewards that a major war could possibly bring. Angell’s major error was one that has been
repeated over and over again in the social sciences ever since—he overestimated the “rationality” of
humanity. Angell recognized earlier than most that the industrialization of military technology and
economic interdependence assured that the costs of a European war would certainly outweigh any
potential benefits, but he was not able to convince his contemporaries who were not ready to give up the
institution of war. The idea of war was still appealing—the normativecost/benefit analysis still tilted in the
favor of fighting, and that proved to be the more important factor. Today, there is reason to believe that
this normative calculation may have changed. After the war, Angell noted that the only things that could
have prevented the war were “surrendering of certain dominations, a recasting of patriotic ideals, a
revolution of ideas.”34 The third and final argument of Angell’s successors is that today such a
revolution of ideas has occurred, that a normative evolution has caused a shift in
the rules that govern state interaction. The revolutionary potential of
ideas should not be underestimated. Beliefs, ideologies, and ideas are often, as
Dahl notes, “a major independent variable,” which we ignore at our peril.35 “Ideas,” added John Mueller,
are very often forces themselves, not flotsam on the tide of broader social or economic patterns . . . it does
not seem wise in this area to ignore phenomena that cannot be easily measured, treated with crisp
“moral
precision, or probed with deductive panache.36 The heart of this argument is the
progress” that has “brought a change in attitudes about international
war” among the great powers of the world,37 creating for the first time, “an
almost universal sense that the deliberate launching of a war can no
longer be justified.”38 At times leaders of the past were compelled by the masses to defend
the national honor, but today popular pressures push for peaceful
resolutions to disputes between industrialized states. This normative
shift has rendered war between great powers “subrationally
unthinkable,” removed from the set of options for policy makers,
just as dueling is no longer a part of the set of options for the same classes for
which it was once central to the concept of masculinity and honor. As Mueller explained, Dueling, a form of
violence famed and fabled for centuries, is avoided not merely because it has ceased to seem ‘necessary’,
but because it has sunk from thought as a viable, conscious possibility. You can’t fight a duel if the idea of
doing so never occurs to you or your opponent.39 By extension, states cannot fight wars if doing so does
not occur to them or to their opponent. As Angell discovered, the fact that major war was futile was not
enough to bring about its end—people had to believe that it was futile. Angell’s successors suggest that
such a belief now exists in the industrial (and postindustrial) states of the world, and this
“autonomous power of ideas,” to borrow Francis Fukuyama’s term, has brought
about the end of major, great power war.40

Plan – The United States Federal

Government should substantially increase
beneficiary eligibility in the area of
family-based visas by eliminating (find
specific restriction...).

Contention 4 - Rational Decision Making

Rational decision-making means that negative fiat
should be limited to the agent of the plan and that
consequences, good and bad, should be intrinsic
to the passing of the plan by the affirmative
agent.
Mitchell, JD Baylor, Former Briefing Attorney for
the Texas Supreme Court, 81
HYPERLINK
(Frank, The Bounderies of Government Fiat Debaters Research Journal
"http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Mitchell1981Educ
ation.htm"http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Mitchell1981Education.htm)

The key to understanding current fiat theory is the notion that debate
should reflect real world decision-making. Certainly, much of debate
argumentation reflects real world concerns. For example, debaters consider actual
socioeconomic issues in a discussion of their pertinent risks and benefits. Presumably, if one of debate's

tasks is to train debaters in decision making, the debate process

should reflect aspects of real-world decision-making. The acceptance of this
assumption also suggests that debate should reflect real world limits on
governmental action. Because current governmental structures are
limited by legal authority, any social problem will have a different set
of solutions depending upon the agent that addresses the problem. For
instance, when responding to a Constitutional question, the Supreme
Court can interpret the constitutionality of a law, but cannot enact a
law as Congress does. An individual citizen, reacting to high gas prices, can form a car pool, but cannot
enact national legislation. Thus no one agent, because of limits imposed by law

and the political environment, can be all-powerful. Application of this

analogy to debate provides a theoretical basis for limiting fiat power
and authority. First, this notion contests the current assumption allowing
negative teams the power to fiat through different governmental
levels. However, such a power has no real world counterpart. For a judge
to be a state legislator, a federal, and a local one all at the same time
goes far beyond the power of a real world legislator. Second, the notion of
an all-powerful agent often assumes institutional organizations and
relationships that do not exist in the real world. For instance, a characteristic of
policy action at the state level is that it is non-uniform. Fiat at this level becomes very
"non-real." In the real world the relative desirability of policy options is, in part,
a function of ease of implementation and perhaps this consideration
should be reflected in debate. Thus the judge as an agent should act
within real world limits upon policy enactment. The basis for this
limitation on fiat can be found in an examination of the resolution. In
determining the role of the judge, the resolution sets down the legal jurisdictional

limits for considering change. For example, a resolution asking for federal action limits the
role of the judge to that of a federal policymaker. In this instance a negative arguing for adoption of a state
counterplan will go beyond the jurisdictional limits of the topic. The assumption that debate
is a game provides an additional justification for fiat limitation. As a game of
competition with the judge's decision determining the winners, debate should be governed by rules

that ensure a fair game. By its very nature, the resolution limits the
affirmative to the implementation of policy through one governmental
level. However, with unlimited fiat the negative has the power to enact
policies through several different agents. Hence, the negative has retained a strategic
advantage of flexibility. In sum, this section has established several theoretical criteria with which the power of legislative
debaters must be constrained
fiat can be limited. Acceptance of the above assumptions means that

by the jurisdictional limits of the resolution.

Rational decision-making is the highest

pedagogical standard for explaining and
evaluating debates as well as the most real world
and logical way to analyze complex policy as well
as normal everyday decisions
Strait and Wallace 08 (Paul, assistant coach at USC working on his
PHD at USC, Brett, Working on his MA at The George Washington University,
“ACADEMIC DEBATE AS A DECISION-MAKING GAME: INCULCATING THE
VIRTUE OF PRACTICAL WISDOM”, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate)
Since the inception of modern academic debate, much of the praise it has
received for educating students has focused on the real-world skills acquired
in the processes of research, argumentation, critical thinking, and policy
analysis. Students develop these skills and apply them to jobs, politics, fields
of study, and their personal lives. Indeed, in every decision, trivial (‘Where
should I eat dinner?’), and non-trivial (‘What college should I attend?’ ‘Who
should I marry?’), we evaluate all of the relevant advantages and
disadvantages, consider possible alternatives, and come to some conclusion.
Apologists for policy debate often champion the increased critical thinking
skills taught by the activity that are necessarily used to work through these
kinds of choices, particularly under rigid time and speech constraints. If this is
truly the desired goal of policy debate, one would think that the way in which
debates are framed, discussed, and adjudicated should closely resemble the
process of deliberation that everyone, from the highest government officials
to the most inconsequential members of society, uses. Aristotle (c.
330bce/1941a) argues that this decision-making process combines desire and
reasoning in the act of deliberation focused on some end. The ability to make
good decisions (and to follow through with them) is associated with the virtue
of practical wisdom: Practical wisdom… is concerned with things human and
things about which it is possible to deliberate; for we say this is above all the
work of the person of practical wisdom, to deliberate well, but no one
deliberates about things invariable, nor about things which have not an end,
and that a good that can be brought about by action. The person who is
without qualification good at deliberating is the person who is capable of
aiming in accordance with calculation at the best for humanity of things
attainable by action. Nor is practical wisdom concerned with universals only—
it must also recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is
concerned with particulars. (#1141b 6-16). This underlies our contention that
practical wisdom is the final cause of debate. Practical wisdom is broad,
provides coherence and unity in a non-arbitrary way, and is value-neutral
with respect to the growing divide between the policy-focused and the
critically-inclined. Non-practical ends are not helpful – as Aristotle (c.
330bce/1941a) argues: The origin of action—its efficient, not its final cause—
is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end…
Intellect itself, however, moves nothing, but only the intellect which aims at
an end and is practical; for this rules the productive intellect as well, since
everyone who makes makes for an end, and that which is made is not an end
in the unqualified sense. (#1139a32 – 37)