Julian Switala

Part I

Mega LD Backfile

Cant Touch This

* * * * * MEGA LD BACKFILE * * * * *

* * * * * Written by Julian Switala * * * * *

* * * * * Instructions * * * * *

1. !!!USE THE DOCUMENT MAP VIEW FUNCTION!!!

2. !!!MINIMIZE EVERYTHING IN THE DOCUMENT MAP FIRST!!!
3. This file has internal link, impact, and framework cards applicable to
nearly all possible LD resolutions.
4. I suggest reading and cutting articles specific to the topic for links
and uniqueness.
5. A LOT of the cards overlap and can be reasonably placed in different
categories. However, there are very few duplicate cards (cards that
could be in multiple categories only appear once in the file). Thus, if
you're looking for a particular card in what seems like its most likely
categorization, you may not find it there and will have to search
elsewhere in the file. I guarantee that youll find what youre looking
for if you search hard enough. (Some defense cards might be in the
offensive sections etc.).
6. As such, I would advise against using this file in-round since the
cards arent partitioned enough and many different cards are lumped
together under a very broad heading. I would recommend writing
blocks pre-round with this file. However, if you need carded answers
to arguments you havent heard before or if you know the file
extremely well, then go for it.
7. And given how LD works, youll probably be successful just by
reading the taglines of these cards and then making short
extrapolations and analytics on the fly
8. Have fun!

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* * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS * * * * *
* * * * * MEGA LD BACKFILE * * * * *...........................................................1
* * * * * Written by Julian Switala * * * * *.......................................................1
* * * * * Instructions * * * * *............................................................................1
* * * * * TABLE OF CONTENTS * * * * *........................................................2
*****LIBERTY*****.......................................................................................14
**Autonomy Good / Coercion Bad**............................................................14

Human dignity is the highest standard........................................................................................................................ 14

Moral obligation to protect liberty................................................................................................................................ 14
Freedom comes before all other impacts ................................................................................................................... 14
Coercion outweighs, conditions like poverty are inevitable, its futile to try to solve....................................................15
Compulsory violate rights....................................................................................................................................... 15
Coercion is immoral denies individuals the capacity develop as moral agents........................................................15
Evaluate freedom first it is critical to both prosperity and fairness ...........................................................................16
Freedom outweighs without freedom, we are all reduced to the level of animals and slaves only freedom from
government oppression solves................................................................................................................................... 16
Coercion restricts rights and destroys individual agency............................................................................................ 17
Coercion snowballsEvery increase in the states power brings us closer to tyranny...............................................18
There is no value to life in their framework coercion makes us into mere tools of the state.....................................18
Utilitarianism doesnt trump the impact of coercionindividuals cant be reduced to units of value...........................19
Every invasion of liberty must be rejected failure to do so leads to massive atrocities............................................19
Government coercion is immoral because it kills freedom and virtue by eroding the basis of free market capitalism 20
Coercion creates a slippery slope to more coercion................................................................................................... 21
Violations of liberty create a slippery slope to more governmental constraints. .........................................................21
Government coercion causes more violations of liberty.............................................................................................. 21
Government coercion destroys the value to life and cannot be morally justified.........................................................22
Coercion destroys value to life.................................................................................................................................... 22
Coercion ensures extinction. ...................................................................................................................................... 22
Coercion is the root cause of military conflict ............................................................................................................. 22
Global democratic consolidation is necessary to prevent many scenarios for war and extinction..............................24
Each use of coercive force paves the road for massive atrocities..............................................................................24
Government coercion creates evil............................................................................................................................... 25
Government coercion must be morally rejected.......................................................................................................... 25
Coercion must be rejected in every instance.............................................................................................................. 26
Coercion violates fundament human rights................................................................................................................. 26
**Property Rights Good**............................................................................27

Property rights are key to all rights.............................................................................................................................. 27

Property rights critical to moral agency....................................................................................................................... 27
Property rights are key to prevent Nazism.................................................................................................................. 27
**Rights Come First**..................................................................................29

Placing survival over individual autonomy replicates authoritarian regimes of control, subjugating individual rights to
the values held by those in power .............................................................................................................................. 29
Violation of freedom negates the value of human existence and represents the greatest threat to human survival...29
Violating rights in the name of survival causes social paralysis and destroys the value to life....................................30
It is impossible for policymakers to know future consequences allowing more rights violations will justify worse
consequences in the future......................................................................................................................................... 30
Rights outweigh all critical to human dignitye future................................................................................................ 31
Policymakers must protect individual rights................................................................................................................ 31
The calculation of utilitarianism is the foundation of totalitarianism.............................................................................32
Every alternative to rights leads to tyranny................................................................................................................. 32
Collective safety is no justification for rights violationsleads to slavery, genocide, and wars..................................33
Sacrificing rights to preserve life produces totalitarianism. ........................................................................................ 33
Err on the side of rights its the biggest consequence in the long term....................................................................34
Rights absolute cant infringe on one persons rights to increase well-being of others............................................34
Rights and basic liberties are a prerequisite of rational decisionmaking.....................................................................35
Right to health outweighs violation of right to life..................................................................................................... 35
**AT: Positive Rights Good**......................................................................37

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Government protection of positive rights justifies war................................................................................................. 37

Limiting government protection to property rights is key to prevent atrocities.............................................................38
**AT: Util Protects Rights**.........................................................................39

Current price-tag thinking is insufficient- we have to make the tough decisions that incorporate individual rights
instead of trying to spare laypeople from difficult decisionmaking..............................................................................39
Utilitarianism doesnt trump the impact of coercionindividuals cant be reduced to units of value...........................39
The sacrifice of innocence degrades humanity-- it is an absolute wrong....................................................................40
Util fails to protect moral rights it silences rights claims when not grounded in law..................................................40
Utilitarianism fundamentally fails to protect individual rights greatest good claims simply conflict.........................41
Utilitarianism reduces individuals to their mere utility value, making them expendable..............................................41
Calculation of human life leads to no value to life and the zero point of the holocaust...............................................41
**AT: Rimal**...............................................................................................43

Mutual coercion wont solve - they lack the knowledge and incentive to protect the environment and will perpetuate
tyrannical coercion...................................................................................................................................................... 43
An authoritarian government would fail to conserve resources...................................................................................43
Their authors contradict themselves........................................................................................................................... 43
**AT: Coercion Bad**..................................................................................45

Illegitimate resource acquisition justifies redistribution................................................................................................ 45

Libertarians concede that extinction outweighs.......................................................................................................... 45
Redistribution is not an inherent affront to human dignity. As long as you believe helping others is good,
redistribution doesnt threaten dignity......................................................................................................................... 45
The only way their alternative can capture this is if their alternative is allowed to imagine a world in which individuals
all become charitable givers. This is abusive private actor fiat. If the neg can imagine this they can just imagine world
peace and solve all of our case impacts..................................................................................................................... 45
Nozick's concept of dignity requires access to resources...........................................................................................46
Since initial acquisition was unjust, there are no legitimate entitlements ...................................................................46
Taxation redistributes freedom rather than limiting it.................................................................................................. 46
Taxes don't violate rights............................................................................................................................................ 46
Violations of liberty dont justify rejecting welfare........................................................................................................ 46
Welfare enhances self determination.......................................................................................................................... 47
Redistribution is justified on utilitarian grounds........................................................................................................... 47
Utilitarianism justifies the welfare state....................................................................................................................... 47
Extinction outweighs................................................................................................................................................... 47
Excess liberty creates a moral vacuum....................................................................................................................... 48
Libertarianism would undermine the moral basis of the liberal state...........................................................................48
Blanket statements about coercion are false, must evaluate coercion on a case by case basis................................48
Turn: Autonomy bad................................................................................................................................................... 48
**AT: I Solve Future Coercion**..................................................................50

Coercion snowballs Each increase becomes easier to justify. The only reason why we do not realize it is because
the government uses the ploy of Altruism to take it step by step. As each program fails, it becomes necessary to
move another step closer to more coercion. We are on a road to oppression. ..........................................................50
Linear every increase in coercive power decreases human dignity. .......................................................................50
Steps toward state power are steps toward tyranny .................................................................................................. 50
Coercion isnt justified to prevent coercion this mindset leads to war......................................................................51
Human dignity outweighs Utilitarianism fails to protect rights..................................................................................52
Non-absolute rights fails to protect freedom............................................................................................................... 52
**AT: Im not excessively coercive**...........................................................54

Every justification for coercion, no matter how legitimate, conditions us to accept further limitations on our liberty.. .54
Coercive efforts fail and snowball into massive atrocities every invasion of liberty must be forcefully rejected.......54
Uncompromising stance on libertarian principles is key..............................................................................................55
Allowing any realm of government control quickly snowballs to totalitarian collectivism.............................................57
**AT: Rawls**..............................................................................................58

Rawls conception of rights flawed fails to explain why small incursions on liberty would threaten citizenship........58
Rawls fails to provide warrants for the absolute preservation of basic liberties over other ends.................................58
Rawls conception of personal freedom cannot resolve utilitarian democratic ideals..................................................59
**AT: Egalitarianism / Equality / Distribution Good**..................................60

1. Distributive justice leads to global poverty.............................................................................................................. 60

2. Focusing exclusively on the poor stigmatizes the issueno solvency...................................................................60
3. Egalitarianism does not equate society .................................................................................................................. 60
4. Principles of justice cement the political sphereerode the possibility for real change ......................................61

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5. Inequality inevitablecapitalism ............................................................................................................................ 61

Hierarchies are inevitable even after the redistribution of wealth...............................................................................62
Equality is impossibleenvy ..................................................................................................................................... 62
Distribution of benefits to equalize the impoverished is indefensible encourages envy and moral disorientation....63
Egalitarian and Prioritarian thinking flawed no standard baseline for equality guarantees never-ending
redistribution. ............................................................................................................................................................. 64
Acceptance of egalitarianism dominates the political sphere and makes us powerless to the abuses of elites .........64
Moral calls for egalitarianism are self defeating ......................................................................................................... 65
Err on the side of combining political consequences with humanitarianism ...............................................................65
Moral views of egalitarianism are self serving ............................................................................................................ 65
Egalitarianism isnt democraticinevitable dilemma ................................................................................................. 66
Forced attempts at equality perpetuate inequality .................................................................................................... 66
Egalitarianism hurts the poor .................................................................................................................................... 66
No such thing as a utilitarian defense of egalitarianism ............................................................................................. 67
Utilitarian calculus not egalitarian doesnt act on the principle of intrinsic equality...................................................67
In-egalitarianism solves benefits trickle down........................................................................................................... 68
The goal of the judge should not be to make sure each person is equalrather ensure each person is sufficient....68
Everything is relativethe goal should not be to carve everyone into the same statuerather ensure each person is
sufficientthis is distinct from economic egalitarianism............................................................................................. 69
Egalitarianism fosters never-ending comparison and obligation a sufficientarian framework should take
precedence................................................................................................................................................................. 69
Moderate sufficentarianism offers a pluralist approach to justice which maximizes contextual equality.....................70
*****PRIVATIZATION*****...........................................................................71
**Privatization Good / Government Bad**...................................................71

So-called welfare rights restrict freedom, rationalize the coercive transfer of wealth, and destroy charitable feelings,
turning the case.......................................................................................................................................................... 71
Health care policies are coercive................................................................................................................................ 71
Free health care means slavery.................................................................................................................................. 72
The state is dehumanizing because of bureaucracy and the ability to make war.......................................................72
The government is inherently dehumanizing because it seeks to control people.......................................................73
Government is stripping doctors rights through coercive action.................................................................................73
The welfare state is flawed it looks only at the outcomes rather than the process which is immoral because looking
at outcomes only assumes that the poor have been cheated not that they have tried and failed...............................74
Capitalism is the best system to foster freedom, which is a moral necessity..............................................................75
Limited government is key to prevent tyranny, which killed more people than both World Wars combined the plan
provides positive rights, or entitlements that causally fail to protect the right to life....................................................75
Free markets are inherently non-violent because they rely on voluntary associations whereas governments force
and compel, leading to violence. ................................................................................................................................ 76
Turn aff/neg creates dependence which decreases incentives to work tanks the economy.................................77
Taking wealth forcefully kills charitable desires.......................................................................................................... 77
The alternative results in beneficial forms of capitalism. Only altruism results in the dangerous forms of capitalism
that their authors assume........................................................................................................................................... 78
Capitalism solves war economic interdependencies................................................................................................78
Economically free countries are less likely to go to war put away your democracy add-ons because the alt. solves
better........................................................................................................................................................................... 79
The free market is a moral necessity.......................................................................................................................... 79
Government coercion destroys freedom the free market system is the highest moral ground and will solve all other
problems .................................................................................................................................................................... 80
Government power inevitably leads to war and mass genocide limiting the power of the government and fostering
individual freedom solves............................................................................................................................................ 82
Government provision is inefficient and ineffective three reasons..........................................................................83
Eliminating licensing requirements for medical establishments and restrictions on medical supplies, deregulating
health insurance, and eliminating subsidies such as Medicaid key to greater effectiveness and availability of health
care............................................................................................................................................................................. 84
Abolishing federal programs is the first step to solving poverty allows private sector to grow.................................85
Lower tax rates induce charitable giving studies prove............................................................................................85
Failure to privatize collapses the economy................................................................................................................. 86
**Alternative to Government Provision**.....................................................86

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The alternative is to reject the coercive policies of the affirmative. By embracing negative freedoms, the free market
will alleviate social ills, turning the case...................................................................................................................... 86
We should reject coercion for deliberative democracy................................................................................................87
Reject coercion in favor of capitalism and individual rights.........................................................................................88
Rejection of the collectivist welfare policies of the aff is critical to imagining a better world. Only through this can we
establish concrete foundations for reasonable change...............................................................................................88
Alt view the invisible victims .................................................................................................................................... 89
Americans want smaller government when taxes matter............................................................................................90
AT: Cant imagine. Confinement to the politically possible makes change impossible. Prefer the reformist policies
.................................................................................................................................................................................... 91
**Private Charities CP**..............................................................................92

Private charities are more successful than the government at providing aid..............................................................92
Government eligibility requirements skew aid distribution........................................................................................... 92
Governmental programs are inefficient; Private charities arent..................................................................................93
A greater diversity of solutions makes private charities more effective.......................................................................93
Private Charity causes an attitudinal shift encouraging recipients to escape poverty.................................................93
Private Charity promotes participatory democracy..................................................................................................... 94
Only the counterplan solves informal private networks are not only solve poverty but protect key values ..............94
Privatization promotes choice and increases quality of services to all people............................................................94
Product choice because of privatization will resolve the inefficiency preventing high quality goods and services......95
Privatizing is a prerequisite to eliminating poverty...................................................................................................... 95
Private charities solve poverty.................................................................................................................................... 96
Government programs are ineffective and trade-off with private efforts......................................................................97
Private charities solve coercion.................................................................................................................................. 97
Private charity best targets causes, not symptoms. ................................................................................................97
Taxes trade off with charity......................................................................................................................................... 98
*****UTILITARIANISM GOOD / DEON BAD*****........................................99
**Util Good For Rights**..............................................................................99

Utilitarianism upholds self-ownership and thus liberty................................................................................................. 99

Utilitarianism is best it protects rights while not totally rejecting all policies that might infringe................................99
Util protects rights in social and constitutional hierarchies..........................................................................................99
Utilitarian calculus is the only way to determine rights relative importance..............................................................100
**Util Good: Generics**.............................................................................101

Their moral imperatives revolve around a flawed libertarian method- consequences must be evaluated first to
escape the cycle....................................................................................................................................................... 101
Policy must be viewed through a consequentialist framework- slipping into the libertarian mindset only recreates the
root cause of the affirmative harms........................................................................................................................... 101
Governments must weigh consequences................................................................................................................. 102
Moral absolutism suffers from tunnel vision that generates evil and political irrelevance..........................................102
Utilitarianism key to policy making............................................................................................................................ 103
Policymakers should adapt utilitarian calculus applicable throughout society........................................................103
In a nuclear world, you have to weigh consequences............................................................................................... 104
Utilitarianism necessitates public policy that requires that leaders take the action which is in the best interest of
people....................................................................................................................................................................... 104
Consequences matter the tunnel vision of moral absolutism generates evil and political irrelevance....................106
Deontology is bad in the context of public policy five reasons ..............................................................................106
At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy.
At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not
themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness
while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to
preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no
a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of
policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That
deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that
most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian
manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental
policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to
environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the
often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins,

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1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be
troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values
typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope
and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generate
an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public
interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a
plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably
assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end language
and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient, though
perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy......................................................................106
Maximizing all lives is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human dignity...............................................107
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract
social entity. It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive overall social good.
Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert
Nozick, for example, argues that to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the
fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. But why is this not equally true of all those whom
we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to
sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the
cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the
unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular
duties is the principle that rational nature exists as an end in itself (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the
supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the
rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings
as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agentcentered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agentcentered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kants normative theory is based
on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice
rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is
based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from
maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily,
and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have dignity, that is, an unconditional and
incomparable worth that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but persons also have a fundamental equality
that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the endin-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If
one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration suggests that one may have to
sacrifice some to save many..................................................................................................................................... 107
Utilitarianism is the most moral outlookprovides the most benefits for the most number of people.......................107
Ethics are accessed through the evaluation of consequences through an impartial outlook....................................108
Turn calculation is inevitable and justified every action requires calculation, and refusing to engage in calculation
means allowing the worst atrocities to occur............................................................................................................. 108
Rejection of prediction is an implicit prediction which undercuts good predictions...................................................109
Predictions are key to check disasters ..................................................................................................................... 110
Despite studies predictions experts are still trustworthy............................................................................................111
Consequentialism accesses their internal linkwe make the best decisions based on moral AND utilitarian
consequences........................................................................................................................................................... 112
Concrete decision making - Only Utilitarianism makes justifications based on the end result rather then ambiguous
language................................................................................................................................................................... 113
Utilitarianism prevents nuclear war........................................................................................................................... 113
Utilitarianism inevitable............................................................................................................................................. 114
Utilitarianism is inevitable - people are inherently utilitarians....................................................................................114
Consequentialism is best, short term impacts are key even when the long-term impacts are uncertain...................115
Concept of morals not mutually exclusive with utilitarianism.....................................................................................115
Successful integration of morality into utilitarian calculus possible...........................................................................116
Utilitarianism is inevitable it will indefinitely permeate human thought......................................................................117
Because of the advent of nuclear omnicide, ethics should not be held absolute .....................................................117
Once an action enters the policy realm we must use a Consequentialist approach, this is necessary to minimize
suffering and conflict. ............................................................................................................................................... 117
Utilitarianism and other forms of calculation are inevitable.......................................................................................117

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Individual and government choices on morality are different, once we play the role of policy makers we must follow a
utilitarian calculus ..................................................................................................................................................... 118
Consequences come first for governments - only our evidence draws the distinction between moral theories for
individuals and governments.................................................................................................................................... 118
Moral rights and wrongs are based on consequences proves Consequentialism is best......................................118
Ignoring consequences is immoral - they sacrifice others to preserve moral purity. It is most moral to act to produce
the best end regardless of the moral cleanliness of the means................................................................................119
Justice must save humanity and weigh.................................................................................................................. 119
Utilitarian actions only act as a last resort. Lack of alternatives means the only inhuman action is to not act at all. 119
Overriding rights is justified when more rights of others and lives are at stake. .......................................................120
We must choose the lesser evil. Hard and fast rules about what is right must be made to limit further atrocities
against civilization..................................................................................................................................................... 121
Moral policy only blocks decision making necessary to limit further damage. Injustice can only be destroyed by
inaction to make sacrifices........................................................................................................................................ 122
Utilitarianism is the only moral framework and alternatives are inevitability self-contradictory..................................122
Politics can only be one of responsibility. Rational policy makers must consider first whether to put rights before all
else. ......................................................................................................................................................................... 123
Only consequentialism can resolve conflicting moral values and promote healthy society.......................................124
Morals and questions of human dignity will constantly conflict making deontological policy making impossible......124
Human value and dignity is impossible to determine externally, utilitarianism is only alternative. ...........................125
The impossibility to attain knowledge of every outcome or abuse leaves utilitarianism as the only option for most
rational decision-making........................................................................................................................................... 125
Not knowing conditions for each individual or ramifications forces us to adopt utilitarianism. Policy makers must use
in their decision making............................................................................................................................................ 126
True equality is only attainable under utilitarian framework. ....................................................................................126
**AT: Rights / Liberty Come First**...........................................................128

Upholding life is the ultimate moral standard............................................................................................................ 128

Life is the end toward which all purposeful action is directed....................................................................................128
Life is the prerequisite to all other value.................................................................................................................... 128
Utilitarianism precludes any claim of moral rights rights not quantifiable...............................................................128
No legitimate reason to include rights discussion under util f/w................................................................................129
Utilitarianism is the only calculus that takes into account human response..............................................................129
Rights dont come first conflicting values and ideologies.......................................................................................130
Rights not absolute doesnt take into account intended good................................................................................130
No appropriate duty to satisfy rights of conscience. ................................................................................................. 130
No absolute rights competing values and rights of different groups.......................................................................131
Priority of liberty not viable as basis of government at best it would be a competing theory among other liberal
conceptions of justice................................................................................................................................................ 131
No justification for violation of rights to prevent external loss - principle of intervening actions means that government
is not held responsible for death of others. .............................................................................................................. 131
Government cannot act to uphold the rights of the subject on the basis of moral principle.......................................132
**AT: Util No Rights**...........................................................................133

Utility cant be maximized in the long term by violating rights...................................................................................133

Utilitarianism Protects Fairness................................................................................................................................ 133
**AT: Freedom / Liberty Outweighs Life/Util**..........................................134

Libertarianism denies emotional satisfaction outside that of freedom.......................................................................134

Utilitarian policy-making ensures there will be no unnecessary constrains on liberty because each scenario is
weighed. .................................................................................................................................................................. 134
**AT: Calculations Bad**...........................................................................136

Turn calculation is inevitable and justified every action requires calculation, and refusing to engage in calculation
means allowing the worst atrocities to occur............................................................................................................. 136
Multiplying probability by magnitude is the only moral option hard moral rules result in circular preferences and
horrible consequences.............................................................................................................................................. 137
**AT: Catastrophes Low Probability**....................................................139

Policy-making requires assessment of all risks despite probability...........................................................................139

Policy makers risk political backlash when proper action isnt taken to prevent catastrophe....................................139
**A2: Strive for Perfection (Imagination)**................................................141

Imagination fails cant change reality..................................................................................................................... 141

**Deontology Bad**...................................................................................142

Deontology is bad when people disagree about what is right or wrong....................................................................142

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While the ethical choice is normally a good idea, a threshold should be used in the face of a catastrophe..............142
Morality co-opts ethical behavior because the focus falls on ideology, not action ...................................................142
Deontology is unable to distinguish between better ethics, but is logically no longer ethical when peoples lives are
at risk........................................................................................................................................................................ 143
Hatred between groups of people make human rights violations inevitable..............................................................143
Deontology does not hold up against the threat of nuclear war................................................................................144
Deontology is a terrible system for policy- policies must use means to an end framework and are judged by their
effectiveness ............................................................................................................................................................ 145
Deontology is irrelevant in policy making - intentions are impossible to know, only the outcome matters...............145
Deontology in policy making fails to uphold democracy and legitimizes oppression.................................................146
Deontology fails-- no way of evaluating conflicting obligations ................................................................................146
The need for exceptions means deontology fails as a theory...................................................................................147
The subjectivity of what rights are important means deontology fails. .....................................................................148
Deontologys absolutism prioritizes morality as a concept over moral results. .........................................................148
Deontologys absolutism means it will inevitably fail. ...............................................................................................149
Utilitarianism is the only way to access morality. Sacrifice in the name of preserving rights destroys any hope of
future generations attaining other values. ................................................................................................................ 149
Destruction of social institutions that limit rights literally cause social chaos and make it impossible to project rightbased economies elsewhere. .................................................................................................................................. 150
There is no Utopia in which we can get rid of difficult moral decisions. Political inaction in times of risks can only be
for the worst.............................................................................................................................................................. 150
Political inaction to prevent further death is the greatest inhumanity one can commit. ............................................151
Attempts to totalize systems of morals is impossible................................................................................................151
Construction of moral lines is counter-productive to decision making. .....................................................................151
Exceptions to all concrete lines of morals prove there exists no true deontological framework. ..............................152
Alternatives to cost-benefit analyses would result in political paralyses and crush decision-making .......................152
*****UTIL BAD / DEON GOOD*****..........................................................154
**Util Bad**................................................................................................154

People are not a means to a result, the results of an action are never as important as the action itself...................154
Normality bias causes us to underestimate the impact of discriminatory outcomes. This justifies a feedback loop
where we accept the established order and treat disadvantaged populations as suitable victims necessary for our
safety........................................................................................................................................................................ 154
Risk assessment is distorted by poverty trading on capital reserves exclude the poor..........................................158
Judge must recognize their complicity in reinforcing beliefs which justify a continuation of racism..........................158
Apocalyptic predictions are constructed by alarmists to advance personal interests................................................159
Predictions out of debate may be good, but in debate they should be held to a very low standard. The probability of
one small political change from the status quo causing nuclear war or extinction is not only infinitesimal, its also
ridiculous................................................................................................................................................................... 159
Moral conscience precedes rational decision making decisions are based off a moral backdrop..........................159
The quest for survival destroys all human values..................................................................................................... 161
Utilitarianism inherently only favors a privileged few.................................................................................................161
Calculation reduces life to zero................................................................................................................................. 161
Utilitarianism causes species extinction.................................................................................................................... 162
Utilitarianism is unsustainableadvocates ultimately revert back to morals to make decisions ..............................162
Prediction destroys human agency........................................................................................................................... 162
Utilitarianism = Killing................................................................................................................................................ 163
The calculation of utilitarianism is the foundation of totalitarianism...........................................................................165
Every alternative to rights leads to tyranny............................................................................................................... 165
Government coercion must be morally rejected........................................................................................................ 165
Consequentialism, by very nature, will fail in public policy to improve the well-being of others................................166
Consequentialism is based on the greater good, not on self-interests......................................................................166
There is a limit to what morality can require for us, which consequentialism fails to incorporate..............................167
Consequentialism can result in sacrifices on some for the sake of others................................................................167
Utilitarianism cant address the issues of equity and distributive justice ...................................................................167
Utilitarianism policies result in inequality .................................................................................................................. 168
Utilitarian thinking results in mass murder................................................................................................................ 168
Utilitarianism is used to justify mass murder by governments...................................................................................169
Medical utilitarian calculus ensures human dehumanization and annihilation..........................................................169
Utilitarianism takes away all value to live.................................................................................................................. 170

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Rights incompatible with utilitarianism...................................................................................................................... 170

Util ignores fundamental rights and creates a slippery slope until rights lose all significance...................................171
Morality is complex Blanket claims that we need to save people in poverty prevent us from making rational choices
.................................................................................................................................................................................. 171
The utilitarian viewpoint is flawed. It is impossible for society to be viewed as a single............................................173
Utilitarians view society as a single entity, which devalues the rights and human dignity of.....................................173
Utilitarianism views people as locations of utilities, whose purpose is to bring good to the......................................173
Adapting the consequentialist viewpoint justifies the deaths of millions of innocents in............................................174
Utilitarianism taken alone allows unjustified war; full weight must be given to..........................................................174
Policy decisions directed at maintaining human survival through whatever means will encourage genocide, war, and
the destruction of moral values................................................................................................................................. 175
Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and perpetuates societal inequality by evaluating utility as a whole
.................................................................................................................................................................................. 176
Although utilitarianism claims to result in equality, its nature to only regard people as one entity rather than a group
of individuals inherently contradicts the principle of equality.....................................................................................177
Owning oneself is a moral imperative utilitarianism imposes interpersonal obligations to society, which destroys
morality..................................................................................................................................................................... 177
Aims to maximize overall utility despite competing interests in the public is utilitarianism destroys individualism. 178
Utility maximization destroys individualism............................................................................................................... 178
Utilitarianism forces individuals to sacrifice their own goals in order to increase utility ............................................178
Risks taken by the government to increase overall utility will severely compromise the individual which will result in
fatality....................................................................................................................................................................... 179
Government coercion threatens individual freedom and renders morality meaningless...........................................179
Utilitarianism promotes inequity and inherently discriminates against minority like slavery .....................................180
Utilitarianism destroys value to life by forcing the individual to take risks on a cost-benefit basis in an effort to
increase overall utility of an entity, while demoralizing the individuals own system of values..................................181
The only way to preserve individualism is to allow all persons to have the right to own themselves regardless of any
negative consequentialist impacts............................................................................................................................ 181
Utilitarianism allows larger powers like the government to control the individual as long a greater utility is achieved. It
is immoral to violate the sanctity of human life.......................................................................................................... 182
Utilitarianism suppresses individual choice-making freedom gives value to life.....................................................182
Governments have a responsibility to maintain human rights and individualism utilitarianism undermines human
rights ........................................................................................................................................................................ 183
Theories of right preserve value to life government politics with the intention of increasing overall utility through
environmentalism destroy morality and deceives the individual................................................................................183
Utilitarianism inevitable even in deontological frameworks.......................................................................................184
Compromising moral values and trading off for other injustices proves deontology is impossible............................184
Age of nuclear deterrence makes preventative measures necessary. Its too late to consider otherwise. ...............185
**Deon Good**..........................................................................................186

Consequences can only be evaluated AFTER morals Rights come first.............................................................186

Deontology InevitableIt is grounded in human behavior........................................................................................186
Deontology precludes util- the values of deontology come first................................................................................186
Deontology comes first, the means must justify themselves utilitarianism justifies the Holocaust. ......................187
Deontology precludes util- the values of deontology come first................................................................................188
Deontology comes before util- utilitarianism can be a last resort to preserve fundamental rights.............................188
Deontology preserves fundamental rights and still accesses the ultimate good, accessing the same things as util. 189
Evaluating the deontological aspects of a policy is critical to policy making.............................................................190
Deontology key to giving human life value................................................................................................................ 191
Deontology does not dismiss consequences, categorical imperative means deont still maximizes happiness........191
Callahan embraces reason and says it must be used in combination with a moral obligation to make decisions....192
Policy makers cannot depend solely on economics, but need to apply ethics to make efficient policies..................193
Deontology is essential for the maintenance of international human rights because it restricts the practice of
justifying the actions of the government by the ends achieved, creating what is essentially a humane international
order......................................................................................................................................................................... 194
Certain premises have an intrinsic moral value that comes before consequences of actions. Evaluating
consequences first puts our fate and the fate of the masses in the hands of............................................................194
Recognizing rights and putting them before a utilitarian calculus is the only rational and.........................................195

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Deontological principles of rights should be considered first other interpretations are assigned no moral value if
conflicting with the principles of rights because viewing the debate from a deontological perspective is the only way
to guarantee freedom................................................................................................................................................ 197
By guiding social choice, deontology ultimately achieves the same result as utilitarianism without compromising the
individual................................................................................................................................................................... 197
An action taken to maximize utility by a powerful entity like the government is illegitimate and immoral. Deontological
moral law guides the individual to realize obligations he has to society and will ultimately solve for societys problems
.................................................................................................................................................................................. 198
The utility of a society only has value when its individuals are treated with dignity. A free society that sacrifices some
of its own individuals to prevent human extinction is morally corrupt........................................................................198
Maintaining proper moral values is the only way to obtain a free society, which outweighs nuclear extinction.........199
Living without freedom transcends nuclear war ....................................................................................................... 199
A deontological framing maximizes the good by emphasizing rights and acting on an individualist basis................200
Both utilitarians and non-utilitarians respect the moral principle of equality and freedom. However, only deontology
can meet this principle because it allows for individual decisions.............................................................................200
Deontology morality maximizes good to its fullest extent while utilitarianism is indifferent to distribution of good . . .201
Evaluating morality through rights and justice is intrinsically good while utilitarianism denies humans of their basic
rights......................................................................................................................................................................... 201
Deontological morality promotes individualism, protecting humans from utilitarian obligations to society................202
Humans should morally have a right to themselves and the right to their property the government is immoral to
deny property rights regardless of their utilitarian intentions.....................................................................................203
*****MORALITY GOOD / BAD*****...........................................................204
**Morality Good: Obligations, Moral Laws, etc**.......................................204

Moral justice vital sets us apart from animalistic tendencies..................................................................................204

Moral law outweighs other considerations integral to human nature......................................................................204
Moral rationality key to sustainable decisionmaking avoids animalistic tendencies...............................................205
Utilitarianism fails to take into account prima facie rights moral resolution of conflicts necessary..........................205
Failure to satisfy moral obligations leads to violent backlash....................................................................................205
**Morality Bad**.........................................................................................207

Ethics is structurally flawed, in that it implies a transgression...................................................................................207

The ideology of good and evil is inherently flawed.................................................................................................. 207
The real drive behind ethics is desire, not the will to do good.................................................................................208
Morality is a demand for the impossible as it is based on our desires......................................................................208
Ethics is merely a tool by which personal morals are imposed on others, which is the root of discontent in society 209
It is impossible to determine whether an action is truly ethical or not........................................................................209
Ethics in terms of attempts to do something good only re-entrenches the presence of the omnipresent evil..........209
People already realize they have a moral obligation but dont actually follow them or treat them as anything but
another obligation..................................................................................................................................................... 210
Ethics fails to take into account human nature and therefore does not allow the individual to embrace oneself.
Instead, it forces a model that is not grounded in humanity and actually alienates human life.................................210
Philosophers provided ethics as a rational foundation for thought and moral responsibility but never really quested or
compared them, only when questioned can they actually be considered.................................................................211
Ethics is a faade, a back bone by which western philosophers could bounce contrived ideas, ethics as a whole
must be questioned to critique the culture that creates it instead of the inconsequential rationalizations.................212
Morality is complex Blanket claims that we need to save people in poverty prevent us from making rational choices
.................................................................................................................................................................................. 212
**Ethical Action & Legality Mutually Exclusive**.......................................214

Ethical action cant be based on the legal and illegal................................................................................................ 214

Ethical action and legality cannot be related............................................................................................................. 214
**State Ethics Bad**..................................................................................216

A Government that drops political obligation in order to obtain correct moral or ethical responsibility has the ability
to totalize into a destructive regime that strips human dignity (turn).......................................................................216
Ethico-politics gives governments the logocentric nature that leads to the worst atrocities in humanity such as the
Holocaust (turn)........................................................................................................................................................ 217
Whenever ethics is reinforced through ideals and norms chosen by the state it results in a world where people are
desensitized. Any universally imposed ethics will result in the destruction of man as people gain the conscience of a
machine. (turn).......................................................................................................................................................... 218
The affirmative cant reach out to the other when mandated by the state to do so, your evidence is perverted on this,
using the state allows authoritative action against the other.....................................................................................219

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The goal of ethics to the other and the ethics of the refugee actually furthers state control. Only by challenging
sovereignty can we have independent ethics........................................................................................................... 219
Deconstructing universal conceptions of right and ethics actually opens up the possibility for responsibility to the
other. Working within the state re-entrenches current oppressive dualisms.............................................................220
Government enforcement of responsibility takes away from the individuals ability to think and act on an individual
level of morality, which is key to regaining lost sense of morality in politics..............................................................221
Government established norms of ethical and moral right and wrongs lead to the dulling conscience of the individual
taking out all solvency. It also leads to accepting the shift to totalitarian regimes in the name of crises...................222
Forcing ethical views upon people through politics results in the ethics being short lived as individuals are unable to
feel invested in these new ideals.............................................................................................................................. 224
State ethics violate the very idea of democratic ethics (no solvency).......................................................................224
**Universal / Absolutist Ethics Bad**.........................................................226

Universal morality is impossible because everyone has individual passions and views...........................................226
Institutional ethics results in a homogenous mindless unconscious. Only by advocating individual ethics can humans
gain value for themselves......................................................................................................................................... 226
Any project that defines a universal ethical claim fosters indifference. Only by finding ethics in the absence of
universal norms can ethical action take place........................................................................................................... 227
Their form of moral absolutism prioritizes clean moral hands over moral results: they are more concerned with not
acting directly immoral than preventing much larger immoral consequences...........................................................228
Ignoring consequences is immoral - they sacrifice others to preserve moral purity. It is most moral to act to produce
the best end regardless of the moral cleanliness of the means................................................................................229
**Aesthetic Ethics Good**.........................................................................230

Foucault proposed an aesthetical ethics in which individuals choose their ethics based on an aesthetic existence.
Poster 07.................................................................................................................................................................. 230
Narcissism were the Other is supposed to discover themselves is opposed by Foucault, indicating that we should
live aesthetically instead and draws a line between this narcissistic enlightenment and aesthetic values
Poster 07.................................................................................................................................................................. 230
Aesthetic judgments, or judgments free of bias and societal opinion, are the best alternatives to judging morals and
ethics without placing our own vanity and egos as the hidden priority......................................................................231
By placing our own individual art and judgment before the worlds ethics we have the ability to question the
institutionalized ethics that leads our lives and form our own idea of ethics by the superior imperatives...............233
**AT: Kants Categorical Imperative**.......................................................236

Institutionalized ethics, such as the Kants Categorical Imperative, places regulations of what is right and what is
thought to be wrong without explanation or freedom to assume an alternative pathway by the individual.............236
Kants categorical imperative results in duty being impersonal. This results in a society where we work simply out of
necessity and no person choice resulting in the destruction of ourselves like the German writer Heinreich von Kleis
.................................................................................................................................................................................. 237
Kants categorical imperative creates a world where people are impersonal to the notion of duty. A nation following
this categorical imperative of impersonal duty will assure its destruction as it makes a nation of conscience lacking
machines.................................................................................................................................................................. 238
The categorical imperative destroys any individualism and promote sovereignty by claiming in the name of selfpreservation we must embrace a universal ethics.................................................................................................... 239
*****BIOPOWER*****................................................................................241
**Link: State Ethics**.................................................................................241

The affirmatives attempt to secure society allows for the government to rule a state of exception on behalf of
Humanitarian Imperatives. It allows the sovereigns biopower to go global...............................................................241
The modern humanitarian movement is rendered in biopolitical terms and actually works to extend the states
biopolitical control to a global scale........................................................................................................................... 242
The States attempt to be ethical is just a cover to increase biopolitical control over the population. Humanitarian
intervention is meant to justify state sponsored security and control over life...........................................................243
The idea of human rights and a states obligation to protect things like hunger is just the moving of security discourse
into the private life. This idea of an ethical responsibility is just the states excuse for further biopolitical control of
everyday life.............................................................................................................................................................. 244
The State exploits and destroys the Other in the name of humanitarian intervention and for the sake of humanity as
a whole..................................................................................................................................................................... 245
The ability of the state to apply good or bad ethical claims is the root of security discourse. In the name of ethics the
affirmative gives the state increased biopolitical control........................................................................................... 246
In the name of humanitarian and ethical concerns the government intervenes even more into the person life of the
people. The biopolitical order is reinforced by the idea that the state has a responsibility to its people and therefore
has a right to control it............................................................................................................................................... 248

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**Link: Ethics**..........................................................................................250

Foundationalism is a moral stance that leads towards a homogenous biopolitical structure....................................250

Attempts to coercively generalize ethical stances results in reinforcing the already hierarchal and dominating system
of the state, this coercively brings people into the states control and is biopolitical.................................................250
*****GOVERNMENT PROVISION*****.....................................................252
**Rimal**....................................................................................................252

Authoritarianism and constraints are key to avoid overpopulation and resource crunch that will end life.................252
Constitutional liberties encourage an unsustainable relationship with natural resources..........................................253
Private property and liberty encourages unsustainable resource consumption........................................................253
Welfare is key to avoid the resource crunch that will end all life...............................................................................254
Tyranny is inevitable its only a question of how quickly we allow it to form............................................................254
Frontline: Mutual coercion agreed upon by the majority will check bad instances of coercion..................................255
Uniqueness: A global authoritarian revolution is coming there is a lack of political interest in the promotion of
democratic freedoms................................................................................................................................................ 255
Uniqueness: Authoritarianism is spreading globally its already enmeshed in global political and economic
institutions................................................................................................................................................................. 256
**AT: Privatization**..................................................................................258

Privatization Fails More Than Succeeds................................................................................................................... 258

No moral common good exists arguments that the free market will provide for those in poverty are loose
predictions and are nto morally motivated................................................................................................................ 258
Privatization Raises Death Rate............................................................................................................................... 259
Individual investors will be less profitable than the government ensuring the failure of privatization........................259
Privatization Not Efficient.......................................................................................................................................... 260
Privatization Creates Disaster................................................................................................................................... 260
Corporations running the privatized economy are analogous to big governments....................................................260
*****THE USFG*****..................................................................................261
*****Courts*****..........................................................................................261
**Social Reform / Movements**................................................................261

Judicial rulings fail to spur social movements on their own.......................................................................................261

Courts cant produce social reform 3 reasons........................................................................................................ 261
**Courts Good: Generic**.........................................................................262

Judicial supremacy key to maintaining constitutional unity and rights of minorities..................................................262

Not adhering to precedent kills Court legitimacy....................................................................................................... 262
Undermining the Constitution causes extinction ...................................................................................................... 262
**Hollow Hope / Courts Bad**...................................................................263

The Supreme Court Prevents democracy................................................................................................................. 263

Link- Environment. The Courts were only able to help the environment once the other branches had acted...........263
Controversial Supreme Court decisions spur confusion, accomplishing nothing......................................................263
The Supreme Court undermines minority rights movements causing tension in American communities and
dependence on flawed legislation............................................................................................................................. 264
Litigation distracts time and money from successful grassroots movements............................................................264
Courts merely join movements- they dont produce social change...........................................................................265
Court rhetoric prevents the mobilization of the public, short circuiting personal autonomy. .....................................265
Civic Engagement is key to democracy.................................................................................................................... 266
**AT: Hollow Hope / Courts Good**..........................................................267

Civil obedience follows legislation- social change is a product of congressional law................................................267

Lawsuits can facilitate social movements................................................................................................................. 267
Court decision can be transformativeits proven by the fact that Brown affected far more than just public schools
.................................................................................................................................................................................. 268
Court decisions are insufficient in changing public opinion.......................................................................................268
Judicial victories do not have a catalytic effect......................................................................................................... 268
Courts mobilize social change wage discrimination rulings prove.........................................................................269
Symbolic legal support to rights claims advance social movement...........................................................................269
Even losses in the Courts lay the groundwork for political success..........................................................................270
Social success requires a shift in ideology that the Courts and individuals must achieve together..........................271
Rosenbergs hollow hope analysis is flawed, court decisions polarize citizenry in exceptional ways. .....................271
Judges are seen by the public as essential to social change....................................................................................272
Courts cant solve broader womens rights even precedent setting decisions fail because courts lack the essential
tools to solve for alt. causalities ............................................................................................................................... 272
Rosenberg is wrong bad theory and no reason why congress and the executive do provide change ..................272

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Perm on the counterplan solves the DA to be effective, the court must work with other branches of government
.................................................................................................................................................................................. 273
Courts solve social change massive swings in public opinion dont matter, minor changes in assumptions overtime
build up and influence actors.................................................................................................................................... 273
Social change doesnt need to be seen, court decisions simply need to challenge current assumptions to provide for
change elsewhere..................................................................................................................................................... 274
The Hollow Hope theory is wrong Rosenberg misrepresents the efficacy of the lower courts in court decision
enforcement.............................................................................................................................................................. 274
Rosenberg fails to take into account problems with implementation at the Congressional level...............................274
Courts are important the Hollow Hope fails to take into account that the judiciary works with and results in the
action of other branches of government to enforce decisions...................................................................................275
Rosenberg asks too much of court decisions he implies there is intent where there isnt justices rely on
enforcement at the local level................................................................................................................................... 275
In cases of lost hope, the court didnt actually act on the social change- hollow hope is a myth..............................277
Rosenberg and followers exaggerate the power the court has to lose hope.............................................................277
Turn: Court action encourages further litigation and strategy- Brown proves...........................................................278
Social movements will continue even if they dont win- resources, need to fight opposition ....................................279
*****Congress*****.....................................................................................280
**Social Reform / Movements**................................................................280

Congress is the most effective agent for solving societal problems..........................................................................280

**Centralization / Government Bad**........................................................281

The affirmatives acceptance of centralization prevents social movements by discouraging individual actionthe
result is extinction
Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Peace Through Social
Empowerment, "Primary Causes," http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp14.html) ......................281
Voting negative challenges the inevitability of centralization and opens up local communities for action.................281
Decentralization Solvency - Seeking institutional solutions while failing to question the assumptions that underlie
such institutions will inevitably fail ............................................................................................................................ 281
No net benefitthere is only a risk the CP alone solves best.
.................................................................................................................................................................................. 282
Centralization and individualism are zero-sumthe growing power of centralized power necessarily decreases the
significance of individuals ........................................................................................................................................ 282
The centralization of power in the center of an organization inevitably trades off with the individual........................283
Perm fails- power cannot reside in two places at once............................................................................................. 283
The perm cannot solve. The endorsement of a mass movement, no matter how well meant, will inevitably lead to a
loss of individual power............................................................................................................................................. 283
Centralized power inevitably trades off with the local................................................................................................284
Central government action discourages individual movements to solve the problem because they posit problems as
out of our control..................................................................................................................................................... 284
The government is the root cause of problems......................................................................................................... 285
Decentralization solves democracy and poverty....................................................................................................... 285
The government is the root cause of environmental destruction, wars, and economic upheavals............................285
The centralization of power inevitably leads to global destruction............................................................................286
Individual engagement in democracy is key to preventing a collapse.......................................................................286
Decentralized government is key to development of democracy..............................................................................287
Localization is a pre-requisite to solving democracy ................................................................................................287
Localized efforts are key to solve war and democracy .............................................................................................287
Decentralization promotes democracy ..................................................................................................................... 288
Decentralization promotes democracy ..................................................................................................................... 288
Inefficiencies of the federal government are inevitable this is an inherent characteristic in federal enterprise tradition
resulting in corruption and misallocation .................................................................................................................. 290
Healthcare is the epitome of overcentralization. It's current practice denies the power of local communities, whilst
sacrificing quality healthcare for profits. ................................................................................................................... 290
The concentration of power makes populism inevitableall social movements will regress to ineffectiveness
because of their demands for universality ................................................................................................................ 292
Decentralization of power is key to solving the population crisis. .............................................................................293
We can't provide a blueprint for the world of the alternative. Doing so would only further the domination of centralized
power. ...................................................................................................................................................................... 293
Their evidence is biased- the media will use it's control of information to maintain its hold on power ......................294

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Centralization is being broken down in the status quo-technology allows individuals to reach large audiences .....294
**Centralization Good / States Bad**........................................................295

Furthering the neoliberal agenda justifies genocide and extinction...........................................................................295

Federal devolution to the states exacerbates neoliberalism.....................................................................................295
Devolutionary policies can lead to a full blown neoliberal shift..................................................................................295
Policies passed to the state reinforce neoliberal ideologies......................................................................................296
Devolution to the states reinforces low-income disparities .......................................................................................296
Devolution to the states destroys political influence for the low-income....................................................................296
Passing jurisdiction to the states increases governmental control over individuals..................................................297
Devolutionary policies increase the stigmatization placed on the poor.....................................................................297
Devolutionary policies inherently bring destabilization and kills solvency.................................................................297
State policies are inefficient implementation differences........................................................................................ 298
Devolution inherently makes policies less equal ...................................................................................................... 298
Enforcing neoliberalism causes endless wars.......................................................................................................... 299
Neoliberalism makes poverty inevitable.................................................................................................................... 299
Even single policies risk a huge ideological shift empirically proven......................................................................300
**Separation of Powers**..........................................................................302

Collapse of constitutional balance of power risks tyranny and reckless warmongering............................................302

Lack of separation of powers causes nuclear war.................................................................................................... 302

*****LIBERTY*****
**Autonomy Good / Coercion Bad**
Human dignity is the highest standard

George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 19 92, p. 9

In sum, there seems to be no generally credible foundation for a critique of rights. Rights emerge as
the only or best way of protecting human dignity, and human dignity remains the highest standard.
This is not to deny that there will be strenuous differences of interpretation of various rights and
quarrels over the comparative importance of various rights. But by now even some antiindividualists, whether secular or religious, accept the idea of rights as useful or even as an indispensable ingredient in their
own thinking about politics and society.
Moral obligation to protect liberty
Edward Crane, President of the Cato Institute, VITAL SPEECHES OF THE DAY, September 15-17,
1996, p. 597
Those are words that we need to hear more of. It's true, freedom and morality do, ultimately, depend
on each other for their existence. But as government grows year in and year out, under Democratic
and Republican administrations, as regulations multiply, politically correct public education expands,
and our tax burden gets ever greater, I can't help but think the reservoir of morality in America is
much deeper than our reservoir of political liberty. The crisis we confront is a political crisis - one that
merits our immediate attention. We have, it seems to me, a moral imperative to challenge the
political status quo and to roll back the 20th century's legacy of statism. It is our heritage as
Americans to live in a civil society - not a society that is increasingly politicized. If we want a more
moral society, then, as Barry Goldwater said, liberty must be our main interest. Thank you.

Freedom comes before all other impacts

Sylvester Petro, professor of law at Wake Forest, Spring 1974, Toledo Law Review, p480
However, one may still insist on echoing Ernest Hemingway I believe in only one thing: liberty. And
it is always well to bear in mind David Humes observation: It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost
all at once. Thus, it is unacceptable to say that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of no import
because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That road leads to chaos, tyranny,
despotism, and the end of all human aspiration. Ask Solzhenstyn, Ask Milovan Djilas. In sum, if one
believes in freedom as a supreme value and proper ordering principle for any society aiming to
maximize spiritual and material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically

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identified and resisted with undying spirit.

Coercion outweighs, conditions like poverty are inevitable, its futile to try
to solve.
Kelley, founder and senior fellow of the Atlas Society, 98
(David Kelley, founder and senior fellow of the Atlas Society, 1998, A life of one's own, p68-69)

there is not always a hard and fast distinction between the number of
alternatives one has and the degree of ones freedom to choose among them.
Theoretically, any obstacle, restraint, or limitation may be looked at in either of two ways:
we may view it (1) as something that eliminates one or more alternatives a person
would otherwise have available or (2) something that prevents the person from
choosing one or more alternatives. The difference lies in whether we consider the limitation as
affecting the range of alternatives he has or the process of choosing among them. Advocates of
positive freedom have exploited this fact, insisting that lack of a certain opportunity
because of poverty, illness, or disability deprives a person of the freedom to choose that
opportunity. Conversely, we could in principle view overt coercion, physical force, or violence,
not as something that prevents a person from choosing an alternative but as
something that removes alternatives he would otherwise have. There are real
differences between (1) and (2). One difference is whether the obstacle or limitation is
imposed by reality or by other people. When some fact of reality affects the range of
alternatives we face, it is wishful thinking to regard it as an obstacle to what we would
otherwise be free to do. Facts are facts. The world operates a certain way, according to
causal laws, and the constraints imposed by nature are the foundation for human
choice, not a barrier to it. A farmer plants a field and tends it over the growing season, but a
To be sure,

hailstorm destroys the crop before he can harvest it. It would be bizarre to say that the hailstorm
abridged his freedom to reap what he has sown. As a natural event, the hailstorm is a misfortune that
eliminates the possibility of a harvest. By contrast, if a government price-support regulation forbids the
farmer to harvest the crop, the restraint arises from human action and does abridge his freedom to
what he otherwise could.

Compulsory violate rights

Ayn Rand, 1964, Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter, author of numerous books
including Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The Virtue of Selfishness pg 129

-=Max Rispoli=-

A single question added to each of the above eight clauses would make the issue clear: At whose expense? Jobs, food,
clothing, recreation (I), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values
goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide them? If some men are entitled by right to the products of the

work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. Any alleged "right" of one
man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. No man can have a right to
impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing
as "the right to enslave. A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only
the freedom to earn that implementation by one's own effort. Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision
of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the Pursuit of happinessnot of the right to
happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve
his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

Coercion is immoral denies individuals the capacity develop as moral agents.

Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 37-8
More hopeful is the strategy, pursued by a large number of libertarian philosophers, of appealing to a broadly

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Aristotelian account of morality (Mack 1981; Machan 1989; Rasmussen and Den Uyl 1991; Smith 1995).

the fundamental moral question is not What is the right thing to do? but rather What traits of
character should I develop? Only when one has determined what traits these are -- that is, what habitual patterns of
On Aristotles view,

action count as virtues can one go on to answer the subordinate question of how one ought to act in a particular case
(the answer being that one should act the way someone possessing the virtue relevant to that situation would act).

What count as the virtues, in turn, are just those qualities most conducive to enabling human beings to fulfill the
potentials which distinguish them as the unique sorts of beings they are those qualities, that is, which best allow
human beings to flourish given their distinctive human nature. Given that human beings are by nature rational
animals, we can flourish only if we practice those virtues governing practical and theoretical reason. It follows that we
have reason to acquire intellectual virtues like truthfulness and practical virtues such as temperance and courage,
and to avoid such corresponding vices as licentiousness and cowardice. Given that human beings are also by nature
social animals, we can only flourish if we practice also those virtues governing interaction with other human beings, so
that we have reason to acquire such social virtues as honesty and loyalty. Though the moral life will involve

decision-making about what to do in a particular concrete situation, then, it involves more basically the
gradual development of a good character by the taking on of the virtues and the weeding out of vices it essentially
involves, that is, a process of self-perfection. Only a person who voluntarily decides to do so can carry out this process,
however virtue must be freely chosen if it is truly to count as virtue. Moreover, the specific requirements of virtuous
behavior depend to a considerable extent on the unique circumstances of the situation and the individual person
involved, circumstances knowable only to that person himself in the concrete contexts of moral decision- making. The

moral life, then, is only fully possible under conditions wherein the individual is capable of self-direction (in Rasmussen and
Den Uyls terms), the absence of coercion and interference from outside forces . Allowing others such self-direction is
necessary too if the individual is to allow those others also to develop the virtues; and in general, respecting others
autonomy is essential if one is successfully to cooperate with them as fellow citizens, and thus fulfill ones own nature
as a social being. Given the centrality of self-direction to self- perfection, then, respect for the rights of self-ownership

turns out to be required for the successful pursuit of the moral life.
Evaluate freedom first it is critical to both prosperity and fairness
Richard L. Stroup (professor of economics at Montana State University) 1987: REFLECTIONS ON FREEDOM,
FAIRNESS, AND THE CONSTITUTION
Freedom (with accountability) is the key to both prosperity and to any reasonable and realistic conception of fairness.
Only with entrepreneurial freedom will the innovation required to increase prosperity occur. And only through freedom
and prosperity can fairness in the sense of benefits accruing to those with low incomes, as well as fair treatment
under the lawbe maintained. Both freedom and prosperity are incompatible with extensive regulatory or tax/transfer
powers in the hands of government. This paper argues that freedom, fairness, and prosperity are unalterably linked
and require strong constitutional constraints on government. A powerful case can be made for small, secure, but
constrained and competing governments ofthe sort a federal system suggests. As James Buchanans work indicates,
in todays world Hobbesian anarchy is not likely to yield freedom, economic growth and prosperity, or fairness. In this
world, I believe we do need government. Restraints on government, however, are the key to freedom and fairness.
Few would dispute the need for restraints to maintain freedom, but the restraints on government are necessary for
fairness as well. Why? Individuals are not equally endowed with effectiveness in market earnings, nor in the market
for political influence. There will be elites in any system, and those who are not members of the elite are far better
offwhen the influence of elites is diffused, as in a free society with constrained governmentwith freedom of entry
and exit, operating under the rule ofwilling consent. Thus a government with the power to prevent arbitrary abuse of
some people by others, but with sharply limited power to coerce others directly and in detail, is likely to provide
maximum freedom,and hence maximum prosperity and fairness as well.

Freedom outweighs without freedom, we are all reduced to the level of animals and
slaves only freedom from government oppression solves
Ludwig von Mises (Austrian Economist and Philosopher) 1960: The Economic Foundations of Freedom.
http://mises.org/efandi/ch1.asp
Animals are driven by instinctive urges. They yield to the impulse which prevails at the moment and peremptorily asks
for satisfaction. They are the puppets of their appetites. Man's eminence is to be seen in the fact that he chooses

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between alternatives. He regulates his behavior deliberatively. He can master his impulses and desires; he has the
power to suppress wishes the satisfaction of which would force him to renounce the attainment of more important
goals. In short: man acts; he purposively aims at ends chosen. This is what we have in mind in stating that man is a
moral person, responsible for his conduct. Freedom as a Postulate of Morality
All the teachings and precepts of ethics, whether based upon a religious creed or whether based upon a secular
doctrine like that of the Stoic philosophers, presuppose this moral autonomy of the individual and therefore appeal to
the individual's conscience. They presuppose that the individual is free to choose among various modes of conduct
and require him to behave in compliance with definite rules, the rules of morality. Do the right things, shun the bad
things. It is obvious that the exhortations and admonishments of morality make sense only when addressing
individuals who are free agents. They are vain when directed to slaves. It is useless to tell a bondsman what is morally
good and what is morally bad. He is not free to determine his comportment; he is forced to obey the orders of his
master. It is difficult to blame him if he prefers yielding to the commands of his master to the most cruel punishment
threatening not only him but also the members of his family. This is why freedom is not only a political postulate, but
no less a postulate of every religious or secular morality. The Struggle for Freedom Yet for thousands of years a considerable part
of mankind was either entirely or at least in many regards deprived of the faculty to choose between what is right and what is wrong. In the status
society of days gone by the freedom to act according to their own choice was, for the lower strata of society, the great majority of the population,
seriously restricted by a rigid system of controls. An outspoken formulation of this principle was the statute of the Holy Roman Empire that
conferred upon the princes and counts of the Reich (Empire) the power and the right to determine the religious allegiance of their subjects. The
Orientals meekly acquiesced in this state of affairs. But the Christian peoples of Europe and their scions that settled in overseas territories never
tired in their struggle for liberty. Step by step they abolished all status and caste privileges and disabilities until they finally succeeded in
establishing the system that the harbingers of totalitarianism try to smear by calling it the bourgeois system. The Supremacy of the Consumers
The economic foundation of this bourgeois system is the market economy in which the consumer is sovereign. The consumer, i.e., everybody,
determines by his buying or abstention from buying what should be produced, in what quantity and of what quality. The businessmen are forced by
the instrumentality of profit and loss to obey the orders of the consumers, Only those enterprises can flourish that supply in the best possible and
cheapest way those commodities and services which the buyers are most anxious to acquire. Those who fail to satisfy the public suffer losses and
are finally forced to go out of business. In the precapitalistic ages the rich were the owners of large landed estates. They or their ancestors had
acquired their property as gifts?feuds or fiefs?from the sovereign who?with their aid?had conquered the country and subjugated its inhabitants.
These aristocratic landowners were real lords as they did not depend on the patronage of buyers. But the rich of a capitalistic industrial society are
subject to the supremacy of the market. They acquire their wealth by serving the consumers better than other people do and they forfeit their
wealth when other people satisfy the wishes of the consumers better or cheaper than they do. In the free market economy the owners of capital are
forced to invest it in those lines in which it best serves the public. Thus ownership of capital goods is continually shifted into the hands of those who
have best succeeded in serving the consumers. In the market economy private property is in this sense a public service imposing upon the owners
the responsibility of employing it in the best interests of the sovereign consumers. This is what economists mean when they call the market
economy a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. The Political Aspects of Freedom Representative government is the political
corollary of the market economy. The same spiritual movement that created modern capitalism substituted elected officeholders for the
authoritarian rule of absolute kings and hereditary aristocracies. It was this much-decried bourgeois liberalism that brought freedom of conscience,
of thought, of speech, and of the press and put an end to the intolerant persecution of dissenters. A free country is one in which every

citizen is free to fashion his life according to his own plans. He is free to compete on the market for the most desirable
jobs and on the political scene for the highest offices. He does not depend more on other people's favor than these
others depend on his favor. If he wants to succeed on the market, he has to satisfy the consumers; if he wants to
succeed in public affairs he has to satisfy the voters. This system has brought to the capitalistic countries of Western Europe, America,
and Australia an unprecedented increase in population figures and the highest standard of living ever known in history. The much talked-about
common man has at his disposal amenities of which the richest men in precapitalistic ages did not even dream. He is in a position to enjoy the
spiritual and intellectual achievements of science, poetry, and art that in earlier days were accessible only to a small elite of well-to-do people. And
he is free to worship as his conscience tells him.

Coercion restricts rights and destroys individual agency.

Blake, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, 01
(Michael Blake, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, Summer 2001, Distributive Justice,
State Coercion, and Autonomy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Summer, 2001), pp. 257-296, JSTOR)

People can be
denied their autonomy by being starved, deeply impoverished, or subjected to oppressive and
marginalizing norms, but they can also face a denial of autonomy that results from outright
coercion. I will refrain from offering a complete theory of coercion in the present context;'4 I will only note that, as I
have insisted upon throughout this exercise, whether an individual faces a denial of autonomy resulting
from coercion cannot be read off simply from the number of options open to her. Coercion is not
simply a matter of what options are available; it has to do with the reasons the set of options is as
constrained as it is. Coercion is an intentional action, designed to replace the chosen option with
the choice of another. Coercion, we might therefore say, expresses a relationship of domination,
violating the autonomy of the individual by replacing that indi- vidual's chosen plans and pursuits
There is much more to be said in the above context, but I want now to turn to the issue of coercion.

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with those of another. Let us say, therefore, that coercive proposals violate the autonomy of those
against whom they are employed; they act so as to replace our own agency with the agency of
another.
Coercion snowballsEvery increase in the states power brings us closer to
tyranny
Browne, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and Director of
Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, 95
(Harry Browne, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and
Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, 1995, Why Government
Doesn't Work, p.65-66)
Each increase in coercion is easier to justify . If its right to force banks to report your
finances to the government, then its right to force you to justify the cash in your pocket at the
airport. If its right to take property from the rich and give it to the poor, then its right to take
your property for the salt marsh harvest mouse. As each government program fails, it

becomes necessary to move another step closer to complete control over our
lives. As one thing leads to another as coercion leads to more coercion what can we
look forward to? Will it become necessary to force you to justify everything you do to any
government agent who thinks you might be a threat to society? Will it become necessary to
force your children to report your personal habits to their teachers or the police? Will it
become necessary to force your neighbors to monitor your activities? Will it become
necessary to force you to attend a reeducation program to learn how to be more sensitive, or
how not to discriminate, or how to avoid being lured into taking drugs, or how to recognize
suspicious behavior? Will it become necessary to prohibit some of your favorite foods and ban
other pleasures, so you dont fall ill or have an accident putting a burden on Americas healthcare system? Some of these things such as getting children to snitch on their parents or
ordering people into reeducation programs are already happening in America. The others
have been proposed and are being considered seriously. History has shown that each was an
important step in the evolution of the worlds worst tyrannies. We move step by step

further along the road to oppression because each step seems like such a small
one. And because were told that each step will give us something alluring in
return less crime, cheaper health care, safety from terrorists, an end to discrimination even
if none of the previous steps delivered on its promise. And because the people who promote these
steps are well-meaning reformers who would use force only to build a better world.
There is no value to life in their framework coercion makes us into mere
tools of the state.
Hayek, Nobel Prize winner for Economics, 60
(F.A. Hayek, Nobel Prize winner for Economics, 1960, The Constitution of Liberty, p.20)

By coercion we mean such control of the environment or circumstances of a

person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a
coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another . Except in the sense of choosing the
lesser evil in a situation forced on him by another, he is unable either to use his own intelligence
or knowledge or to follow his own aims and beliefs . Coercion is evil precisely because it thus
eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the
achievement of the ends of another. Free action, in which a person pursues his own aims by the
means indicated by his own knowledge, must be based on data which cannot be shaped at will
by another. It presupposes the existence of a known sphere in which the circumstances cannot

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be so shaped by another person as to leave one only that choice prescribed by the other.

Utilitarianism doesnt trump the impact of coercionindividuals cant be

reduced to units of value.
Machan, 95 Professor of philosophy, Auburn University, 1995
ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 129)

(Tibor, PRIVATE RIGHTS AND PUBLIC

The essential point to note at this juncture is how the idea of the worth and rights of the individual
simply cannot find a place in the standard utilitarian cost-benefit analysis favored by many economists.
Benefits, according to this approach, are to be measured by what people prefer (or would prefer, if
properly informed), while costs are reducible to what people would prefer to do without or avoid if they
were properly informed. The kind of value (or worth) individuals have, however, is not just one benefit
competing among other benefits...Consider the case where some people are injured or harmed by
others. "Since the costs of injury are borne by its victims," Kelman contends, "while its benefits are
escaped by its perpetrators, simple cost-benefit calculations may be less important than more abstract
conceptions of justice, fairness, and human dignity. Developing this theme more fully, Kelman writes as
follows: We would not condone a rape even if it could be demonstrated that the rapist derived
enormous pleasure from his actions, while the victim suffered in only small ways. Behind the conception
of "rights" is the notion that some concept of justice, fairness or human dignity demands that
individuals ought to be able to perform certain acts, despite the harm of others, and ought to be
protected against certain acts, despite the loss this causes to the would-be perpetrator. Thus we
undertake no cost-benefit analysis of the effects of freedom of speech or trial by jury before allowing
them to continue.

Every invasion of liberty must be rejected failure to do so leads to massive

atrocities.
Harry Browne, former Libertarian presidential candidate, executive director of public policy at
American Liberty Foundation, editor of Liberty Magazine, financial advisor and economist, 19 95, Why
Government Doesnt Work)

The reformers of the Cambodian revolution claimed to be building a better

world. They forced people into reeducation programs to make them better citizens . Then they
used force to regulate every aspect of commercial life . Then they forced office workers and
intellectuals to give up their jobs and harvest rice, to round out their education. When people
resisted having their lives turned upside down, the reformers had to use more and more force.
By the time they were done , they had killed a third of the countrys population , destroyed
the lives of almost everyone still alive, and devastated a nation . It all began with using force for
the best of intentions to create a better world.
The Soviet leaders used coercion to provide economic security and to build a
New Man a human being who would put his fellow man ahead of himself. At least 10
million people died to help build the New Man and the Workers Paradise.37 But human nature
never changed and the workers lives were always Hell, not Paradise.
In the 1930s many Germans gladly traded civil liberties for the economic
revival and national pride Adolf Hitler promised them. But like every other
grand dream to improve society by force, it ended in a nightmare of
devastation and death.
Professor R. J. Rummel has calculated that 119 million people have been killed by their own
governments in this century.38 Were these people criminals? No, they were people who simply
didnt fit into the New Order people who
preferred their own dreams to those of the reformers. Every time you allow government to use

force to make society better, you move another step closer to the nightmares of Cambodia, the

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Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany.

Weve already moved so far that our own government can perform with impunity the outrages
described in the preceding chapters. These examples arent cases of government gone wrong;
they are examples of government period. They are what governments do just as chasing
cats is what dogs do. They are the natural consequence of letting government use force to bring
about a drug-free nation, to tax someone else to better your life, to guarantee your economic
security, to assure that no one can mistreat you or hurt your feelings, and to cover up the

damage of all the failed government programs that came before.

Government coercion is immoral because it kills freedom and virtue by
eroding the basis of free market capitalism
Doug Bandow (Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special
Assistant to President Ronald Reagan) March 7, 1997: Freedom and Virtue
are Inseparable. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6186.
For years the Left promised that socialism would eventually out-produce the market. That claim
died with the Soviet Union. What remained of the Left then began to complain that capitalism
generated too many material goods. Now similar attacks on capitalism are coming from the
Right. The market, it is said, threatens family, human relationships, values and virtue. However,
it is a mistake to treat freedom, which is the essence of capitalism, and virtue as mutually
antagonistic. In fact liberty-- the right to exercise choice, free from coercive state regulation-- is
a necessary precondition for virtue. And virtue is ultimately necessary for liberty to flourish.
Virtue cannot exist without the freedom to make moral choices. Coerced acts of conformity
with some moral norm, however good, do not represent virtue; rather, compliance with that
moral norm must be voluntary. Virtue rejects a standard of intra-personal morality. As such it is
an area that lies largely beyond the reach of state power. Of course societies can be more or
less virtuous. But blaming moral shifts on legal changes mistakes correlation for causation.
America's one-time cultural consensus eroded during an era of strict laws. Only cracks in this
consensus, which provided the moral foundation of the laws, led to statutory changes.
Government has proved that it is not a good teacher of virtue. The state tends to be effective
at simple tasks, like jailing people. It is far less successful in shaping individual consciences.
New laws would not make America a more virtuous nation. Even if there were fewer overt acts
of immorality, there would be no change in peoples hearts and thus in society's moral core.
Indeed attempting to forcibly make people virtuous would make society it self less virtuous:
First individuals would lose the opportunity to exercise virtue. They would not face the same
set of temptations and be forced to choose between good and evil. This approach might make
their lives a bit simpler. But they would not be more virtuous. In this dilemma we see the
paradox of Christianity: A God of love creates man and provides a means of redemption, but
allows him to choose evil. Second, to vest government with primary responsibility for
promoting virtue shortchanges other institutions like the family and church, sapping their
vitality. Private social institutions find it easier to lean on the power of coercion than to lead by
example, attempt to persuade and solve problems. Third making government a moral enforcer
encourages abuse by whatever interest groups gain power. If one thing is certain, it is that man
is sinful. That sin is magnified by coercive power. Those who possess power can of course, do
good, but history suggests that they are far more likely to do harm. Indeed, as Americas
traditional Judeo-Christian consensus crumbles we a more likely to see government promoting
alternative moral views. This is possible only if the state is given the authority to coercively
mold souls in the name of the community or family. Despite the best intentions of advocates of
statecraft as soulcraft, government grows ever more likely to enshrine something other than
traditional morality. The fact that government can do little to help does not mean that there is
nothing it should do. Public officials should adopt as their maxim "First, do no harm." Although
America's moral breakdown, most evident in the inner-city, has many causes, the welfare state
has exacerbated the problem at every level, punishing marriage, work and thrift. Government
has spent years attempting to expunge religious values from the public square; the public
school monopoly discourages both good education and values instruction.

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Coercion creates a slippery slope to more coercion

Harry Browne, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President, Director of Public Policy for the
DownsizeDC.org, THE GREAT LIBERTARIAN OFFER, 2000, p. 18
Government grows, too, because the subsidy given to one group inspires others to demand the same
benefits. And when government protects one company or industry from competition, others wonder
why they shouldn't demand the same protection. That's why no government program ever stands
still. No matter what the stated purpose or limit when implemented, it inevitably expands to cover
more and more peopleand wider and wider areas. Everyone who comes to the government asking
for favors has a plausible request. Once it's considered proper to use government force to solve one
person's problem, force can be justified to solve anyone's problem. Over time, fewer and fewer
requests seem out of bounds. And the grounds for saying "no" become more and more eroded. The
pressure on politicians to use coercion to grant favors becomes overwhelming. The Motives of Public
Servants But, in truth, very little pressure is needed. Lawmakers, bureaucrats, and judges all rejoice
in a government that grows and grows and grows. Big government gives lawmakers the power to
make or break companies and individuals. People must bow and scrape to obtain favorsor just to
keep government from destroying them.
Violations of liberty create a slippery slope to more governmental constraints.
Tibor R. Machan, Research Fellow @ Hoover Institution, Professor Emeritus in the Department of
Philosophy at Auburn University, 2002, Liberty and Hard Cases, p. [xvii xix]
We are not unfamiliar with the hazards of the slippery slope in our own personal lives. If a man hits his
child in some alleged emergency, the very act of doing so may render him more amenable to smacking
the kid under more typical circumstances. Slapping someone who is hysterical may make it easier to
slap someone who is only very upset or recalcitrant or annoying or just too slow fetching the beer from
the refrigerator. Similarly, a minor breach of trust can beget more of the same, a little white lie here
and there can beget lying as a routine, and so forth. Moral habits promote a principled course of action
even in cases where bending or breaking the principle might not seem too harmful to other parties or to
our own integrity. On the other hand, granting ourselves reasonable exceptions tends to weaken our
moral habits; as we seek to rationalize past action, differences of kind tend to devolve into differences
of degree. Each new exception provides the precedent for the next, until we lose our principles
altogether and doing what is right becomes a matter of happenstance and mood rather than of loyalty
to enduring values. The same is true of public action. When citizens of a country delegate to
government, by means of democratic and judicial processes, the power to forge paternalistic public
policies such as banning drug abuse, imposing censorship, restraining undesirable trade, and
supporting desirable trade, the bureaucratic and police actions increasingly rely on the kind of violence
and intrusiveness that no free citizenry ought to experience or foster. And the bureaucrats and the
police tell themselves, no doubt, that what theyre doing is perfectly just and right. Consider, for
starters, that when no one complains about a crimebecause it is not perpetrated against someone
but rather involves breaking a paternalistic lawto even detect the crime requires methods that are
usually invasive. Instead of charges being brought by wronged parties, phone tapping, snooping,
anonymous reporting, and undercover work are among the dubious means that lead to prosecution.
Thus the role of the police shifts from protection and peacekeeping to supervision, regimentation, and
reprimand. No wonder, then, that officers of the law are often caught brutalizing suspects instead of
merely apprehending them. Under a paternalistic regime, their goals have multiplied, and thus the
means they see as necessary to achieving those goals multiply too. The same general danger of
corrupting a free societys system of laws may arise when government is called on to deal with
calamities. There is the perception, of course, that in such circumstances the superior powers of
government are indispensable, given the immediateness of the danger. The immediate benefitsa life
saved by a marineare evident. Yet the dangers of extensive involvement by legal authorities in the
handling of nonjudicial problems are no less evident, if less immediate in impact.
Government coercion causes more violations of liberty.
Hazlitt, founding board member of the Mises Institute and Journalist for The Wall Street Journal, 07
(Henry, Can the State Reduce Poverty? http://www.mises.org/story/2526)
From the beginning of history, sincere reformers as well as demagogues have sought to abolish or at
least to alleviate poverty through state action. In most cases their proposed remedies have only
served to make the problem worse. The most frequent and popular of these proposed remedies has

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been the simple one of seizing from the rich to give to the poor. This remedy has taken a thousand
different forms, but they all come down to this. The wealth is to be "shared," to be "redistributed," to
be "equalized." In fact, in the minds of many reformers it is not poverty that is the chief evil but
inequality. All schemes for redistributing or equalizing incomes or wealth must undermine or destroy
incentives at both ends of the economic scale. They must reduce or abolish the incentives of the
unskilled or shiftless to improve their condition by their own efforts; and even the able and
industrious will see little point in earning anything beyond what they are allowed to keep. These
redistribution schemes must inevitably reduce the size of the pie to be redistributed. They can only
level down. Their long-run effect must be to reduce production and lead toward national
impoverishment. The problem we face is that the false remedies for poverty are almost infinite in
number. An attempt at a thorough refutation of any single one of them would run to disproportionate
length. But some of these false remedies are so widely regarded as real cures or mitigations of
poverty that if I do not refer to them I may be accused of having undertaken a book on the remedies
for poverty while ignoring some of the most obvious.
Government coercion destroys the value to life and cannot be morally justified

Tibor Machan, PRIVATE RIGHTS & PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 68-9.

All governmental action that does not serve to repel or retaliate against coercion is antithetical to
any respect for human dignity. While it is true that some people should give to others to assist them
in reaching their goals, forcing individuals to do so plainly robs them of their dignity. There is nothing
morally worthwhile in forced giving. Generally, for a society to respect human dignity, the special
moral relations between people should be left undisturbed. Government should confine itself to
making sure that this voluntarism is not abridged, no matter how tempting it might be to use its
coercive powers to attain some worthy goal.
Coercion destroys value to life
Joseph Raz, philosopher, THE MORALITY OF FREEDOM, 1986, p. 307
One way to test the thesis of the primacy of action reasons is to think of a person who is entirely
passive and is continuously led, cleaned, and pumped full with hash, so that he is perpetually content,
and wants nothing but to stay in the same condition. Its a familiar imaginary horror. How do we rank
the success of such a life? It is not the worst life one can have. It is simply not a life at all. It lacks
activity, it lacks goals. To the extent that one is tempted to judge it more harshly than that and to
regard it as a negative life this is because of the wasted potentiality. It is a life which could have been
and was not. We can isolate this feature by imagining that the human being concerned is mentally and
physically effected in a way which rules out the possibility of a life with any kind of meaningful pursuit in
it. Now it is just not really a life at all. This does not preclude one from saying that it is better than
human life. It is simply sufficiently unlike human life in the respects that matter that we regard it as
only a degenerate case of human life. But clearly not being alive can be better than that life.
Coercion ensures extinction.
Louis Rene Beres, Professor of International Law, Purdue University, Spring, 1994, ARIZONA JOURNAL
OF INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW, p. 23-4
This, then, is an altogether different kind of understanding. Rather than rescue humankind by freeing individuals from fear of death, this perspective recommends educating people to the truth of an incontestable relationship between death and

By surrendering ourselves to States and to traditional views of self-determination, we encourage not immortality but premature and
predictable extinction. It is a relationship that can, and must, be more widely understood. There are great ironies involved. Although the corrosive calculus of
geopolitics has now made possible the deliberate killing of all life, populations all over the planet turn
increasingly to States for security. It is the dreadful ingenuity of States that makes possible death in the
billions, but it is in the expressions of that ingenuity that people seek safety. Indeed, as the threat of nuclear annihilation looms even after the Cold War, the
citizens of conflicting States reaffirm their segmented loyalties, moved by the persistent unreason that is, after all, the most indelible badge of modern
geopolitics.

humankind.

Coercion is the root cause of military conflict

Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, PhD, former pharmaceutical research scientist, former Assistant Professor of
Surgery, HEALING OUR WORLD: THE OTHER PIECE OF THE PUZZLE, 1993, p.
http://www.ruwart.com/Healing/ruwart_all.html.
Humankind is poised on the brink of an evolutionary leap. In the last few decades, we have become
increasingly aware of the source of our inner peace and enrichment. Depending on our personal
background, we express this great discovery differently. The practical, down-to-earth individuals among

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us "take responsibility for our lives" as described in Wayne W. Dyer's Your Erroneous Zones. Those of us
with a metaphysical outlook "create our own reality" as Shirley MacLaine did in Out on a Limb. The
spiritual among us know that "the kingdom of God is within" and follow The Road Less Traveled (M.
Scott Peck). Sometimes we simply "find ourselves" through the power of love as Richard Bach did in The
Bridge Across Forever. Ultimately, our inner harmony and abundance depend on how we react to our
outer world. The creation of peace and plenty in our outer world, however, frequently seems hopelessly
beyond our control. In the past century, we've supported widespread social reform. Nevertheless,
people are still starving in a world capable of feeding all. In our own country, homelessness and poverty
are on the rise. Violence is no longer limited to overseas wars: our streets, even our schools, are no
longer safe. The environment that nurtures us is ravaged and raped. When we acknowledge how our
reactions contribute to our inner state, we gain control. Our helplessness dissolves when we stop
blaming others for feelings we create. In our outer world, the same rules apply. Today, as a society, as a
nation, as a collective consciousness, "we" once again feel helpless, blaming selfish others for the
world's woes. Our nation's laws, reflecting a composite of our individual beliefs, attempt to control
selfish others at gunpoint, if necessary. Striving for a better world by focusing on others instead of
ourselves totally misses the mark. When others resist the choices we have made for them, conflicts
escalate and voraciously consume resources. A warring world is a poor one. Attempting to control
others, even for their own good, has other undesirable effects. People who are able to create intimacy
in their personal relationships know that you can't hurry love. Trying to control or manipulate those
close to us creates resentment and anger. Attempting to control others in our city, state, nation, and
world is just as destructive to the universal love we want the world to manifest. Forcing people to be
more "unselfish" creates animosity instead of good will. Trying to control selfish others is a cure worse
than the disease. We reap as we sow. In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point
fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and the international cartels. We are blithely
unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them. Like a stone thrown in a
quiet pond, our desire to control our neighbors ripples outward, affecting the political course of our
community, state, nation, and world. Yet we know not what we do. We attempt to bend our neighbors to
our will, sincere in our belief that we are benevolently protecting the world from their folly and shortsightedness. We seek control to create peace and prosperity, not realizing that this is the very means
by which war and poverty are propagated. In fighting for our dream without awareness, we become the
instruments of its destruction. If we could only see the pattern! In seeking to control others, we behave
as we once did as children, exchanging our dime for five pennies, all the while believing that we were
enriching ourselves. When a concerned adult tried to enlighten us, we first refused to believe the truth.
Once awareness dawned, we could no longer be fooled, nor was laborious deliberation necessary for
every transaction. Once we understood how to count money, we automatically knew if we benefited
from such a trade. Similarly, when the fact and folly of controlling others first come to our attention,
we're surprised and full of denial. I certainly was! When we care about the state of our world, however,
we don't stop there. I trust you are concerned enough to persevere and to consider seriously the shift in
consciousness this book proposes. Once we have the courage to accept responsibility for our part of the
problem, we automatically become part of the solution, independent of what others do. We honor their
non-aggressive choices (even if they are self-ish) and stop trying to control them. In doing so, we
dismantle their most effective means of controlling us. Others only ignite the flames of war and poverty.
We feed the flames or starve them. Not understanding their nature, we've fanned the sparks instead of
smothering them. Not understanding our contribution to the raging inferno, we despair that a world full
of selfish others could ever experience universal har-mony and abundance. Nothing could be further
from the truth! Widespread peace and plenty can be created within our lifetime. When we understand
how to stop fueling the flames of war and poverty, we can manifest our dream.

Coercion causes tyranny.

Tibor Machan, philosophy professor, Auburn, PRIVATE RIGHTS AND PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 19 95, p. 86-7
As Bondy notes, in totalitarian states, where the government controls the printing presses and
publishing organizations, anyone wishing to state a personal opinion must gain official sanction.
(Even under Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reformsbegun in 1987, prior to the
breakup of the Soviet statethe openness and restructuring involved were permitted or instituted by
government, rather than being understood as a basic human right that limits the scope and power of
the government. Consider also that General Augusto Pinochet's Chile had had a relatively "free"

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marketthat is, a government policy of abstention from heavy-handed economic regulation. Yet its
critics will quite rightly refuse to regard it as having been a free country. Moreover in countries where
broadcasting is government administered, there is no right to telecast one's views or ideas on the
airways, only a permission to do so if it suits the state authorities. In contrast, if the right to property
is respected, individuals do not have to seek political permission to act, even if they still must earn
the opportunity to do so via the free marketplace and in face of natural obstacles. The right to
property is the right to work for, acquire, and hold goods and valuables; it includes the rights of
production, trade, and bequest, as well as the right to undertake innumerable actions vis-a-vis the
world of ownable items not even conceived of yet. The right to pursue happiness or individual
excellence in life, then, requires full support of the right to property. Private property rights are
neither favored nor legally protected in our era and have not been for a long time. Both cultural and
legal developments in the last one hundred years have undermined the protection of property rights
The state often acts in a paternalistic fashion toward the citizen's ownership and management of
property. It is increasingly willing to usurp mutually agreed-upon contracts. Nevertheless, broadly
speaking, the history of the United States demonstrates that the significant protection of private
property rights, despite much compromise and confusion, has a propensity to increase the
productivity as well as the self-responsibility of the members of a human community. It contributes
to their self-perception as moral agents who cannot expect others to live for them and it fosters their
concern for and development toward doing reasonably well in their lives. In short, the right to private
property is a required feature of a human community that enhances human flourishing.
Global democratic consolidation is necessary to prevent many scenarios for war and
extinction
Larry Diamond, Hoover Institution senior fellow, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy,
December 1995, A Report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Promoting
Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives,
http://wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm
OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming
years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and
could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international
crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted
the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to
proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered.
Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the
weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty,
and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important
lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one
another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders.
Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less
likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not
build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form
more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more
stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer
to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better
bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness
makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own
borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are
the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be
built.
Each use of coercive force paves the road for massive atrocities
Harry Browne, former Libertarian presidential candidate, executive director of public policy at
American Liberty Foundation, editor of Liberty Magazine, financial advisor and economist, WHY
GOVERNMENT DOESNT WORK, 1995, p. 66-7.
The reformers of the Cambodian revolution claimed to be building a better world. They forced people
into reeducation programs to make them better citizens. Then they used force to regulate every aspect

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of commercial life. Then they forced office workers and intellectuals to give up their jobs and harvest
rice, to round out their education. When people resisted having their lives turned upside down, the
reformers had to use more and more force. By the time they were done, they had killed a third of the
countrys population, destroyed the lives of almost everyone still alive, and devastated a nation. It all
began with using force for the best of intentionsto create a better world. The Soviet leaders used
coercion to provide economic security and to build a New Mana human being who would put his
fellow man ahead of himself. At least 10 million people died to help build the New Man and the Workers
Paradise. But human nature never changedand the workers lives were always Hell, not Paradise. In
the 1930s many Germans gladly traded civil liberties for the economic revival and national pride Adolf
Hitler promised them. But like every other grand dream to improve society by force, it ended in a
nightmare of devastation and death. Professor R.J. Rummel has calculated that 119 million people have
been killed by their own governments in this century. Were these people criminals? No, they were
people who simply didnt fit into the New Orderpeople who preferred their own dreams to those of the
reformers. Every time you allow government to use force to make society better, you move another
step closer to the nightmares of Cambodia, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. Weve already moved
so far that our own government can perform with impunity the outrages described in the preceding
chapters. These examples arent cases of government gone wrong; they are examples of government
period. They are what governments dojust as chasing cats is what dogs do.
Government coercion creates evil
Mann 03. Frederick Mann, entrepreneur, author of The Economic Rape of America, and founder of
the Free World Order. Why you must recognize and understand Coercion, p1. 2003.
http://www.buildfreedom.com/power/powerx/1.html
"Lao Tzu believed that when people do not have a sense of power they become resentful and
uncooperative. Individuals who do not feel personal power feel fear. They fear the unknown because
they do not identify with the world outside of themselves; thus their psychic integration is severely
damaged and they are a danger to their society. Tyrants do not feel power, they feel frustration and
impotency. They wield force, but it is a form of aggression, not authority. On closer inspection, it
becomes apparent that individuals who dominate others are, in fact, enslaved by insecurity and are
slowly and mysteriously hurt by their own actions. Lao Tzu attributed most of the world's ills to the fact
that people do not feel powerful and independent." Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous German
philosopher, wrote that "will to power" is the essence of human nature. In a book compiled from his
notes after his death, 'The Will To Power,' is written: "My idea is that every specific body strives to be
master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its
extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming
to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: Thus they conspire
together for power." .. To feel that we are worthwhile individuals, to know that we exist, we have to
express our power - feel that we are in control. This imperative to express our power and experience
control is central to human behavior. Every human does something to express his or her power in the
world. This power can be expressed creatively or destructively. Humans first attempt to express their
power creatively. If such attempts fail repeatedly, they experience themselves as powerless. They may
feel helpless and hopeless, and become depressed. What they experience is that they cannot make a
positive difference in their own lives or in the world. A cognitive breakdown occurs between their
actions and the results they produce. Mentally and intellectually they cease to understand the
connections between their behavior and the consequences of their behavior. Then they express their
power destructively.
Government coercion must be morally rejected
Dr. Edward Younkins, business professor, Wheeling Jesuit, CIVIL SOCIETY: THE REALM OF FREEDOM,
June 10, 2000, p. http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000610-11.htm
Recently (and ironically), government projects and programs have been started to restore civil
society through state subsidization or coercive mandates. Such coercion cannot create true
voluntary associations. Statists who support such projects believe only in the power of political
society they don't realize that the subsidized or mandated activity can be performed voluntarily
through the private interaction of individuals and associations. They also don't understand that to
propose that an activity not be performed coercively, is not to oppose the activity, but simply its
coercion. If civil society is to be revived, we must substitute voluntary cooperation for coercion and

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replace mandates with the rule of law. According to the Cato Handbook for Congress, Congress
should: before trying to institute a government program to solve a problem, investigate whether
there is some other government program that is causing the problem ... and, if such a program is
identified, begin to reform or eliminate it; ask by what legal authority in the Constitution Congress
undertakes an action ...; recognize that when government undertakes a program, it displaces the
voluntary efforts of others and makes voluntary association in civil society appear redundant, with
significant negative effects; and begin systematically to abolish or phase out those government
programs that do what could be accomplished by voluntary associations in civil society ...
recognizing that accomplishment through free association is morally superior to coercive mandates,
and almost always generates more efficient outcomes. Every time taxes are raised, another
regulation is passed, or another government program is adopted, we are acknowledging the inability
of individuals to govern themselves. It follows that there is a moral imperative for us to reclaim our
right to live in a civil society, rather than to have bureaucrats and politicians solve our problems
and run our lives.
Coercion must be rejected in every instance
Frederick Mann, Why YOU MUST RECOGNIZE AND UNDERSTAND COERCION, 2000, p.
http://quebecoislibre.org/000610-11.htm
In Six Myths About Libertarianism, Murray N. Rothbard writes: "If a person is forced by violence or the
threat thereof to perform a certain action, then it can no longer be a moral choice on his part. The
morality of an action can stem only from its being freely adopted; an action can scarcely be called
moral if someone is compelled to perform it at gunpoint. Compelling moral actions or outlawing
immoral actions, therefore, cannot be said to foster the spread of morality or virtue. On the contrary,
coercion atrophies morality for it takes away from the individual the freedom to be either moral or
immoral, and therefore forcibly deprives people of the chance to be moral. Paradoxically, then, a
compulsory morality robs us of the very opportunity to be moral.
Coercion violates fundament human rights
Ridgway Foley, ESSAY ON CARING, April 1985, p. www.libertyhaven.com/politicsandcurrente
vents/politicalpartiesoractivism/essayoncaring.html
The Dividing Line A remarkable duality pervades the concept of caring and its current
implementation. Force represents the dividing line. Application or refrain from coercion separates the
wrongful intrusion into the sanctity of the life of another from the permissible compassionate
endeavor. The law ought not impede attempts to aid others or to solve problems where those
enterprises occur without compulsion. This should be true where the majority decries the problem as
ridiculous or the solution as ill-advised; after all, the crowd often proves ineluctably wrong and, in
any event, no human being possesses either the ability or the moral privilege to substitute his
judgment for that of another choosing sentient being. Conversely, no one should employ the legal
monopoly of force to compel adherence to, participation in, or compliance with an artifice designed
to better another, no matter how well intentioned or meritorious the plan. No individual should be
permitted to thrust a decision or shunt responsibility for the consequences of his choice upon
another, unwilling human being. Disregard of this salient principle necessarily denies the dignity of
that other individual, since moral choice and accountability constitute an essential element in the
human condition. Those who purport to care, then, must submit to a test of means and motive. The
law (rules and orders created and enforced by mankind) should not address the means employed by
those who promote compassion as a political or economic discipline except to assure that no
individual or entity compels a dissenter to assent to, support or participate in a proposal
disagreeable to the latter for any reason.All too often, those who preach caring, compassion and
concern rest their case upon the root of envy: Loathe the rich and trust the poor; take from the evil
producer and give to the high-principled but helpless victim of circumstance and oppression. Such
caring persons really do not care at all about others: The creators must be plundered, the users must
be pandered, by force and violence, by false premises and promises, in order to salve the promoter's
inordinate ego and to effect his flawed view of mankind and the world. In these, the vast majority of
instances, one can always count upon the concerned to care - -for themselves !

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**Property Rights Good**

Property rights are key to all rights.
John Hospers, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, THE LIBERTARIAN
ALTERNATIVE, Tibor Machan, ed., 1974, p. 8.
Depriving people of property is depriving them of the means by which they live-the freedom of the
individual citizen to do what he wishes with his own life and to plan for the future. Indeed, only if
property rights are respected is there any point to planning for the future and working to achieve
one's goals. Property rights are what makes long-range planning possible - the kind of planning
which is a distinctively human endeavor, as opposed to the day-by-day activity of the lion who hunts,
who depends on the supply of game tomorrow but has no real insurance against starvation in a day
or a week. Without the right to property, the right to life itself amounts to little: how can you sustain
your life if you cannot plan ahead? and how can you plan ahead if the fruits of your labor can at any
moment be confiscated by government?
Property rights critical to moral agency
Tibor Machan, philosophy professor, Auburn, PRIVATE RIGHTS AND PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 19 95, p. 9-10
If one is on a desert island all by oneself, the issue of property rights is of no significance, because
there is no one else who could threaten one's authority over what one is going to do and how one will
set out to manage the natural world that surrounds one. But if there is somebody elseif, for
example Robinson Crusoe is met by Fridayboth now have the choice to do good, bad, or mediocre
deeds, and either may have an impact on the other. They are moral agents who may get in each
other's way with their morally wrong choices and actions. In his choice of actions, for instance, Friday
might help himself in a morally significant fashion from which Crusoe ought not to benefit without
Friday's permission. There should be some way to tell what Robinson Crusoe does and what Friday
does and to let both of them have a say whether and when they want to cooperate. This, in brief,
spells out one of the moral functions of private property rights: Such rights identify what Robert
Nozick called "moral space" around personswithin which, if adequately protected, they can be
sovereign agents We can appreciate, then, that from the point of view of morality everyone needs to
know his or her proper scope of personal authority and responsibility. One needs to know that some
valued item, skill, or liquid asset is in one's own jurisdiction to use before one can be prudent, creative, courageous, charitable, or generous. If one does not know that some particular area of human
concern is under one's own or other people's proper authority, then one cannot know if it would be
courageous, foolhardy, or silly to protect it, whether it would be generous or reckless to share it, and
so on. It follows that private property rights are, in the first place, a social precondition to the
possibility of an extensive, personally guided, and morally significant life. If one is to be generous to
the starving human beings in Somalia but has nothing of one's own from which to be generous,
generosity will not be possible So there is, in effect, a necessary connection between a practical
moral code or set of guiding moral principles and the institution of private property rights .26
Property rights are key to prevent Nazism.
Dr. Nathanial Branden, psychotherapist and author, INDIVIDUALISM AND FREE SOCIETY, January
1995, p. http://www.fff.org/freedom/0195d.asp
The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual,
is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism or totalitarianism or
collectivism or communism or socialism or nazism or fascism or the welfare state. Force,
governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism the belief that the
individual exists to serve others is translated into political reality. Although this issue has not been
traditionally discussed in the terms in which I am discussing it here, the moral-political concept that forbids the initiation of
force, and stands as the guardian and protector of the individual's life, freedom, and property, is the concept of rights. If life

on earth is the standard, an individual has a right to live and pursue values as survival requires; a
right to think and act on his or her judgment the right of liberty; a right to work for the
achievement of his or her values and to keep the results the right of property; a right to live for his
or her sake, to choose and work for personal goals the right to the pursuit of happiness. Without
property rights, no other rights are possible. We must be free to use that which we have produced, or

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we do not possess the right of liberty. We must be free to make the products of our work serve our
chosen goals, or we do not possess the right to the pursuit of happiness. And since we are not
ghosts who exist in some nonmaterial manner we must be free to keep and consume the products
of our work or we do not possess the right of life. In a society where human beings are not free to
own privately the material means of production, their position is that of slaves whose lives are at the
absolute mercy of their rulers. It is relevant here to remember the statement of Trotsky: "Who does
not obey shall not eat."

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**Rights Come First**

Placing survival over individual autonomy replicates authoritarian regimes
of control, subjugating individual rights to the values held by those in power
Schroeder, Prof. Law, Duke, 86
(Christopher H. Schroeder, Prof. Law, Duke,1986, Rights Against Risks, 86
Colum. L. Rev. 495)
expanding the idea of preservation to include bodily integrity on the
basis of quality of life considerations has already pointed the way to a more realistic
Actually,

statement of those individual characteristics worth protecting. The same considerations of

quality of life counsel recognizing some freedom of action and initiative within the definition of
the morally relevant aspects of the individual. Doing so is consistent with a long political
and philosophical heritage. 90 Deeply ingrained in practically all theories of the rights
tradition is the vision of a person as capable of forming and entitled to pursue some individual
life plan. 91 Given this vision, placing survival or bodily integrity absolutely above all

other ends would be tantamount to saying that the life plan that one ought to
adopt is that of prolonging life at all costs. That idea is unacceptably
authoritarian and regimented. It would be extremely anomalous for a theory supposedly
centered on the autonomy of the individual to result in a conception of justice
that constrained all individuals to a monolithic result . Individual human beings
want more from their lives than simple [*520] bodily integrity, and the conception of
an individual, of what defines and constitutes a person, as so limited is peculiarly impoverished.
Individuals are capable of formulating and pursuing life plans, of forming bonds of love,
commitment, and friendship on which they subsequently act, of conceiving images of self- and
community-improvement. Some of these may directly advance interests in human survival, as
when dedicated doctors and scientists pursue solutions to cancer or develop chemical
pesticides with a view to assisting agricultural self-sufficiency in developing countries. Some
may dramatically advance the "quality of life," rather than survival itself, as when Guttenberg's
press made literature more widely available or when Henry Ford pioneered the

mass production of the automobile. However, even individual initiatives of

much less demonstrable impact on the lives of others constitute a vital element
that makes human life distinctively human. A just society ought to understand and
value this element both in the concrete results it sometimes produces and in the freedom and
integrity that are acknowledged when individual liberty to conceive and act upon initiative is
respected.

Violation of freedom negates the value of human existence and represents

the greatest threat to human survival
Rand, Philosopher, 89
(Ayn Rand, Objectivist Philosopher, 07-1989, The Virtue of Selfishness: A
New Concept of Egoism, p. 145)
A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort , or enslaves him, or
attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational
judgment, a society that sets up a conflict between its ethics and the requirements of mans
nature is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.
Such a society destroys all values of human coexistence, has no possible justification, and
represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to mans survival. Life on desert
island is safer than and incomparably preferable than existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

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Violating rights in the name of survival causes social paralysis and destroys
the value to life.
Callahan, institute of Society and Ethics, 73
(Daniel Callahan, institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of
Survival, pp. 91-93)
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

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
and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system.

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.

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. It is easy, of course, to
recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk
about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction
at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a
For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival."

legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would
ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny
survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival

can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at
nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for
survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights
make much sense without the premise of a right to lifethen how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for
survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it

if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an
effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic
more strongly,

victories.

It is impossible for policymakers to know future consequences allowing

more rights violations will justify worse consequences in the future
Journal of Contemporary Health Law & Policy, 01
(Journal of Contemporary Health Law & Policy, Winter 2001, 18 J. Contemp.
Health L. & Poly 95, p. 117)
The utilitarian principle justifies intentional, harmful acts against other humans
to achieve a hoped-for benefit to a greater number of people. It is the wrong
approach to public policy decisions. Its most notable proponents have been responsible

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Experience has taught us time and again

that public servants, even when crafting policies that appear wholly beneficent, can cause great
harm (the so-called "law of unintended consequences"). Humans lack the wisdom and foresight
to completely understand the future ramifications of many actions. A father, for example, may
for much of the misery and strife of the last century.

believe that it is an entirely good thing to help his daughter with homework every day because
they are spending time together and he is showing sincere interest in her life and schooling. By
"helping" with homework, however, his daughter may be denied the mental struggle of
searching for solutions on her own. She may not develop the mental skills to solve tough math
problems, for example, or to quickly find key concepts in reading selections. If even "good"

actions can produce undesirable results, how much worse is the case when evil is tolerated in the
name of some conjectural, future outcome?
Rights outweigh all critical to human dignitye future
George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 405
Why make so much of individual personal and political rights? The answer, as I have said, is that
respect for rights is the best way of honoring human dignity. Why make so much of human dignity? I
do not find much to say. I am not even sure that much should be said. Suppose we carry on at length
about why governments should treat people in certain ways (by actions and abstentions), and in
these ways unconditionally and as a matter of course, and should do so because people deserve and
are entitled to such treatment, rather than because governments may find it prudent to treat people
in these ways in the spirit of extending revocable privileges. I am afraid that we may jeopardize
human dignity by laboring to defend it. What sort of attack would merit an answer? Is a long and
elaborate theory needed to establish the point that people should not be treated by the state as if
they were masses, or obstacles or instruments to higher purposes, or subjects for experiments, or
pieces in a game, or wayward children in need of protection against themselves, or patients in need
of perpetual care, or beasts in need of the stick? With what right does anyone maintain that people
may be regarded or used in these nonhuman or subhuman ways? With what truth? Unabused and
undegraded, people have always shown that they deserve better. They deserve guaranteed rights.
When their rights are respected, all that their dignity, their human status, requires is achieved.
People are enabled to lead lives that are free, modest, and decentprovided, of course,
socioeconomic circumstances are not hopeless. To tie dignity to rights is therefore to say that
governments have the absolute duty to treat people (by actions and abstentions) in certain ways,
and in certain ways only. The state's characteristic domination and insolence are to be curbed for the
sake of rights. Public and formal respect for rights registers and strengthens awareness of three
constitutive facts of being human: every person is a creature capable of feeling pain, and is a free
agent capable of having a free being, of living a life that is one's own and not somebody else's idea
of how a life should be lived, and is a moral agent capable of acknowledging that what one claims for
oneself as a right one can claim only as an equal to everyone else (and relatedly that what one wants
done to oneself one should do to others). Respect for rights recognizes these capacities and thus
honors human dignity.

Policymakers must protect individual rights

George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 2
The background assumption is that most people in a society of rights are disposed to be law-abiding
and that government's mere existence sustains their disposition. But because some persons
inevitably transgress against their fellow citizens, government can never lose the status of protector;
in particular, protector of life and property, the usual objects of transgression. If, then, rights are
rights against the state, the theory of rights does not ignore the obvious fact that the state exists to
prevent, deter, or punish crime or mayhem. (I prefer to see crime not as a denial of the victim's
rights but, instead, as legally culpable immorality; nevertheless, it is sometimes sensible to speak
of individuals violating one another's rights.) Government exists to preserve individuals. The point
is that it must do this work, and its other work, in a way that does not violate rights, including the
rights of transgressors and those accused of transgression. If the Bill of Rights is the core, its silences
and deliberate omissions required that it be supplemented over time. Freedom of speech, press,

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religion, and association; due-process rights for suspects, defendants, and the legally guilty; and
respect for a person's freedom from arbitrary invasions of security and privacyall go far in
protecting the dignity (or integrity) of individuals. But their dignity needs moreabove all, three
further rights: first, the right to vote and take part in politics; second, the right to be spared from
utter degradation or to be saved from material misery; and third, the right to equal protection of the
laws (in the language of the Fourteenth Amendment). The two last-named rights do not call for mere
governmental abstention, as do the rights of speech, press, religion, association, security, and
privacy. Nor do they call for only procedural justice, as do some other main rights in the Bill of Rights.
Rather, the right to be free of degradation and misery Answers To a minimal samaritanism as morally
obligatory on society and looks to government to carry it out. It is a right to be given something, to
be enabled to begin to live a life. Samaritanism is obligatory on society, and obligatory samaritanism
would be the foundation of a right to life which was expanded beyond its present constitutional
interpretation in the United States. I believe that this right, more than any other, stands in need of
expansion through positive governmental action, despite all the serious risks involved in charging
governments with the task of fostering life. And the equal protection of the laws may necessitate
governmental action against, say, official or social racial discrimination. Naturally, in saying that the
state, which must always be kept under suspicion, must also be entrusted not only with the
fundamental task of preserving individuals against transgressors but also with the positive function
of promoting some of the rights that are indispensable to human dignity, one admits that there will
be an inevitable ambivalence toward the state. It is an enemy, the worst enemy, but it is not the only
enemy and it is not only an enemy. My emphasis, however, is on the antagonism that government
shows to rights by its initiatives rather than by its neglect. Throughout this book I rarely refer to
rights that need government's positive contribution. The latter rights, no matter how fundamental,
cannot be the norm in a society devoted to individual rights. Different individuals may use or need
the several rights variably, but when government refuses to respect rights, it not only makes people
suffer, it injures everyone's human dignity.

The calculation of utilitarianism is the foundation of totalitarianism

George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 11
I do not mean to take seriously the idea that utilitarianism is a satisfactory replacement for the
theory of rights. The well-being (or mere preferences) of the majority cannot override the rightful
claims of individuals. In a time when the theory of rights is global it is noteworthy that some moral
philosophers disparage the theory of rights. The political experience of this century should be enough
to make them hesitate: it is not clear that, say, some version of utilitarianism could not justify
totalitarian evil. It also could be fairly easy for some utilitarians to justify any war and any
dictatorship, and very easy to justify any kind of ruthless-ness even in societies that pay some
attention to rights. There is no end to the immoral permissions that one or another type of
utilitarianism grants. Everything is permitted, if the calculation is right. No, an advocate of rights
cannot take utilitarianism seriously as a competing general theory of political morality, nor any other
competing general theory. Rather, particular principles or considerations must be given a place. A
theory of rights may simply leave many decisions undetermined or have to admit that rights may
have to be overridden (but never for the sake of Social well-being or mere policy preference). Also,
kinds of rights may sometimes conflict, and it is not always possible to end that conflict either by an
elaboration of the theory of rights or by an appeal to some other

Every alternative to rights leads to tyranny

George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 5
At the same time, there are other theories that seem to affirm human dignity yet give rights only a
lesser or probationary or instrumental role. Examples are utilitarianism, recent communitarianism,
recent republicanism, and radical egalitarianism. The first and last 1 will return to shortly; my response
to the others appears here and there in this volume. (All I wish to say now is that unless rights come
first they are not rights. They will tend to be sacrificed to some purpose deemed higher than the equal
dignity of every individual. There will be little if any concept of the integrity or inviolability of each
individual. The group or the majority or the good or the sacred or the vague future will be preferred. The
beneficiaries will be victimized along with the victims because no one is being treated as a person who

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is irreplaceable and beyond value. To make rights anything but primary, even though in the name of
human dignity, is to injure human dignity.

Collective safety is no justification for rights violationsleads to slavery,

genocide, and wars.
Rand 40, Objectivist Philosopher,
(Ayn Rand, Objectivist Philosopher, 1940, To All Innocent Columnists, The
Journals of Ayn Rand, p. 351)

They preach "Democracy" and then make a little addition "Economic Democracy" or a
"Broader Democracy" or a "True Democracy," and demand that we turn all property over to the
Government; "all property" means also "all rights"; let everybody hold all rights together and nobody
have any right of any kind individually. Is that Democracy or is it Totalitarianism? You know of a
prominent woman commentator who wants us all to die for Democracyand then defines "true"
Democracy as State Socialism [probably a reference to Dorothy Thompson]. You have heard
Secretary [Harold] Ickes define a "true" freedom of the press as the freedom to express the views
of the majority. You have read in a highly respectable national monthly the claim that the Bill of
Rights, as taught in our schools, is "selfish"; that a "true" Bill of Rights means not demanding any
rights for yourself, but your giving these rights to "others." God help us, fellow-Americans, are we
blind? Do you see what this means? Do you see the implications? And this is the picture wherever

you look. They "oppose" Totalitarianism and they "defend" Democracyby preaching their own
version of Totalitarianism, some form of "collective good," "collective rights," "collective will," etc.
And the one thing which is never said, never preached, never upheld in our public life, the one thing
all these "defenders of Democracy" hate, denounce and tear down subtly, gradually, systematicallyis
the principle of Individual Rights, Individual Freedom, Individual Value. That is the principle against
which the present great world conspiracy is directed. That is the heart of the whole world question.

That is the only opposite of Totalitarianism and our only defense against it. Drop thatand what
difference will it make what name you give to the resulting society? It will be Totalitarianismand all
Totalitarianisms are alike, all come to the same methods, the same slavery, the same bloodshed, the
same horrors, no matter what noble slogan they start under, as witness Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
Sacrificing rights to preserve life produces totalitarianism.
Christopher H. Schroeder, Professor of Law, Duke University; Visiting Professor of Law, UCLA 1985-86,
1986, Columbia Law Review, Rights Against Risks, 86 Colum. L. Rev. 495
Actually, expanding the idea of preservation to include bodily integrity on the basis of quality of life
considerations has already pointed the way to a more realistic statement of those individual
characteristics worth protecting. The same considerations of quality of life counsel recognizing some
freedom of action and initiative within the definition of the morally relevant aspects of the individual.
Doing so is consistent with a long political and philosophical heritage. 90 Deeply ingrained in practically
all theories of the rights tradition is the vision of a person as capable of forming and entitled to pursue
some individual life plan. 91 Given this vision, placing survival or bodily integrity absolutely above all
other ends would be tantamount to saying that the life plan that one ought to adopt is that of
prolonging life at all costs. That idea is unacceptably authoritarian and regimented. It would be
extremely anomalous for a theory supposedly centered on the autonomy of the individual to result in a
conception of justice that constrained all individuals to a monolithic result. Individual human beings
want more from their lives than simple [*520] bodily integrity, and the conception of an individual, of
what defines and constitutes a person, as so limited is peculiarly impoverished. Individuals are capable
of formulating and pursuing life plans, of forming bonds of love, commitment, and friendship on which
they subsequently act, of conceiving images of self- and community-improvement. Some of these may
directly advance interests in human survival, as when dedicated doctors and scientists pursue solutions
to cancer or develop chemical pesticides with a view to assisting agricultural self-sufficiency in
developing countries. Some may dramatically advance the "quality of life," rather than survival itself, as
when Guttenberg's press made literature more widely available or when Henry Ford pioneered the mass

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production of the automobile. However, even individual initiatives of much less demonstrable impact on
the lives of others constitute a vital element that makes human life distinctively human. A just society
ought to understand and value this element both in the concrete results it sometimes produces and in
the freedom and integrity that are acknowledged when individual liberty to conceive and act upon
initiative is respected.

Err on the side of rights its the biggest consequence in the long term
Machan, Professor of Philosophy, 03
Tibor Machan, prof. emeritus of philosophy at Auburn University, 2003
Passion for Liberty
honesty is the best policy, even if at
times it does not achieve the desired good results; so is respect for every individual's
rights to life, liberty, and property. All in all, this is what will ensure the best consequencesin
the long run and as a rule. Therefore, one need not be very concerned about the most recent
estimate of the consequences of banning or not banning guns, breaking up or not
breaking up Microsoft, or any other public policy, for that matter. It is enough to
know that violating the rights of individuals to bear arms is a bad idea, and that
history and analysis support our understanding of principle. To violate rights has
always produced greater damage than good, so let's not do it, even when we are terribly tempted
to do so, Let's not do it precisely because to do so would violate the fundamental
requirements of human nature. It is those requirements that should be our guide, not some recent empirical data that have no
All in all, then, I support the principled or rights-based approach. In normal contexts,

staying power (according to their very own theoretical terms). Finally, you will ask, isn't this being dogmatic? Haven't we learned not to bank too much on what
we've learned so far, when we also know that learning can always be improved, modified, even revised? Isn't progress in the sciences and technology proof that

We must go with what we

know but be open to change provided that the change is warranted. Simply
because some additional gun controls or regulations might save lives (some lives,
perhaps at the expense of other lives) and simply because breaking up Microsoft
might improve the satisfaction of consumers (some consumers, perhaps at the
expense of the satisfaction of other consumers) are no reasons to violate basic
rights. Only if and when there are solid, demonstrable reasons to do so should we throw out the old principles and bring on the new principles. Any
past knowledge always gets overthrown a bit later? As in science and engineering, so in morality and politics:

such reasons would have to speak to the same level of fundamentally and relevance as that incor porated by the theory of individual rights itself. Those defending consequentialism, like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, have argued
the opposite thesis: Unless one can prove, beyond a doubt, that violating rights in a particular instance is necessarily wrong in the eyes of a "rational and fair man,"
the state may go ahead and "accept the natural outcome of dominant opinion" and violate those rights.1 Such is now the leading jurisprudence

Rights absolute cant infringe on one persons rights to increase well-being of others.
Gewirth, prof of philosophy @ U Chicago. 1994.
Alan. Are There Any Absolute Rights? Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics. Joram Graf
Haber. Pgs 137-138
Ought Abrams to torture his mother to death in order to prevent the threatened nuclear
catastrophe? Might he not merely pretend to torture his mother, so that she could then be
safely hidden while the hunt for the gang members continued? Entirely apart from the fact that
the gang could easily pierce this deception, the main objection to the very raising of such
question s is the moral one that they seem to hold open the possibility of acquiescing and
participating in an unspeakably evil project. To inflict such extreme harm on one' s mother
would be an ultimate act of betrayal; in performing or even contemplating the performance of
such an action the son would lose all self-respect and would regard his life as no longer worth
living.' A mother' s right not to be tortured to death by her own son is beyond any compromise.
It is absolute . This absoluteness may be analyzed in several different interrelated dimensions.
all stemming from the supreme principle of morality. The principle requires respect for the

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rights of all persons to the necessary conditions of human action, and this includes respect for
the persons themselves as having the rational capacity to reflect on their purposes and to
control their behaviour in the light of such reflection. The principle hence prohibits using any
person merely as a means to the well-being of other persons. For a son to torture his mother to
death even 10 protect the lives of others would be an extreme violation of this principle and
hence of these rights, as would any attempt by others to force such an action . For this reason ,
the concept appropriate to it is not merely 'wrong' but such others as 'despicable',
'dishonorable", 'base', 'monstrous'. In the scale of moral modalities , such concepts function as
the contrary extremes of concepts like the supererogatory , What is supererogatory is not
merely good or right but goes beyond these in various ways; it includes saintly and heroic
actions whose moral merit surpasses what is strictly required of agents, In parallel fashion,
what is base, dishonourabte. or despicable is not merely bad or wrong but goes beyond these
in moral demerit since it subverts even the minimal worth or dignity both of its agent and of its
recipient and hence, the basic presupposition s of morality itself, Just as the supererogatory is
superlatively good, so the despicable is superlatively evil and diabolic, and its moral wrongness
is so rotten that a morally decent person will not even consider doing it. This is but another way
of saying that the rights it would violate must remain absolute.

Rights and basic liberties are a prerequisite of rational decisionmaking.

Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003.
Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian
Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31,
No. 3, Pg 16. Project MUSE.
In order to advance the reconstruction of the Hierarchy Argument, we must now answer the
following question: How does this highest-order interest in rationality and its preconditions
justify the lexical priority of the basic liberties over other primary goods, as called for by the
Priority of Liberty? In short, it justifies such priority because the basic liberties are
necessary conditions for the exercise of rationality, which is why parties in the Original
Position give first priority to preserving their liberty in these matters (pp. 13132). If the
parties were to sacrifice the basic liberties for the sake of other primary goods (the means
that enable them to advance their other desires and ends [p. 476]), they would be sacrificing
their highest-order interest in rationality and its preconditions, and thereby failing to express
their nature as autonomous beings (p. 493). A brief examination of the basic liberties
enumerated by Rawls will indicate why they are necessary conditions for the exercise of
rationality (p. 53). The freedoms of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience, and freedom of
thought are essential to the creation and revision of plans of life: without secure rights to
explore ideas and beliefs with others (whether in person or through various media) and
consider these at our leisure, we would be unable to make informed decisions about our
conception of the good. Freedom of the person (including psychological and bodily integrity), as
well as the right to personal property and immunity from arbitrary arrest and seizure, are
necessary to create a stable and safe personal space for purposes of reflection and
communication, without which rationality would be compromised if not crippled. Even small
restrictions on these basic liberties would threaten our highest order interest ,
however slightly, and such a threat is disallowed given the absolute priority of this interest over
other concerns. Note also that lexical priority can be justified here for all of the basic liberties,
not merely a subset of them (as was the case with the strains-of-commitment interpretation of
the Equal Liberty of Conscience Argument).1

Right to health outweighs violation of right to life.

McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984
HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and
Rights. Pgs 127-128.
The right to health, like the right to bodily integrity, is related to but not whol1y based on the
right to life. Ill health and mutilation of the body need not threaten life. Deliberately to harm

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the health of persons is to violate their personhood, impairing capacities, causing needless
suffering, overriding wills. So too with violation of bodily integrity, as with compulsory
sterilization, barbarous forms of punishment such as chopping off hands, blinding, removing
the tongue. In a real sense, although not in the sense suggested in Locke's labor argument for
private property nor in the sense claimed by many feminists in their defense of abortion from a
woman's right to control (and mutilate?) her body, our body is ours to care for and maintain as
the vehicle of our personhood. Although it is true that we can lose an organ, a leg, an eye, and
still be the same person, our body appertains to us as persons. The negative aspect of the case
for the rights to health and bodily integrity is evidently strong. How can another have the right
to injure, infect, disease a person? So to act is to violate a right. A very powerful moral
justification would be necessary for such an act not to constitute a grave end illegitimate
violation of a right.

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**AT: Positive Rights Good**

Government protection of positive rights justifies war.
Frank van Dun, Senior Lecturer of Philosophy of Law at the University of Maastricht,
JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES, Fall 2001, p. http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_4/15_4_1.pdf.
Even in the richest states, budgetary limitations often lead to sharp confrontations between pressure
groups and vested interests in various social, economic, and cultural domains. Using the term human
rights to describe ones interests does not change this fact of real-world limits. Rather, it creates the
risk of inflating political rhetoric and passion, now that the flag of human rights flies over almost the
whole arena of government policy. Each policy option can be interpreted at one and the same time as
both a measure to further some human right and as an indication of the neglect or even violation of any
number of other human rights. Therefore, there is at all times unlimited room for weighing various
rights and for setting and revising priorities. The political and administrative bodies to which this
weighing of rights has been entrusted or that have succeeded in monopolising it have ample
opportunities for expanding their power and influence. Nothing remains of the old idea that a right is
worthy of respect in all circumstances except, perhaps, the most extreme emergency. The human
rights of the UD are not and cannot be absolute, even in the most normal of circumstancesunless
anything short of Utopia should count as an emergency. By their very nature, they are susceptible to
continuous weighing, negotiation, and qualification. They are a politicians delight, for every human
right translates into a right to more government intervention on its behalf. This is no less true for the
ghosts of natural rights that linger in the first half of the UD than for the economic, social, and cultural
rights in the rest of it. Of course, we should not confuse the ghost and the real thing. For example ,
Article 2 of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen clearly states what a persons
natural rights are: liberty, property, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and resistance to oppression. In the
UD, on the other hand, a person is not informed that his life, liberty, security of person, and property
are his fundamental rights. He is told only that he has the right to life, liberty, and security of person
(Art. 3) and property (Art. 17). He should not expect more. For it is obviously inconsistent to claim that
everyone is entitled to the full realisation of the economic, social, and cultural rights and at the same
time to claim that any persons fundamental rights are his life, liberty, and property. The administration
of the former requires the concentration of massive coercive powers of taxation and regulation in the
hands of the state, and so must presuppose that a persons life, liberty, and property are not his rights.
However, this inconsistency evaporates once we realise that the UDs rights to life, liberty, property
do not specify to whose life, liberty, or property a person has a right. It rules out the possibility that he
has an exclusive right to his own life, liberty, or property, but it does not rule out that some or all others
have an equal, or perhaps more pressing, claim on those things in order to enable them, say, to enjoy
the arts or a paid holiday. Thus, a persons life, liberty, and property are thrown upon the enormous
heap of desirable scarce resources to which all people are said to have a right. As such, they, too, end
up in the scales with which political authorities, administrators, and experts are supposed to weigh the
ingredients for their favoured policy-mix. Here we catch our first glimpse of the shadow of Hobbes
behind the contemporary notion of human rights: the person who believes he has a right to
everything is likely to find out that there is no thing that is his right. A Hobbesian Predicament The
following thought experiment will bring out the Hobbesian character of the UDs conception of human
rights. Imagine two people, the only survivors of a shipwreck, who find refuge on a small deserted
island. They have with them nothing but their human rights, in particular their right to work and all
that it entails according to Articles 23, 24, and 25 of the UD. One can imagine what will happen if they
sit there insisting on their right of being employed by the other at a just and favourable wage, or to
receive an unemployment compensation high enough to allow them an existence worthy of their
dignity. One can also imagine what will happen if, instead of just sitting there, they attempt to enforce
their human rights against one another: their own version of Hobbess war of all against all. Finally, one
can easily imagine what would happen if one of them won that war: Hobbess solution for the
incompatibility of their rights would emerge. The winner could then arrange for himself a nice
unemployment compensation (e.g., a tax on an-others labour) to match his new-found dignity as a
ruler, and keep the other man quiet by leaving him as much as is consistent with the organisation and
the resources of their state. Indeed, starvation, universal war, and the Leviathan State are the only
possible outcomes under a regime of human rightsand only the latter outcome is compatible with
survival. Imagining a two-person situation makes this conclusion clear, but its validity does not depend

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on the numbers. Large numbers only serve to obscure the logic of the situation. the burden of taxation
and regulation just below the threshold of revolt.
Limiting government protection to property rights is key to prevent atrocities

Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 89-90.

That last line of the last chapter no doubt scandalizes many readers, as does the conception of
politics it evinces. Surely there is more to morality than property rights, and more to social life than
exchanging property! they might be tempted to respond; And surely there is more to community
than the collective safeguarding of that property! What a cold and heartless indeed, positively
counter- utopian conception of human life is embodied by such a view! They would, of course, be
absolutely right to think this. Where they go wrong is in assuming that Nozick would think, or is
required by his position to think, any differently in assuming that Nozicks political philosophy is
intended to be a complete social philosophy. They go wrong also in assimilating morality to justice,
social life to politics, and community to government. For justice is not the whole of morality; not
all of social life is politics; and genuine human community definitely is not the same thing as
government action. Justice the securing of which is the chief end of political action is, however
important, but one virtue among others. Sometimes what is called justice is not justice at all, but a
mask for something decidedly unvirtuous, such as envy. One suspects that the demand for equality
is a case in point; certainly one suspects this when one considers that equality as an ideal is rarely
argued for by it proponents, and is almost never argued for very well (Nozick 1974. chapter 8). There
are, in any case, virtues that are as important as justice, and some that are more important.
Temperance, prudence. fortitude, faith, hope, and love are cases in point, and only a fool could
believe that the practice of these virtues will be guaranteed if only we hit upon the right government
program. Government itself, however high-flown the rhetoric often spouted in its defense, is, it must
always be remembered, nothing more than brute force, the getting of people to do things or to
refrain from doing things by the threat of violence. Sometimes, as when the defense of individual
rights is involved, such force is necessary; it remains force nonetheless. And when it involves the
imposition of redistributive taxation or paternalistic regulation, it involves nothing more than some
people forcing other people innocent people who have violated no one elses rights to do things
against their will, to submit to the will of those doing the forcing. Whether or not one thinks such
arm-twisting is morally justified, it is dishonest, indeed perverse, to talk smugly as if it is the
quintessence of community. Nor can politics which in a non-libertarian society amounts to little
more than the struggle to be the ones who get to force the others, even if for their own good
plausibly be regarded as a paradigmatically social activity, at least not if social is meant to connote
an ideal of high-minded cooperation. A conception of human life that sees all questions of morality,
and indeed everything of value, as necessarily entailing a political program backed by the police
power of the state and the threat of litigation, is one that can only be described, charitably, as
deficient; less charitably, as warped. We need, in Nozicks view, to learn to see through the political
realm (1974, x). We need to get beyond the tendency a very modern tendency that would have
surprised earlier generations reflexively to think of all problems as having a political solution, of all
progress as dependent on government action. We need in particular to stop thinking in utopian terms
or rather, to stop thinking of utopia in political terms. The utopias of the past have usually been
implemented in a political fashion, and they have universally failed, often catastrophically think
the French Revolution, Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago. They have also involved the imposition of
one groups vision of utopia on everyone (indeed, this is part of the reason why they have failed). If
utopian thinking is to be realistic and to have a future, it must avoid these errors.

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**AT: Util Protects Rights**

Current price-tag thinking is insufficient- we have to make the tough
decisions that incorporate individual rights instead of trying to spare
laypeople from difficult decisionmaking
Hlne Hermansson 07, Division of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and the History of
Technology Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Rights at Risk: Ethical Issues in Risk Management
Stockholm 2007 p 5-7
As choices like these seem to become more common, i.e., choices between risk alternatives
presented in terms of probability estimates, it is not surprising if people in general feel more and
more insecure despite the fact that we lead longer and healthier lives now than we did a couple of
centuries ago. The solution, however, is not to spare lay people from making risk decisions or letting
experts make the decisions for them. In this thesis it is argued that the risk-exposed should be
included in the decision procedure. Moreover, this procedure should be open to other aspects than
those that a narrow technical framing allows for. Respecting a variety of aspects may not make risk
decisions easier to make, but as these decisions are in fact seldom easily made, being honest about
that may relieve some of the feelings of anxiety and distrust among the general public. Background
and aim of thesis Risk management is frequently described as a practice in crisis. Critics point to
investigations analysing several countries risk expenditures which have shown large variations in
the cost per statistical life saved in different social sectors. The differences are said to be the result
of arbitrary decisions. Furthermore, it is argued that if societal resources were used in a more
effective and rational way, these differences could be levelled out and more lives be saved for the
same amount of money. Therefore, demands for a consistent risk management have repeatedly
been called for in the risk literature (See e.g. Morone & Woodhouse, 1986; Morrall, 1986; Viscousi,
1996; Breyer, 1999; Sjberg 1999; Sunstein, 2002).
In technical discussions about risk it has been
maintained that risks should be managed in accordance with scientific data in order to avoid the
irrational fears of the public, whose focus is on sensational risks, while the real, but more ordinary
risks, go unnoticed. Risk management should be a rational, neutral, and scientific area beyond the
influence of emotions, ideologies and values. One such approach is the Standard Model that is
discussed in this thesis (see especially articles I and II). According to this model a risk is defined as
the probability of a negative event multiplied by the damage resulting from it, for instance expected
fatalities. The number representing the risk is weighed against the possible benefit that could be
gained from accepting it. If total benefit exceeds total cost (risk), then the risk can be accepted. In
this thesis I argue that scientific and technological reasoning is not enough for analysing or
managing risks. Even though the Standard Model contributes to a systematic way to make risk
decisions, it is too narrow a perspective on risk management. Such a narrow perspective may allow
for risk exposure that violates the rights of the individual. While I agree that consistency in risk
decisions is valuable and worth striving for, I question the standard approach to how this should be
done and maintain that a new and wider perspective on how to understand consistency in risk
management needs to be developed. Above all, it is argued that the current price-tag thinking (i.e.,
that consistency in risk management is exclusively about costs for different kinds of risk reductions)
is insufficient.

Utilitarianism doesnt trump the impact of coercionindividuals cant be

reduced to units of value.
Machan, 95 Professor of philosophy, Auburn University, 1995
ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 129)

(Tibor, PRIVATE RIGHTS AND PUBLIC

The essential point to note at this juncture is how the idea of the worth and rights of the individual
simply cannot find a place in the standard utilitarian cost-benefit analysis favored by many economists.
Benefits, according to this approach, are to be measured by what people prefer (or would prefer, if
properly informed), while costs are reducible to what people would prefer to do without or avoid if they
were properly informed. The kind of value (or worth) individuals have, however, is not just one benefit

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competing among other benefits...Consider the case where some people are injured or harmed by
others. "Since the costs of injury are borne by its victims," Kelman contends, "while its benefits are
escaped by its perpetrators, simple cost-benefit calculations may be less important than more abstract
conceptions of justice, fairness, and human dignity. Developing this theme more fully, Kelman writes as
follows: We would not condone a rape even if it could be demonstrated that the rapist derived
enormous pleasure from his actions, while the victim suffered in only small ways. Behind the conception
of "rights" is the notion that some concept of justice, fairness or human dignity demands that
individuals ought to be able to perform certain acts, despite the harm of others, and ought to be
protected against certain acts, despite the loss this causes to the would-be perpetrator. Thus we
undertake no cost-benefit analysis of the effects of freedom of speech or trial by jury before allowing
them to continue.

The sacrifice of innocence degrades humanity-- it is an absolute wrong.

Anscombe, 93 Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, Absolutism and Its Consequentialist
Critics, edited by Joram Graf Haber, p. 51-52.
Common morality is outraged by the consequentialist position that, as long as human beings can
remain alive, the lesser of two evils is always to be chosen. Its defenders maintain, on the contrary, that
there are minimum conditions for a life worthy of a human being, and that nobody may purchase
anything- not even the lives of a whole community- by sacrificing those conditions . A community that
surrenders its members at the whims of tyrants ceases to be anything properly called by that name;
and individuals willing to accept benefits at the price of crimes committed upon other individuals
degrade their humanity. Common morality allows a certain room for compliance with tyrannical external
force, when resistance has become impossible; but there is a line that must be drawn beyond which
compliance is excluded, and the example of rabbinic teaching is a guide drawing it.

Util fails to protect moral rights it silences rights claims when not
grounded in law.
Erin Byrnes, JD U Arizona, 1999, Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Unmasking White Privelege to
Expose the Fallacy of White Innocense, 41 Ariz. L. Rev. 535

of rights as being cognizable only when they are legally recognized.

236 To the utilitarian, there is no such thing as a moral right because it is not socially
recognized. 237 The utilitarian rejection of moral rights can be fatal to affirmative action. Rights in utilitarian rhetoric
are synonymous with the idea of a valid claim to act. 238 Put differently, one can be said to hold a valid claim when,
and only when, that claim is grounded in a legally or socially recognized right. This
Utilitarianism conceives

normative theory of rights further posits that the exercise of rights is not dependent upon a duty incumbent upon others to acknowledge or respect that right. 239

Instead of conceiving of rights as corresponding

with a duty, the utilitarian thinks of rights in terms of "immunity rights ," which have a
corresponding concept of a "disability." 240 This too is a foreboding concept because affirmative action programs often involve
This is clearly problematic when applied to calls for affirmative action.

affirmative guarantees, versus a simple right to be free from discrimination. An example of an immunity right is the right to free speech. The right to free speech
exists independently of an obligation upon others not to interfere with an individual's right to exercise free speech. 241 The corresponding disability operates upon
Congress. The disability prohibits Congress from enacting certain laws abridging the individual's right to free speech, but does not extend so far as to require the
passage of legislation which would affirmatively protect or guarantee the immunity right. 242 The immunity right, then, is one that merely involves a freedom from
outside interference, a sort of negative right, as opposed to being a right that is affirmatively protected through the imposition of an obligation upon others to honor
the right. The distinction made between moral and legal rights, encompassing the distinction between a disability and a duty, is central to the utilitarian argument.

Utilitarianism squarely rejects the recognition of moral rights because moral rights must be
understood in terms of a corresponding beneficial obligation . 243 A moral conception of rights

dictates that a right is held by an individual "if and only if one is supposed to
benefit from another person's compliance with a coercive...rule." 244 Utilitarianism
must necessarily reject a conception of rights grounded in morality because the utilitarian doctrine
is diametrically opposed to the notion that rights correspond with duties . [*563] Furthermore,
utilitarianism renounces moral rights precisely because they exist independent of social
recognition or enforcement. 245 Moral rights "are independent of particular circumstances and do not depend on any special conditions," 246
like legal affirmation. Thus, moral rights cannot be accepted by the utilitarian because they lack the normative
grounding fundamental to utilitarian theory. Utilitarians, therefore, assume that there is a clear

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delineation between moral rights and the pursuit for overall human welfare ,

the central tenet of

utilitarian doctrine.
Utilitarianism fundamentally fails to protect individual rights greatest
good claims simply conflict.
Erin Byrnes, JD U Arizona, 1999, Therapeutic Jurisprudence: Unmasking White Privelege to Expose
the Fallacy of White Innocense, 41 Ariz. L. Rev. 535
Moral rights are objectionable not only because they lack social recognition but also because they necessarily imply a correlation between rights and duties. Again,

utilitarianism's specific rejection of the tie between rights and duties renders recognition of white
privilege nearly impossible. Without this recognition, there can be no meaningful solution. 247 If accepted,
moral rights would provide the grounds for the appraisal of law and other social institutions, a system of appraisal antithetical to utilitarianism's rubric of assessment.
Moral rights carry with them the expectation that institutions will be erected with an eye towards respect and furtherance of such rights. 248 Such a proposition would

Utilitarianism, however, requires that

institutions and rights be evaluated solely with respect to the promotion of human welfare, welfare being
the satisfaction of overall citizen desires. 249 The assumption, implicit in the foregoing argument, is that moral rights neither fit perfectly nor
certainly require more than just striving towards color-blindness were it applied to affirmative action.

converge with legal rights. 250 This may not necessarily be the case. David Lyons' "theory of moral rights exclusion" discusses the way in which utilitarians conceive
of moral rights working at odds with the utilitarian goal. 251 Lyons' theory describes the way in which a moral right, at some point, gains enough currency to warrant
individual exercise of that right. According to Lyons, when a moral right has reached this point, it has achieved the "argumentative threshold" and gains normative
force. 252 The potential for this occurrence is precisely what leads to the utilitarian rejection of moral rights. Rejection is predicated on the fact that once the

Under a system
which recognized moral rights, but still organized itself according to the utilitarian goal of achieving
human welfare (which is happiness), individual rights would purportedly run headlong into the pursuit
of welfare. 254 Though the pursuit of welfare would be deemed morally relevant and would justify a course of action on welfare's behalf , in a scenario
where that course of action constituted a mere "minimal increment of utility," it would be incapable of
overcoming the argumentative threshold of rights. 255 Thus, the argument is that the recognition of moral rights is
diametrically opposed to utilitarianism because in a moral rights regime, rights act as a limitation upon
the utilitarian goal of fulfilling as many individual desires as possible.
argumentative threshold is reached, a presumption is created against interference upon the individual exercise [*564] of the right. 253

Utilitarianism reduces individuals to their mere utility value, making them

expendable
Christopher H. Schroeder, Prof. Law, Duke,1986, Rights Against Risks, 86 Colum. L. Rev. 495
The anxiety to preserve some fundamental place for the individual that cannot be overrun by larger
social considerations underlies what H.L.A. Hart has aptly termed the "distinctively modern criticism
of utilitarianism," 58 the criticism that, despite its famous slogan, "everyone [is] to count for one," 59
utilitarianism ultimately denies each individual a primary place in its system of values. Various versions of
utilitarianism evaluate actions by the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the
net of pleasure over pain, or the satisfaction of desires. 60 Whatever the specific formulation, the
goal of maximizing some measure of utility obscures and diminishes the status of each individual. It reduces the individual to
a conduit, a reference point that registers the appropriate "utiles," but does not count for anything independent of his
monitoring function. 61 It also produces moral requirements that can trample an individual, if necessary, to maximize
utility, since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken into account, the
individual is expendable. Counting pleasure and pain equally across individuals is a laudable proposal,
but counting only pleasure and pain permits the grossest inequities among individuals and the [*509] trampling of the
few in furtherance of the utility of the many. In sum, utilitarianism makes the status of any individual radically contingent.
The individual's status will be preserved only so long as that status contributes to increasing total utility. Otherwise, the
individual can be discarded.

Calculation of human life leads to no value to life and the zero point of the
holocaust
Michael Dillon, Prof. Politics U-Lancaster, 04-1999, Political Theory, vol. 27, no. 2, p. 165
Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration
and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily

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submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the
point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing
abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating
and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out
the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of
championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always with
whatever exceeds measure." But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers:
as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the
advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being.

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**AT: Rimal**
Mutual coercion wont solve - they lack the knowledge and incentive to
protect the environment and will perpetuate tyrannical coercion
Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political
Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for
the Oregon State Supreme Court [Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The
Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]
Hardin's solution would be reasonable if it could be assumed that the majority is aware of threats to
the commons and knows the measures needed to prevent its destruction. But this is the very
knowledge which Hardin asserts individuals lack. Individual "rationality," or self-interest, Hardin
says, is what leads to the destruction of the commons. How self- interested individuals are to be
transformed into a public-spirited, wise majority is a problem Hardin does not address. The
knowledge required to use the commons wisely will not result automatically from the majority's
power to impose its will on the minority. Hardin also ignores the possibility that the majority might
act un- justly; that is, coerce the minority for its own immediate pleasure rather than for the
preservation of the commons and the well-being of future generations. That mutual coercion might
degenerate into majority tyranny is a possibility that Hardin does not acknowledge, nor does his
prescription provide a solution.46

An authoritarian government would fail to conserve resources

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political
Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for
the Oregon State Supreme Court [Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The
Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]
Heilbroner's argument leads to a similar predicament. As pessimistic as he is in Inquiry Into the Human
Prospect, he does see hope that the psychological need for authority-the "trait of obedience"-will be
powerful enough to force men to acquiesce to authoritarian controls before it is too late.47 Heilbroner
doubts that men will consent to the authority of reason or engage in discussion about the need for
govern- ment. He predicates his only hope for survival on a government which presupposes the
unwillingness if not the incapacity of men to exercise reason. For Heilbroner the Hobbesian fear of
violent death at the hands of one's fellow man is the fear of extinction from environmental de- struction.
In both cases salvation is sought in the coercive power of the Leviathan. Ironically, it was the unleashing
of the passion for material abundance, legitimized by Hobbesian natural right, amplified by Locke,
combined with the rejection of the classical commitment to reason and proper limits that caused the
ecological crisis. One is left wondering what endowed the authoritarian power with the wisdom to rule which everyone else
lacks. Indeed, none of the prescriptions for Leviathan includes measures to insure its wisdom or political skill. Surely, it takes
more than brute force to make wise use of scarce resources, balance population with resources, and decide on appropriate levels
and uses of technology. It will require skill to persuade modern men that the industrial capacities of the society ought not be
developed without regard to the supply of natural resources, and to persuade them to exercise restraint when no immediately apparent reasons exist.

Their authors contradict themselves

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former Professor of Political
Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for
the Oregon State Supreme Court [Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The
Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]
Ophuls' new position still traps him between competing political traditions. He wishes to affirm the
basic materialism of Enlightenment thought, which attempts to explain the human situation in
terms of biological survival and man's relationship to physical nature. At the same time he hopes
for the revival of classical politics while yet refusing to affirm the classical faith in an objective good
that can guide man in the selection of appropriate ends for his life.51 Like Rousseau and many
contemporary thinkers, Ophuls wants the best of the classical and mod- ern worlds, irrespective of

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the wide epistemological gulf separating clas- sical Greek thought from the Enlightenment.

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**AT: Coercion Bad**

Illegitimate resource acquisition justifies redistribution
Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 109.

Nozick's theory cannot

protect existing holdings from redistribution. But we still need to know how
Because most initial acquisition was in fact illegitimate,

acquisition could have arisen legiamately. If we cannot answer that question, then we should not only
postpone the implementation of Nozick's principle of transfer until historical titles are ascertained or
rectified, we should reject it entirely. If there is no way that people can appropriate unowned
resources for themselves without denying other people's claim to equal consideration, then
Nozick's right of transfer never starts.
Libertarians concede that extinction outweighs
Murray Rothbard, libertarian, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY:
THE LIBERTARIAN MANIFESTO, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263.
accessed 4/20/06.
Many libertarians are uncomfortable with foreign policy matters and prefer to spend their energies
either on fundamental questions of libertarian theory or on such "domestic" concerns as the free
market or privatizing postal service or garbage disposal. Yet an attack on war or a warlike foreign
policy is of crucial importance to libertarians. There are two important reasons. One has become a
cliche, but is all too true nevertheless: the overriding importance of preventing a nuclear
holocaust. To all the long-standing reasons, moral and economic, against an
interventionist foreign policy has now been added the imminent, ever-present threat of
world destruction. If the world should be destroyed, all the other problems and all the
other ismssocialism, capitalism, liberalism, or libertarianismwould be of no
importance whatsoever.
Redistribution is not an inherent affront to human dignity. As long as you believe helping
others is good, redistribution doesnt threaten dignity
Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY,
1990, p. 122-3.
Finally, Nozick might argue that welfare redistribution denies people's dignity, and this
dignity is crucial to treating people as equals (e.g. Nozick 1974: 334). Indeed Nozick often writes
as if the idea that other people have claims on the fruits of my talents is an assault on my dignity.
But this is implausible. One problem is that, Nozick often ties dignity to selfdetermination, so that it will be liberal regimes, not libertarian ones, which best promote each
person's dignity. In any event, dignity is predicated on, or a byproduct of, other moral
beliefs. We only feel something to be an attack on our dignity if we are already
convinced that it is wrong. Redistribution will feel like an assault on dignity only if we
believe it is morally wrong. If we believe instead that redistribution is a required part
of treating people as equals, then it will serve to promote, rather than attack, people's
sense of equal dignity.
The only way their alternative can capture this is if their alternative is allowed to imagine a
world in which individuals all become charitable givers. This is abusive private actor
fiat. If the neg can imagine this they can just imagine world peace and solve all of our
case impacts
ANARCHO-CAPITALISM WOULD GIVE RISE TO REGIMES OF DOMINATION AND OPPRESSION, THIS
POSES THE SINGLE GREATEST THREAT TO HUMAN EXISTENCE
Noam Chomsky, philosopher, CHOMSKY ON ANARCHO-CAPITALISM,2004, p. P.
http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/chomsky-on-ac.txt.

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Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to

forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the
slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they
would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of "free contract"
between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an
academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.
Nozick's concept of dignity requires access to resources
Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY,
1990, p. 150.
But, we have seen, the notion of dignity and agency that Nozick relies on, based on the idea of acting
on one's conception of oneself, requires rights over resources as well as one's person. Having
independent access to resources is important for our purposes, and hence our purposive freedom,
but that argues for liberal equality not libertarianism.

Since initial acquisition was unjust, there are no legitimate entitlements

Jonathan Wolff, philosopher, ROBERT NOZICK, 1991, p. 141.

Second, initial appropriation remains undefended by Nozick, and this may well be because it is
indefensible on libertarian grounds Allowing people virtually unlimited appropriation of the world will
importantly restrict what others can do, thus undermining their liberty and self-ownership. Thus
Nozick's concept of ownership itself generates conflicts, and so The project of allowing no restrictions
upon ownership itself falls into incoherence.
Taxation redistributes freedom rather than limiting it
Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY,
1990, p, 147.
As soon as we ask that question, Flew's equation of capitalism with freedom is undermined. For it is
the owners of the resource who are made free to dispose of it, while non-owners are deprived of that
freedom. Suppose that a large estate you would have inherited (in the absence of an inheritance tax)
now becomes a public park, or a low-income housing project (as a result of the tax). The inheritance
tax does not eliminate the freedom to use the property, rather it redistributes that freedom. If you
inherit the estate, then you are free to dispose of it as you see fit, but if I use your backyard for my
picnic or garden without your permission, then I am breaking the law, and the government will
intervene and coercively deprive me of the freedom to continue. On the other hand, my freedom to
use and enjoy the property is increased when the welfare state taxes your inheritance to provide me
with affordable housing, or a public park. So the free market legally restrains my freedom, while the
welfare state increases it.

Taxes don't violate rights

John Christman, Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC
AFFAIRS, Spring 1986, p.165.
Also, as Kearl has pointed out, persons who gain entitlements through embedded labor may enter
into a market, the function of which serves to reduce inefficiencies, reduce externalities, and lower
negotiation costs which all increase the net social product produced from those entitlements without
demanding extra labor from individual traders Thus, taxation which redistributes that extra product
would amount to a limitation of the ownership rights of the traders over the commodities in question
but not constitute an encroachment on the rights anyone has to her or his labor (since the product
redistributed is from the increased efficiencies of the market mechanism, not increased labor.
Violations of liberty dont justify rejecting welfare.
Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed.,
1981, p. 193.
Naturally any opposition to the power of governments will meet with a certain sympathy from observers
of the contemporary scene, and Nozick emphasizes the connection between his view and the fight
against legal regulation of sexual behavior, drug use, and individual life styles. It is easy to develop an
aversion to state power by looking at how actual states wield it. Their activities often include murder,
torture, political imprisonment, censorship, conscription for aggressive war, and overthrowing the

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governments of other countries-not to mention tapping the phones, reading the mail, or regulating the
sexual behavior of their own citizens. The objection to these abuses, however, is not that state power
exists, but that it is used to do evil rather than good. Opposition to these evils cannot be translated into
an ot jection to welfare, public education, or the graduated income tax.
Welfare enhances self determination.
Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 122.
Libertarians claim that liberal welfare programmes, by limiting property-rights, unduly limit people's
self-determination. Hence the removal of welfare redistribution programmes (Nozick), or their
limitation to an absolute minimum (Fried), would be an improvement in terms of self-determination.
But that is a weak objection. Redistributive programmes do restrict the self-determination of the well
off to a limited degree. But they also give real control over their lives to people who previously
lacked it. Liberal redistribution does not sacrifice self-determination for some other goal. Rather, it
aims at a fairer distribution of the means required for self-determination. Libertarianism, by contrast,
allows undeserved inequalities in that distribution-its concern with self-determination does not
extend to a concern for ensuring the fair distribution of the conditions required for selfdetermination. In fact, it harms those who most need help in securing those conditions. If each
person is to be treated as an end in herself, as Nozick says repeatedly, then I see no reason for
preferring ;a libertarian regime to a liberal redistributive one.
Redistribution is justified on utilitarian grounds
Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981,
p. 50.
Utilitarianism has no problem in justifying a substantial amount of compulsory redistribution from the
rich to the poor. We all recognize that $1,000 means far less to people earning $100,00 than it does
to people trying to support a family on $6,000. Therefore in normal circumstances we increase the
total happiness when we take from those with a lot and give to those with little. Therefore that is
what we ought to do. For the utilitarian it is as simple as that. The result will not absolute equality of
wealth. There may be some who need relatively little to be happier, and others whose expensive
tastes require more to achieve the same level of happiness. If resources are adequate the utilitarian
will give each enough to make him happy, and that will mean giving some more than others.
Utilitarianism justifies the welfare state
Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 19 81,
p. 50-1.
None of the arguments Nozick uses against Rawls is decisive when invoked against a utilitarian position.
Utilitarianism gives a clear and plausible defense not merely of progressive taxation, welfare payments,
and other methods of redistribution, but also of the general right of the state to perform useful
functions beyond the protection of its citizens from force and fraud. Utilitarianism also provides an
argument in defense of the claim behind Williams's argument for equality-that society should, so far as
its resources allow, provide for the most important needs of its members.
Extinction outweighs
Murray Rothbard, libertarian, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY:
THE LIBERTARIAN MANIFESTO, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263.
accessed 4/20/06.
Many libertarians are uncomfortable with foreign policy matters and prefer to spend their energies
either on fundamental questions of libertarian theory or on such "domestic" concerns as the free
market or privatizing postal service or garbage disposal. Yet an attack on war or a warlike foreign
policy is of crucial importance to libertarians. There are two important reasons. One has become a
cliche, but is all too true nevertheless: the overriding importance of preventing a nuclear holocaust.
To all the long-standing reasons, moral and economic, against an interventionist foreign policy has
now been added the imminent, ever-present threat of world destruction. If the world should be
destroyed, all the other problems and all the other ismssocialism, capitalism, liberalism, or
libertarianismwould be of no importance whatsoever.

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Excess liberty creates a moral vacuum

Robert Nisbet, Professor of Sociology, Columbia, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p.
20.
For the conservative, individual freedom lies in the interstices of social and moral authority. Only
because of the restraining and guiding effects of such authority does it become possible for human
beings to sustain so liberal a political government as that which the Founding Fathers designed in this
country and which flourished in England from the late seventeenth century on. Remove the social
bonds, as the more zealous and uncompromising of libertarian individualists have proposed ever since
William Godwin, and you emerge with, not a free but a chaotic people, not creative but impotent
individuals. Human nature, Balzac correctly wrote, cannot endure a moral vacuum.
Libertarianism would undermine the moral basis of the liberal state
Walter Berns, Professor of Government, Georgetown, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed.,
1984, p. 32-3.
I think what I have said above is sufficient to illustrate my point: we were founded on liberal
principles, but we used the public authority in nonliberal ways. We did so partly out of habit, I
suppose, and partly because there were men--Horace Mann, the central figure in American public
schooling, is a good example-who reflected on our situation and who knew that a liberal state could
not be perpetuated with simply self-interested citizens. Men had to be taught to be public-spirited, to
care for others, to be at least somewhat altruistic. In the course of time, and partly as the result of
Supreme Court decisions affecting public education, public support of private education, and, of
course, the censorship of obscenity, we have ceased to use the public authority in these ways. We
can now be said to be living off the fat we built up in the past. I shudder to think of what would
happen if we moved all the way from liberalism to libertarianism.
Blanket statements about coercion are false, must evaluate coercion on a case by case basis
Stein 98 [Herbert, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was on the board of
contributors of The Wall Street Journal. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under
President Nixon and President Ford. In the 1970s, he was a professor of economics at the University of
Virginia, What I think: Essays on Economics, Politics, and Life. 1998 P. 7]
Today's concern is mainly about coercion by the state. We have many government regulations today,
mainly related to health and the environment, that we did not have fifty years ago. We have fewer
regulations about international trade, agriculture, transportation, and banking than we did then. I don't
know whether there is more regulation now than there was. More important, it is essential to have some
feeling about the coerciveness of government coercion. It is one thing to be prevented from producing
an automobile that emits more than a specified amount of carbon dioxide by a regulation enacted
pursuant to a democratic legislative process, applied objectively and subject to judicial review. It is
quite a different thing to be thrown into the Lubyanka prison and shot for malting a critical remark
about the dictator. I agree that much of current government regulation is unnecessary and inefficient. I
admire the people who diligently analyze all regulation and point out the follies that they find. They are
engaged in the constant tidying up needed for a good society, but they are not carrying on a revolution

Turn: Autonomy bad

Gaylin and Jennings, 1996, William, psychoanalytic medicine professor at Columbia,
president of Hastings Center and Bruce, director of Center for Humans and Nature, The Perversion of
Autonomy: the proper uses of coercion and constraints in a liberal society. Pages 5-6. New York, NY,
The Free Press, 1996)
The dark side of the culture of autonomy is becoming increasingly apparent: something akin to
decadence is setting in. Individualism, privacy, and rights claims are sometimes so overblown that
they become caricatures of themselves. The individualistic philosophy that has been the backbone of
political liberalism and that protects the person from the power of the state has become
hyperextended into a kind of social liberalism that sees power, and nothing but power, everywhere,
and that casts the same acids of suspicion ; mistrust on the family and civil associations that political
liberals have traditionally reserved for the government. Extending the claims of autonomy as America
has been doing recently is dangerous for two reasons. First, it invites a politically; socially reactionary

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backlash that could threaten civil liberties across the board, and not just the exaggerated ones. Equally
dangerous, more subtle and insidious, is the possibility that it will come to undermine the very social
and psychic infrastructure upon which social order, and hence the conditions for autonomy itself, rests.
The social infrastructure to which we refer consists primarily of the family and the various civic
institutions through which individuals live as parents, friends, and neighbors; as church, synagogue,
or mosque members; as volunteers, professionals, and citizens. The psychic infrastructure
endangered by the culture of autonomy is those processes of childrearing, socialization, and moral
development that create the motivational basis for responsible conduct in the social emotions of
shame, guilt, pride, and conscience. Maintaining these foundations of social order requires respect for
authority as well as respect for freedom; it requires institutional power and restraint as well as selfexpression and independence.

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**AT: I Solve Future Coercion**

Coercion snowballs Each increase becomes easier to justify. The only
reason why we do not realize it is because the government uses the ploy of
Altruism to take it step by step. As each program fails, it becomes
necessary to move another step closer to more coercion. We are on a road
to oppression.
Linear every increase in coercive power decreases human dignity.
Rothbard, 70
[Murray, academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and
distinguished professor at UNLV, Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism and the
Division of Labor, http://www.mises.org/fipandol/fipsec1.asp]
Individual human beings are not born or fashioned with fully formed knowledge, values, goals, or
personalities; they must each form their own values and goals, develop their personalities, and
learn about themselves and the world around them. Every man must have freedom , must
have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices , for any sort of development of his
own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human. In a
sense, even the most frozen and totalitarian civilizations and societies have allowed at least a
modicum of scope for individual choice and development. Even the most monolithic of despotisms
have had to allow at least a bit of "space" for freedom of choice, if only within the interstices of
societal rules. The freer the society, of course, the less has been the interference with

individual actions, and the greater the scope for the development of each
individual. The freer the society, then, the greater will be the variety and the diversity among
men, for the more fully developed will be every man's uniquely individual
personality. On the other hand, the more despotic the society, the more restrictions on
the freedom of the individual , the more uniformity there will be among men and the less the
diversity, and the less developed will be the unique personality of each and every
man. In a profound sense, then, a despotic society prevents its members from being
fully human.
Steps toward state power are steps toward tyranny
Browne 95, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and Director of
Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, 95
(Harry Browne, Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and
Director of Public Policy for the DownsizeDC.org, 1995, Why Government
Doesn't Work, p.65-66)
Each increase in coercion is easier to justify . If its right to force banks to report your
finances to the government, then its right to force you to justify the cash in your pocket at the
airport. If its right to take property from the rich and give it to the poor, then its right to take your
property for the salt marsh harvest mouse. As each government program fails, it becomes necessary
to move another step closer to complete control over our lives. As one thing leads to another as
coercion leads to more coercion what can we look forward to? Will it become necessary to force
you to justify everything you do to any government agent who thinks you might be a threat to
society? Will it become necessary to force your children to report your personal habits to their
teachers or the police? Will it become necessary to force your neighbors to monitor your

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activities? Will it become necessary to force you to attend a reeducation program to learn how to
be more sensitive, or how not to discriminate, or how to avoid being lured into taking drugs, or how
to recognize suspicious behavior? Will it become necessary to prohibit some of your favorite foods
and ban other pleasures, so you dont fall ill or have an accident putting a burden on Americas
health-care system? Some of these things such as getting children to snitch on their parents or
ordering people into reeducation programs are already happening in America. The others have
been proposed and are being considered seriously. History has shown that each was an important
step in the evolution of the worlds worst tyrannies. We move step by step further along the road to

oppression because each step seems like such a small one. And because were told that each step will
give us something alluring in return less crime, cheaper health care, safety from terrorists, an end
to discrimination even if none of the previous steps delivered on its promise. And because the people
who promote these steps are well-meaning reformers who would use force only to build a better world.
Coercion isnt justified to prevent coercion this mindset leads to war
Murray

Rothbard, Academic Vice President of the Ludwig Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies, THE ETHICS

OF LIBERTY, 1982, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/fifteen.asp DOA 5/20/06.

EACH STATE HAS AN assumed monopoly of force over a given territorial area, the areas varying in size in accordance with
different historical conditions. Foreign policy, or foreign relations, may be defined as the relationship between any particular
State, A, and other States, B, C, D, and the inhabitants living under those States. In the ideal moral world, no States would exist,
and hence, of course, no foreign policy could exist. Given the existence of States, however, are there, any moral principles

that libertarianism can direct as criteria for foreign policy? The answer is broadly the same as in the
libertarian moral criteria directed toward the domestic policy of States, namely to reduce the degree
of coercion exercised by States over individual persons as much as possible. Before considering inter-State
actions, let us return for a moment to the pure libertarian stateless world where individuals and their hired private protection
agencies strictly confine their use of violence to the defense of person and property against violence . Suppose that, in this
world, Jones finds that he or his property is being aggressed against by Smith. It is legitimate, as we have
seen, for Jones to repel this invasion by the use of defensive violence. But, now we must ask: is it within the right of Jones

to commit aggressive violence against innocent third parties in the course of his legitimate defense
against Smith? Clearly the answer must be No. For the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or
property of innocent men is absolute; it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It
is wrong, and criminal, to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or is
starving, or is defending oneself against a third mans attack. We may understand and sympathize with the
motives in many of these cases and extreme situations. We (or, rather, the victim or his heirs) may later mitigate the guilt if the
criminal comes to trial for punishment, but we cannot evade the judgment that this aggression is still a criminal
act, and one which the victim has every right to repel, by violence if necessary. In short, A aggresses against B because C is
threatening, or aggressing against, A. We may understand Cs higher culpability in this whole procedure, but we still label this
aggression by A as a criminal act which B has every right to repel by violence. To be more concrete , if Jones finds that his

property is being stolen by Smith, Jones has the right to repel him and try to catch him, but Jones has no
right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying
machine gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more) a criminal aggressor
as Smith is. The same criteria hold if Smith and Jones each have men on his side, i.e., if war breaks out between Smith and
his henchmen and Jones and his bodyguards. If Smith and a group of henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his
bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested
in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Joness cause. But Jones and his men have no right, any more
than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of their just war: to steal others property in order to finance their
pursuit, to conscript others into their posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of their struggle to capture the Smith
forces. If Jones and his men should do any of these things, they become criminals as fully as Smith, and they too become subject
to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality. In fact if Smiths crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to
catch him, or should kill innocent people in the pursuit, then Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such crimes
against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft. Suppose that Jones, in the course of his "just
war" against the ravages of Smith, should kill some innocent people; and suppose that he should declaim, in defense of this
murder, that he was simply acting on the slogan, give me liberty or give me death. The absurdity of this defense should be
evident at once, for the issue is not whether Jones was willing to risk death personally in his defensive

struggle against Smith; the issue is whether he was willing to kill other innocent people in pursuit of his
legitimate end. For Jones was in truth acting on the completely indefensible slogan: Give me liberty or
give them deathsurely a far less noble battle cry. War, then, even a just defensive war, is only proper
when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals themselves. We may judge
for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion. It has often been
maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons

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of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is only a difference of degree rather
than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the
degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one. But a particularly libertarian reply is that
while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear
weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it
could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even conventional aerial bombs, cannot be. These
weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a
mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear
or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification. This is why the old
cliche no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it
is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner.
Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake.
Indeed, of all the aspects of liberty, such disarmament becomes the highest political good that can be pursued in the modern
world. For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny so mass murder

indeed murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itselfis the worst
crime that any man could possibly commit. And that crime is now all too possible.
Human dignity outweighs Utilitarianism fails to protect rights

Loren Lomasky, philosophy professor, University of Minnesota, PERSONS, RIGHTS,

AND THE MORAL COMMUNITY, 1987, p. 18.
It might prove to be the case that by violating the rights of one person, five equally
grave rights violations will be averted. If so, then a utilitarianism of rights will
endorse the one rights-violation act while a side constraint account will reject it. But
how can this rejection be presented as anything other than a single-minded fanaticism
that devours its indebted beneficiary in the case of preserving it? You maintain that
the protection of rights is of great, even transcendent value. Very well then more
upholding of rights is better then less. If one violation is necessary to prevent many
others your own principles ought to lead you to prefer the former. Yet you obstinately
resist. How is this criticism to be countered? The problem that has been identified is
that rights may prove to be inconvient. They set up barriers which neither private
individuals nor governmental bodies may breach at their pleasure. To be sure, that
may often be advantageous in a morally unproblematic way. Human beings are
notoriously susceptible to temptations to pursue their narrow self-interest at the
expense of the well-being others. Were sympathy and beneficences the strongest and
most universally shared emotions, it might be feasible to do without barriers of any
kind moral rules, rights, legally enforceable obligationsand rely instead on the
promptings of individuals hearts to secure a decently livable life for all.
Unfortunately, the animal we are is much more recognizable in the Hobbesian
caricatures than in this idyllic alternative. So incursions must be prevented if we are
to attain a tolerably decent measure of sociability. By recognizing each individual as a
bearer of rights all are afforded some protection against the predations that would
otherwise ensue. Even when arguments for overriding rights are couched in the most
high-minded terms, faced with referenced to the general welfare or the need for
mental sacrifice in a just cause one may suspect that the rhetoric is meant to yield the
most for power or personal attainment History is a textbook for cynics. Having read
from it, we may be prompted to insist on undeviating respect for rights, no matter how
beckoning are inducements to the contrary, because we have no confidence in
peoples ability to discriminate accurately and dispassionately between incursions that
will maximize public good and those that will debase it. If we are to err either on the
side of too much flexibility or excess dignity, betterfar better the later.
Non-absolute rights fails to protect freedom.
Tibor Machan, Philosophy Professor, Auburn,INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR RIGHTS, 1989, pp. 119-21.

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all Gewirth and others do is invite some other set

of principles we will have to turn to when we need to make principled decisions about
By not treating basic human rights as basic,

what people are free or not free to do. Or, more likely, they leave the matter to the discretion of
those who sit as judges in the courts. Indeed, the current legal climate, in which any strong political
interest group can secure the protection of some alleged right to well-being to be provided with
medical care, child-care facilities, a museum, the preservation of an historical building, a subsidy, or
the imposition of a tariff upon a foreign import business suggests what can be expected of a
welfare state, a system that embraces both the limited right to liberty and the limited right to
welfare. The resulting situation is a kind of Hobbesian war of special interests against all other
special interests, each demanding the protection of its alleged liberty or welfare rights. Gewirth, like
Gregory Viastos before him, seems to forget that rights are basic principles of political life and that
making them inherently unstable deprives them of their essential character. To make rights
nonabsolute within the legal context is to open a Pandoras box of bureaucratic arbitrariness
producing the very situation that the moral-political principles we know as human rights were
explicitly designed to render impermissible. Instead of treating human rights as contextually
deontological, as principles rather than piecemeal rules of thumb, Gewirth and Dworkin are inviting
the elitism that utilitarianism requires that is, certain leaders whose value-judgments must be
imposed on the rest whenever they find it intuitively certain or in some other fashion warranted to
override basic human, individual rights. There is a snowballing effect arising from this kind of
utilitarian thinking. Such thinking ought to be avoided and alternatives to solving the problems for
which the violations of rights seemed to be justified should be sought.

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**AT: Im not excessively coercive**

Every justification for coercion, no matter how legitimate, conditions us to
accept further limitations on our liberty.
Machan 02, Research Fellow @ Hoover Institution, Prof. Emeritus Dep.
Philosophy at Auburn U,
(TIbor R. Machan, Research Fellow @ Hoover Institution, Prof. Emeritus Dep.
Philosophy at Auburn U, 2002, Liberty and Hard Cases, pp. xvii-xix)

We are not unfamiliar with the hazards of the slippery slope in our own personal lives. If a man hits
his child in some alleged emergency, the very act of doing so may render him more
amenable to smacking the kid under more typical circumstances . Slapping someone who
is hysterical may make it easier to slap someone who is only very upset or recalcitrant or annoying
or just too slow fetching the beer from the refrigerator. Similarly, a minor breach of trust can
beget more of the same, a little white lie here and there can beget lying as a routine, and so forth.

Moral habits promote a principled course of action even in cases where bending or
breaking the principle might not seem too harmful to other parties or to our own
integrity. On the other hand, granting ourselves reasonable exceptions tends to weaken our
moral habits; as we seek to rationalize past action, differences of kind tend to devolve into
differences of degree. Each new exception provides the precedent for the next, until we lose
our principles altogether and doing what is right becomes a matter of happenstance
and mood rather than of loyalty to enduring values. The same is true of public action .
When citizens of a country delegate to government , by means of democratic and judicial
processes, the power to forge paternalistic public policies such as banning drug abuse,
imposing censorship, restraining undesirable trade, and supporting desirable trade, the
bureaucratic and police actions increasingly rely on the kind of violence and intrusiveness that no
free citizenry ought to experience or foster. And the bureaucrats and the police tell themselves,
no doubt, that what theyre doing is perfectly just and right. Consider, for starters, that when no
one complains about a crimebecause it is not perpetrated against someone but rather involves
breaking a paternalistic lawto even detect the crime requires methods that are usually invasive.
Instead of charges being brought by wronged parties, phone tapping, snooping, anonymous
reporting, and undercover work are among the dubious means that lead to prosecution. Thus the
role of the police shifts from protection and peacekeeping to supervision, regimentation, and
reprimand. No wonder, then, that officers of the law are often caught brutalizing suspects instead
of merely apprehending them. Under a paternalistic regime, their goals have multiplied, and thus
the means they see as necessary to achieving those goals multiply too. The same general

danger of corrupting a free societys system of laws may arise when government is
called on to deal with calamities. There is the perception , of course, that in such
circumstances the superior powers of government are indispensable, given the
immediateness of the danger.
Coercive efforts fail and snowball into massive atrocities every invasion of
liberty must be forcefully rejected.
Harry Browne, former Libertarian presidential candidate, executive director of public policy at
American Liberty Foundation, editor of Liberty Magazine, financial advisor and economist, 1995, Why
Government Doesnt Work, p. 66-7

Their better world never materializes because it depends upon coercion

to succeed. And coercion never improves society. So government is always promising to do
something thats impossible such as coercing people to stop taking drugs or abandon their
prejudices. When the coercion doesnt work, the politicians must impose harsher and harsher measures

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in order to show theyre serious about the problem and, inevitably, we come to the abuses we saw in
the preceding chapter such as property seizures and no-knock invasions of your home . These
arent legal mistakes in need of reform. They are the inevitable result of asking government to use
coercion to create a better world. Each increase in coercion is easier to justify . If its right to force
banks to report your finances to the government, then its right to force you to justify the cash in
your pocket at the airport. If its right to take property from the rich to give to the poor, then its
right to take your property for the salt marsh harvest mouse. As each government program fails, it
becomes necessary to move another step closer to complete control over our lives . As one thing leads
to another as coercion leads to more coercion what can Will it become necessary to force you
to justifywe look forward to? everything you do to any government agent who thinks you might
be a threat to Will it become necessary to force your children to report yoursociety? Will it
become necessary topersonal habits to their teachers or the police? Will it become necessary
toforce your neighbors to monitor your activities? force you to attend a reeducation program to
learn how to be more sensitive, or how not to discriminate, or how to avoid being lured into taking
drugs, or how Will it become necessary to prohibit someto recognize suspicious behavior? of your
favorite foods and ban other pleasures, so you dont fall ill or have an accident putting a burden on
Americas health-care system? Some of these things such as getting children to snitch on their
parents or ordering people into reeducation programs already are happening in America. The
others have been proposed and are being considered seriously. History has shown that each was an
important step in the evolution of the worlds worst tyrannies.
Uncompromising stance on libertarian principles is key.
Edward Romar, Lecturer in Management U. Mass. Boston College of Management, Journal of
Business Ethics, Noble Markets: The Noble/Slave Ethic in Hayeks Free Market Capitalism, 85:57-66,
2009, Springer
Like Nietzsche, Hayek, though acutely aware of the importance of ethics in a world based upon
maximum freedom, did not develop a complete ethical theory to support the functioning of free

Like Nietzsche, Hayek does not claim to know the meaning

of morality or, in Nietzsches case, good and evil.3 Beyond support for the principles
needed to anchor the functioning of free markets and the institutions
needed to support them, Hayek left it to individual actors to develop
their own moral principles, so long as these did not contradict those needed to support free
markets. It was not his intention to prescribe a detailed ethical system to
support free market capitalism because to do so would violate his
principle of freedom and curtail the creativity of markets. Yet, the world
described by Hayek is one where individuals have substantial power to
control their destiny and seek their own level, a world where talent and
risk dominate, a world governed by self interest, a world where individuals have few
market capitalism.

responsibilities to others, and a world driven by competition where reward goes to the successful. He
described a world open to Nietzschean ethics. In The Road to Serfdom (1994) and The Fatal Conceit

Hayek presents a powerful and eloquent attack on twentieth century

totalitarianism. In The Road to Serfdom he argues that the socialist experiment
must inevitably lead to totalitarianism and the complete elimination of
individual liberty and freedom. In the name of principles of social justice,
society installs a system of centralized social and economic planning,
substitutes collective decisions for individual ones, and requires each
person to adopt an identical and complete set of social values . Furthermore,
to achieve its objectives, the socialist state must determine in great
(1988)

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detail the allocation of resources and insure that each individual performs
precisely his/her assigned role. Planned economies must substitute
collectivist thought, values and behavior and eliminate any room for
individualism. Hayek labels this weltanschauung the fatal conceit. It is
fatal because it cannot achieve its objectives and it is conceit because it
overestimates the role of human rationality and mans ability to control
social and economic processes. He sees constructivist continental European philosophic thought, primarily
Cartesian rationalism, as the source of this error (Hayek, 1948, pp. 910; 1973, pp. 912). This philosophic
tradition argues that man can understand the world completely and , therefore,
social and economic processes can be understood completely and
molded to fit human will. Hayek considers this a foolish, self-serving and
arrogant position.4 Certainly, humans have a powerful intellect and reasoning skills. Human reason, though
powerful, has its limitations and cannot completely understand with any certainty how human institutions and social processes
evolved and how they operate. He views the evolution and development of human institutions, be they money, markets, or
ethics as spontaneous, self-generating orders. Systems, if you will, evolving gradually, accidentally, on the basis of incremental
change; not as a result of human design. He labels this between instinct and reason. Humans can understand to some extent
how human society evolved from clan based societies into modern, complex ones based upon individualism and abstract rules,

We can
tweak the social and moral systems but cannot engineer them. Man can
modify social processes and their underlying ethical foundations; but, in
the final analysis, we must accept them as is.5 Since social process and
institutions obey their own set of evolutionary principles which man
cannot know completely, it is best for these to evolve on their own,
without much human interference. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law,
but we cannot know the processes or mechanisms of this evolution in sufficient detail to bend them to our will .

Legislation and Liberty (3 vols., 1973, 1976, 1979) Hayek develops his ideas about the proper

The
fundamental principle of social organization must be based upon the
principle of liberty, which may be defined as that condition of men in
which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in
society6 (Hayek, 1960, p. 11). Hayeks conception of the free, just and moral society is not one where there is a
principles of economic and political organizations and their underlying ethical foundations.

complete absence of coercion but where coercion is limited to those situations where it is required to prevent a reduction in the
liberty of others. Society may use coercion to protect private property and to secure individual rights and conditions which allow
each person the maximum amount of personal freedom to make choices of their own. This is accomplished through a limited set
of abstract rules that apply equally to all which protect private or several property, enforce contracts, and prevent fraud and
deception (Hayek, 1960, pp. 140, 141, 143, 155). While Hayek is concerned with just and moral principles of economic,

he views attempts to achieve distributive justice as

the root cause of the immorality brought about by planned economies. In
order to achieve the desired goals, human behavior must be planned in
minute detail, thereby eliminating freedom of choice. Achieving
collectivist goals mean that there can be no individual ones. Organizing
to control every outcome means there cannot be individual choice. Social control
political and social organization,

means there will be little individual control and it is all doomed because humans cannot understand completely the mechanisms

The only solution must be the free market and the

minimal organizational principles required for it to operate efficiently.
Since these are few and well known, it will be easier to succeed and
needed to reach their objectives.

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create a just and moral society. Allow the market free reign and the just
and moral society will follow according to its own principles .
Allowing any realm of government control quickly snowballs to totalitarian collectivism.
Jack Douglas, Prof. Emeritus Soc. UC San Diego, The Myth of the Welfare State, 19 91, p. 40,
Google Print

The logic of totalitarian collectivism is simple , brutal, and entirely consistent. Once
a people has decided--whether actively or, more commonly, by default, by not actively stopping
them--to allow politicians to decide by legislation, and without severe constraints of custom,
moral principle and constitutional law, what is right and wrong in such basic realms
of life as economic property rights, then there is no longer any logical
constraint upon their exercise of power in all other realms of life . As classical
liberals saw, even in the vastly more simple and self-contained society of the eighteenth century,

without inviolate property rights no other rights can long be sustained.

The government that controls our property rights must ultimately control
our right to the pursuit of happiness, our right to free speech and to the publication
of that speech, our right to take a spouse or have children, our right to work and choose an occupation,

our right to life itself--for all things of life are ultimately dependent upon
material goods and, thus, upon the controls of those goods we call property rights. The
government that has the right to legislate gas prices in Texas, or income
redistribution nationwide, has every logical right to dictate research standards in
physics, hiring standards in sociology, wage rates for black teenagers in New York, parental care
standards for all parents, the right to bear children, the right to redefine life,
and--the right to everything. When the American people, tempted by the ancient enabling
myth of the welfare state, used the power of their votes to give the politicians and, by inaction, the
courts the power to legislate away and rule away our ancient economic rights--our freedoms from
unconstrained government control of our property for the common welfare--they unknowingly gave
them power to legislate away and rule away all our ancient rights. Almost a hundred years ago,
Theodore Roosevelt, one of the first heroes of the rationalistic state planning of American progressivism
proclaimed, "Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its
use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it." The insidious implications of that "to
whatever degree" for the counterrevolution against the System of Natural Liberty became clear only

but for almost a century now the American state has been pursuing
that relentless logic of totalitarian collectivism at an accelerating rate .
slowly,

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**AT: Rawls**
Rawls conception of rights flawed fails to explain why small incursions on
liberty would threaten citizenship.
Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003.
Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian
Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31,
No. 3, Pg 5. Project MUSE.
Up to this point, Rawls has said nothing about the priority of the basic liberties; rather, he has
focused exclusively on their equal provision. Only at the end of his main presentation of the
Self-Respect Argument does he briefly discuss the Priority of Liberty: When it is the position of
equal citizenship that answers to the need for status, the precedence of the equal liberties
becomes all the more necessary. Having chosen a conception of justice that seeks to eliminate
the significance of relative economic and social advantages as supports for mens selfconfidence, it is essential that the priority of liberty be firmly maintained (p. 478).These two
sentences provide a good illustration of what I earlier called the Inference Fallacy: Rawls tries
to derive the lexical priority of the basic liberties from the central importance of an interest
they supportin this case, an interest in securing self-respect for all citizens. Without question,
the Self-Respect Argument makes a strong case for assigning the basic liberties a high priority:
otherwise, economic and social inequalities might reemerge as the primary determinants of
status and therefore of self-respect. It does not explain, however, why lexical priority is needed.
Why, for example, would very small restrictions on the basic liberties threaten the social basis
of self-respect, so long as they were equally applied to all citizens? Such restrictions would
involve no subordination and, being very small, would be unlikely to jeopardize the central
importance of equal citizenship as a determinant of status.

Rawls fails to provide warrants for the absolute preservation of basic

liberties over other ends.
Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003.
Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian
Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31,
No. 3, Pgs 20-21. Project MUSE.
Although Rawls briefly discusses and defends the Priority of Liberty early in Political Liberalism
(PL, pp. 41, 74, 76), his most sustained arguments for it are to be found late in the book, in the
lecture entitled The Basic Liberties and Their Priority. All of these arguments are framed in
terms of Justice as Fairness rather than liberal political conceptions of justice more generally, a
point to which we will return below. The three arguments for the Priority of Liberty that we
identified in Theory can also be found in Political Liberalism, and both their strengths and
weaknesses carry over into the new context.18 At least two new arguments can be found,
however, arguments that I will refer to as the Stability Argument and the Well-Ordered Society
Argument, respectively. As I will now show, both of these arguments are further illustrations of
the Inference Fallacy. The Stability Argument has a structure similar to that of the Self- Respect
Argument. In it, Rawls notes the great advantage to everyones conception of the good of
a . . . stable scheme of cooperation, and he goes on to assert that Justice as Fairness is the
most stable conception of justice . . . and this is the case importantly because of the basic
liberties and the priority assigned to them.Taking the second point first, Rawls never makes
clear why the Priority of Liberty is necessary for stability, as opposed to strongly contributory to
it. Very small restrictions on the basic liberties would seem unlikely to threaten it,
and some types of restrictions (e.g., imposing fines for the advocacy of violent revolution or
race hatred) might actually enhance it. Even if we assume, however, that the Priority of Liberty
is necessary for stability, this fact is not enough to justify it: as highly valued as stability is,
sacrificing the basic liberties that make it possible may be worthwhile if such a sacrifice is

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necessary to advance other highly valued ends. Pointing out the high priority of stability, in
other words, is insufficient to justify the lexical priority of the basic liberties that support it
only the lexical priority of stability would do so, yet Rawls provides no argument for why
stability should be so highly valued.

Rawls conception of personal freedom cannot resolve utilitarian democratic

ideals.
Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003.
Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian
Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31,
No. 3, Pgs 22-23. Project MUSE.
Rawls speculates that the narrower the differences between the liberal conceptions when
correctly based on fundamental ideas in a democratic public culture . . . the narrower the range
of liberal conceptions defining the focus of the consensus.25 By correctly based, Rawls
appears to mean at least two things: first, that the conceptions should be built on the more
central of these fundamental ideas; second, that these ideas should be interpreted in the right
way (PL, pp. 16768). For example, Rawls asserts that his conception of the person as free and
equal is central to the democratic ideal (PL, p. 167). This idea is in competition with other
democratic ideas, however (e.g., the idea of the common good as it is understood by
classical republicans), as well as with other interpretations of the same idea (e.g., the utilitarian
understanding of equality as the equal consideration of each persons welfare). A necessary
condition, then, for Justice as Fairness to be the focus of an overlapping consensus would be for
adherents of all reasonable comprehensive doctrines to endorse this idea, along with the
interpretation Rawls gives it, as more central to the democratic ideal than other fundamental
ideas. If they were to accept not only this idea but also its companion idea of society as a fair
system of cooperation, then the procedures of political constructivism (including the Original
Position) would presumably lead them to select Justice as Fairness as their political conception
of justice.

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**AT: Egalitarianism / Equality / Distribution Good**

1. Distributive justice leads to global poverty
Carl Knight P.h.d International Studies 2008, 34, 713733, British International Studies Association
A pluralistic approach to global poverty
But Rawls masterpiece also presents some obvious obstacles to global poverty alleviation. A
Theory of Justice explicitly states that the theory is only to be applied within a society . Furthermore,
in those few places where the book oers some tangential discussion of transdomestic justice, it is characterised as a
question of the justice of the law of nations and of relations between states.16 Hence, in a discussion occasioned by his
analysis of conscription and conscientious refusal, Rawls suggests that one may extend the interpretation of the original
position and think of the parties as representatives of dierent nations who must choose together the fundamental
principles to adjudicate conicting claims among states.17 He com- ments that this procedure is fair among nations,
and that there would be no surprises in the outcome, since the principles chosen would . . . be familiar ones ensuring
treaty compliance, describing the conditions for just wars, and granting rights of self-defence and self-determination

the latter being a right of a people to settle its own aairs without the intervention of foreign
powers.18 This is, then, a thoroughly nationalist conception of justice: social justice applies only
within a state or nation. Rawlss radical principles of distributive justice, such as the dierence principle, would
only hold transdomestically where, improbably, states had signed treaties to this eect. Given that such wide
ranging internationally redistributive treaties have never been signed, A Theory of Justice
provided a rationale for the Western general publics impression that their duties to the global
poor are, at most, those of charity. Rawls full expression of his views in this area came nearly three decades
later in The Law of Peoples.19 Here Rawls again uses the notion of a transdomestic original position, arguing that it
is an appropriate instrument for selecting laws to govern relations between both liberal societies and
decent non-liberal societies, especially those which are decent hierarchical societies, being non-aggressive,
recognising their citizens human rights, assigning widely acknowledged additional rights and duties, and being backed
by genuine and not unreasonable beliefs among judges and other ocials that the law embodies a common good idea of
justice.20 This Society of Peoples would agree to be guided by eight principles constituting the basic charter of the Law
of Peoples.21

2. Focusing exclusively on the poor stigmatizes the issueno solvency

Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Louisiana State, January 1999
Misfortune, welfare reform, and right-wing egalitarianism
Yet nobody in the welfare debate, as far as I know, invoked the Charles Murray of The Bell Curve rather than the Murray of
Losing Ground. Moreover, while many right-wing arguments are neutral about questions of class distinctions, others
actually seem to be grounded in a kind of relational egalitarianism. For example, conservatives sometimes argue that
welfare stigmatizes recipients. As we have already heard Gingrich (1995, 71) say, "The welfare state reduces the
poor from citizens to clients." This argument raises a serious issue for relational egalitarians : How
can the poor be given material aid with- out others thinking less of them? The stigma of being on the

receiving end of welfare may create the very divisions in society that the relational egalitarian
seeks to avoid. If government programs designed to help the poor stand in the way of citizens
relating to each other non-hierarchically, maybe we should abolish such programs in the interest of
a society in which citizens stand as equals.

3. Egalitarianism does not equate society

Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
Egalitarianism forces persons who exceed the average, in the respect deemed by the theorist to
be relevant, to surrender, insofar as possible, the amount by which they exceed that average to
persons below it. On the face of it, therefore, egalitarianism is incompatible with common good, in
empowering some people over others: roughly, the unproductive over the productive. The
formers interests are held to merit the imposition of force over others, whereas the interests of
the productive do not. Yet producers, as such, merely produce; they dont use force against

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others. Thus egalitarianism denies the central rule of rational human association. What could be
thought to justify this apparent bias in favour of the unproductive, the needy, the sick, against the
productive the healthy, the ingenious, the energetic? What are the latter supposed to have done
to the former to have merited the egalitarians impositions? The answer cant be, Oh, nothing
theyre just unlucky! or We dont like people like that! A rational social theory must appeal to
commonvalues. By definition, those have not been respected when a measure is forced upon
certain people against their own values.

4. Principles of justice cement the political sphereerode the possibility

for real change
William W. Sokoloff -- PhD Candidate @ Amherst. 2005 Between Justice and
Legality: Derrida on Decision, Political Research Quarterly,
http://prq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/58/2/341
In Rawlss (1993: 157) universe, consensus is cemented into the political founding and overrides
all other issues. 26 Anything that triggers political conflict is excluded from the public sphere: A
liberal view removes from the political agenda the most divisive issues, serious contention about
which must undermine the bases of social cooperation. Difficult issues may be interesting but,
for Rawls, they are not the stuff of politics. They threaten consensus and must be excluded or
contained in the private sphere. Politics is about tinkering, not controversy. The only truly political
moment in Rawlss work, then, is laying the ground for justice as fairness in the original posi- tion.
Once the principles of justice as fairness are established, however, the political sphere is
essentially closed. Efforts to re-open the foundation are a threat to political stability. The range of
acceptable political issues is framed by principles that are not up for debate. Hence, citizens are
prevented from pursuing those modes of civic involvement that would open the political sphere to
real contestation. Given the imperative of consensus, the regime must protect its political
founding from interrogation. Narrowing the range of acceptable political issues exacts a high cost
from citizens. Space for dissent is eliminated. The range of political possibilities is restricted to
one (and only one) that will be fixed once and for all (Rawls 1993: 161). Once the principles of
justice are instituted, only the support of the status quo is possible (Alejandro 1998: 144). For
Rawls, all citizens affirm the same public conception of justice (1993: 39). Public discussion about
alternative political possibilities is not necessary.31 Since a critical disposi- tion toward the
founding moment of justice as fairness would risk destroying consensus, it is better to treat it as a
monument before which one genuflects. Rawls, however, does not purge all conflict from his
model of politics in the name of consensus. Some level of reasonable disagreement is permitted in
his liberal utopia. It arises from the burdens of judgment. The causes of these burdens are
formidable:

5. Inequality inevitablecapitalism
Stuart White 2k, ReviewArticle: Social Rights and the Social Contract
Political Theory and the New Welfare Politics Cambridge University Press,
B.J.Pol.S. 30, 50753
How Much Equality of Opportunity Does Fair Reciprocity Require? I have presented only a very
intuitive account of the conditions of fair reciprocity; I have not formally presented a full
conception of distributive justice and demonstrated how each condition follows from this
conception, something one might attempt in a lengthier analysis. However, I do wish to examine
one general philosophical issue that arises when we come to think about the conditions of fair
reciprocity. Assume that distributive justice is centrally about some form of equal opportunity. The
notion of equality of opportunity can, of course, be understood in a number of different ways. But
assume, for the moment, that we understand it in the radical form defended in contemporary
egalitarian theories of distributive justice.40 Equal opportunity in this sense requires, inter alia,
that we seek to prevent or correct for inequalities in income attributable to differences in natural
ability and for inequalities in capability due to handicaps that people suffer through no fault of
their own. The question I wish to consider can then be put like this: How far must society satisfy
the demands of equal opportunity before we can plausibly say that all of its members have

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obligations under the reciprocity principle? One view, which I shall call the full compliance view, is
that the demands of equal opportunity must be satised in full for it to be true that all citizens
have obligations to make productive contributions to the community under the reciprocity
principle. The intuition is that people can have no obligation to contribute in a signicant way to a
community that is not (in all other relevant respects) fully just at least if they are amongst those
who are disadvantaged by their societys residual injustices. Reciprocity kicks in, as it were, only
when the terms of social co-operation are fair, where fairness requires (inter alia) full satisfaction
of the demands of equal opportunity. If equal opportunity is understood in our assumed sense,
however, then this full compliance view effectively removes the ideal of fair reciprocity from the
domain of real-world politics. For there is no chance that any advanced capitalist (or, for that
matter, post-capitalist) society will in the near future satisfy equal opportunity, in our assumed
sense, in full. And so, following the full compliance view, we should, if we are egalitarians in the
assumed sense, simply abandon the idea that there can be anything like a universal civic
obligation to make a productive contribution to the community.

Hierarchies are inevitable even after the redistribution of wealth

Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
Egalitarians can only defend their view by reference to values that many or most people do not
have. People below the mid-point of the proposed redistributional scale will, of course, have
some reason to rejoice at their unearned egalitarian windfalls temporarily. Meanwhile, people
from whom they are wrested have the opposite motivation, so common good is out the window
from the start. Nor can equality relevantly be held to be an objective or an absolute value

a value in itself, that doesnt need to be held byanybody (except the theorist himself, of
course). That is intuitional talk, which has already been dismissed. Do real people (as
opposed to theorists) care about equality as such? No. They want better and more reliable
food on the table, nicer tables to put it on, TVs, theatres, motorcars, books, medical
services, churches, courses in Chinese history, and so on, indefi- nitely. Equality is
irrelevant to these values: how much of any or all of them anyone has is logically independent of
how much anyone else has. People are rarely free of envy, to be sure. Most people would like to
be better than others in some way and some will pay others to let them look down on
them. But few will make themselves worse off in order to make some other people equally badly
off. Values that can be improved by human activity are not independent in any other

way, though, for production is cooperative, requiring arrangements agreed to by a great

many people work- ers, financiers, engineers, customers. Nobody can attain to wealth,
insofar as the free market obtains, without others likewise benefiting. These are truisms,
though I am aware that they will be seen by many readers as ideological even at the
present time, when the absurdities of alternative views of economics have been so
completely exposed.13

Equality is impossibleenvy
Jon Mandle 2k Reviwed: Liberalism, Justice, and Markets: A Critique of

Liberal Equality by Colin M. Macleod The Philosophical Review, Vol. 109, No. 4
(Oct., 2000), pp. 601-604 Duke University Press. Jstor
Here, I can only illustrate one of Macleod's many distinct criticisms of Dworkin's use of idealized
markets. Dworkin argues that the initial division of resources (prior to adjustments made in light
of differences in individual ambition) should satisfy an "envy test": "No division of resources is an
equal division if, once the division is complete, any [person] would prefer someone else's bundle
of resources to his own bundle" (Dworkin 1981b, 285). And the mechanism he proposes to satisfy
this test is a hypothetical auction in which individuals bid on resources using some counter (itself
without value and equally distributed). This market-based solution values resources entirely in
terms of the preferences that individuals express in the auction. Macleod recognizes that a great
strength of Dworkin's auction is that it is sensitive to the opportunity costs to others of giving
some re- source to a particular individual. As Macleod helpfully points out, "The resources a

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person can acquire are a function not only of the importance she attaches to them but also of the
importance attached by others to them .... Phrased in the language of opportunity costs, the
auction ensures that aggregate opportunity costs are equal" (26).

Distribution of benefits to equalize the impoverished is indefensible

encourages envy and moral disorientation.
Page 2007
Edward. Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian
Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2007, pgs 3-20.
Suppose, again, that the sufficiency level for all was 50. Whereas intrinsic egalitarianism
seems, other things being equal, to favour outcome (3) and prioritarianism would favour
allocation (1), sufficientarianism would favour outcome (2) since this would be the only
outcome in which at least some people had enough. For the sufficientarian, the
distribution of benefits and burdens to achieve equality or priority in such circumstances
is indefensible. It would be analogous to the tragedy involved in a famine situation of
giving food to those who cannot possibly survive at the cost of those that could survive if
they received extra rations. In this sense, the ideal of sufficiency is related to the medical
concept of triage according to which, when faced with more people requiring care than
can be treated, resources are rationed so that the most needy receive attention first.
However, because the category of most needy is defined in terms of the overarching
aim that as many people as possible should survive a given emergency, triage protocols
often lead to the very worst off being denied treatment for the sake of benefitting those
who can be helped to survive. Frankfurts view is that all distributive claims arise in
some way from an analysis of where people stand relative to the threshold of sufficiency,
or as he puts it the threshold that separates lives that are good from lives that are not
good (Frankfurt 1997, p. 6). Egalitarianism, by contrast, posits a relationship between
the urgency of a persons claims and their comparative well-being without reference to
the level at which they would have enough. Since allocating people enough to lead
decent lives exhausts our duties of distribution, sufficientarians argue that egalitarianism
recognizes duties that do not exist. In fact, in linking ethical duties to the comparative
fortunes of people, egalitarianism encourages envy and thereby contributes to the moral
disorientation and shallowness of our time (Frankfurt 1987, pp. 2223; Anderson 1999,
pp. 287ff.).

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Egalitarian and Prioritarian thinking flawed no standard baseline for

equality guarantees never-ending redistribution.
Page 2007
Edward. Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian
Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2007, pgs 3-20.
Although Frankfurt focuses his critique of rival distributive views on intrinsic egalitarianism, it
can be readily extended to cover prioritarianism. While the priority view is grounded in the
badness of absolute rather than comparative disadvantage, it is also inclined to divert
resources to the worst off even if this would mean sacrificing substantial benefits to other,
slightly better off, persons who could be helped to lead a decent life. Frankfurt argues that : It is

true that people in the lowest strata of society generally live in horrible conditions, but this
association of low social position and dreadful quality of life is entirely contingent. There is no
necessary connection between being at the bottom of society and being poor in the sense in which
poverty is a serious and morally objectionable barrier to life. (Frankfurt 1997, p. 2) The problem

with prioritarianism, then, is not that it fetishizes comparative wellbeing but rather that it
fetishizes absolute well-being with the result that it mandates constant interference in peoples
lives to benefit the worst off. By doing so, prioritarianism is inclined to generate just as much
envy and pity as its egalitarian rival and to mandate a range of redistributions that do not help
their recipients to lead decent lives. Consider the following example. There are two groups in
society, where one enjoys a considerably lower level of well-being than the other, where both
groups enjoy a far better than decent life, and where the inequalities are undeserved. We can
call these groups the very happy and the extremely happy. Egalitarians claim that, if we
could do something about it, the very happy group should be compensated for their relative
well-being deficit. This is because this theory regards undeserved inequality as bad even if
everyone is at least very happy; that is, it makes no ethical difference that the inequality is
between groups, or persons, who are very well off. Prioritarians, by contrast, regard the very
happy in isolation of their relative happiness as they are only interested in absolute levels of
well-being. Nonetheless, the very happy, as the worst off, deserve our attention even if their
lives are so good they want for nothing. According to sufficientarians, however, the
egalitarian and prioritarian claims are absurd. How can there be a duty to help the
worst off, they ask, when they already lead lives of such a high standard?

Acceptance of egalitarianism dominates the political sphere and makes us

powerless to the abuses of elites
William W. Sokoloff -- PhD Candidate @ Amherst. 2005 Between Justice and
Legality: Derrida on Decision, Political Research Quarterly,
http://prq.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/58/2/341

If Rawlss appeal to the burdens of judgment seems disingenuous insofar as the founding moment
of justice as fairness is somehow protected from them, his underlying notion of citizenship also
leaves much to be desired. Even though he claims citizens learn and profit from conflict and
argument (Rawls 1993: lvii), he methodically closes spaces for the types of dissent, conflict and
argument that nurture democratic citizenship. If citizens with competing comprehensive doctrines
happen to meet on the street in Rawlss liberal utopia, they nervously grimace at each other and
then retreat to the private sphere, simply shrugging shoulders in silence during encounters. Both
the immediate impact and the intergenerational effect of Rawlss neutralization of public dialogue
will produce a society of inarticulate shoppers on Prozac: By taking Prozac, they may be able to
alleviate their angst, which might be a disruptive force to the liberal order (Alejandro 1998: 13).
Citizens will not only be unable to contest abuses of power but they will be incapable of
negotiating encounters with others in substantive ways. Rawlss allergy to even mild modes of
political conflict results in a de-politicization of politics under the banner of neutrality.35 He
evacuates all political content from public discussion: We try to bypass religion and philosophys
pro- foundest controversies so as to have some hope of uncover- ing a basis of a stable
overlapping consensus (Rawls 1993: 152).36Much to his credit, Rawls acknowledges the great
deal of indeterminacy of decision in the burdens of judgment but this indeterminacy is somehow

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absent from his image of political society. The indeterminacy of decision in Rawls is mitigated by
his de-politicization of political foundations. The indeterminacy of politics is precisely what Rawls
seeks to expel from the political horizon. Political liberalism purges politics from politics and
encloses the political field under the terror of uniformity.37The value Rawls ascribes to pluralism is
disingenuous. It is incompatible with the imperative of unanimity on basic principles.

Moral calls for egalitarianism are self defeating

Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Louisiana
State, January 1999 Misfortune, welfare reform, and right-wing
egalitarianism

How will democratic decision makers choose which welfare policy to endorse? They will speculate.
The average voter, for example, will have no option other than guessing which policy has

the best long- term consequences, and the average elected representative is probably in
no better position. In speculating about long-term consequences they may be
inordinately swayed by any number of prejudices or pre- conceived ideas. When the truth
does not present itself clearly, it is easy to seize on the evidence that supports one's ideological
presuppositions. The consequence of applying equality of fortune to the welfare debate is not
usefully neutral in the sense that it avoids blind ideological presuppositions or commitments. It is
tragically neutral in the sense that it provides democratic voters and their representatives
with no reason to challenge their blind ideological commitments. For equality of fortune would
focus the debate on the empirical question that did, in fact, command the lion's share of
attention: Which policy is best for the poor? Answers to this question will be determined by
prejudice and mood more than reasoned deliberation or real debate . If this consequence is
inevitable, then the implications for the ideal of equality are dismal : it would appear impotent as a
political ideal, for it requires democratic bodies to make decisions based on speculation

about economic effects over the course of decades or even generations.

Err on the side of combining political consequences with humanitarianism

Thomas Weiss 99, Presidential Professor of Political Science @ CUNY
Graduate Center, "principles, politics, and humanitarian action"

Political actors have a newfound interest in principles, while humanitari- ans of all stripes are
increasingly aware of the importance of politics. Yet, there remain two distinct approaches
politics and humanitarianism as self-contained and antithetical realities or alternatively as
overlapping spheres. Nostalgia for aspects of the Cold War or other bygone eras is perhaps understandable, but there never was a golden age when humanitarianism was insulated from politics.
Much aid was an extension of the foreign policies of major donors, especially the superpowers.
Nonetheless, it was easieq conceptually and practically, to compartmentalize humanitarianism
and politics before the present decade. Then, a better guide to action was provided by an
unflinching respect for traditional princi- ples, although they never were absolute ends but only
intermediate means. In todays world, humanitarians must ask themselves how to weigh the
political consequences of their action or inaction; and politicians must ask them- selves how to
gauge the humanitarian costs of their action or inaction. The cal- culations are tortuous, and the
mathematics far from exact. However, there is no longer any need to ask whether politics and
humanitarian action intersect. The real question is how this intersection can be managed to
ensure more humanized politics and more effective humanitarian action. To this end,
humanitarians should be neither blindly principled nor blindly pragmatic.

Moral views of egalitarianism are self serving

Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell

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2. Our subject concerns normative political theory, which I take to be part of morality. The
subject is not depiction of a way of life, a formula for individual happiness, or a view of the
mean- ing of life, but rather, rules for the (large) community, or better (as assumed
henceforth), everybody. In the words of Aquinas, a moral theory imposes a uniformity. It
proposes a set a single set, however complicated of rules, declaring that all should adhere
to it. But this uniformity need not be egalitarian in the sense defined above. The one basic set
of directives to which everyone ought to adhere, and by reference to which the conduct of
anyone may be called to account, could be wildly inegalitarian (as with slave moralities.)
Universality sameness of rules for all is a defining feature of morals; egalitarianism is not.

Egalitarianism isnt democraticinevitable dilemma

Fabienne Peter Ph.D. in Economics 13 November 2006 The Political
Egalitarians Dilemma Springer Link
The dilemma is the following. If, on the one hand, the substantive constraints on the deliberative
process are kept to a minimum, only a weak criterion of political equality can be imposed on the
deliberative process. This criterion may fail to ensure the effective equality of participants in the
deliberative process, which undermines the legitimacy of the outcomes of such a process. If, on
the other hand, political equality is interpreted comprehensively, many substantive judgments will
be packed into the conditions imposed on the deliberative process. They will be treated as exempt
from deliberative evaluation. The stronger the criterion of political equality, the more emphasis is
placed not just on general political resources, but on peoples abilities to make effective use of
these resources, the narrower the scope for democratic scrutiny. This, again, jeopardizes
democratic legitimacy. Thus, a strong criterion of political equality, which focuses on peoples
possibilities to participate in the deliberative process as effectively equals, will fail to ensure
democratic legitimacy because it will exempt too many value judgments from deliberative
democratic scrutiny. A weak criterion of political equality will fail to ensure democratic legitimacy
because many will not have been able to participate in the deliberative process as effectively
equals. In other words, the political egalitarians dilemma reveals a clash between the attempt to
ensure equal possibilities to participate in the democratic process and the requirement of
subjecting substantive judgments to deliberative evaluation.

Forced attempts at equality perpetuate inequality

Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
The conclusion stands, then, that egalitarians propose measures incompatible with Common
Good, conceived in liberal terms. Appeals to equity that are not simply question-begging fail;
appeals to moral intuitions are useless; appeal to the arbitrariness of nature is irrelevant; appeals
to marginal utility are of questionable basic relevance, and exactly wrong insofar as they are
relevant. Society, I conclude, should make no interference in the free actions of individuals in
using their resources as they see best, by their own lights, within the constraints of a no-harmto-others rule. There is no socially acceptable case for forced equality .

Egalitarianism hurts the poor

Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
Further reflection on this leads to an important further point against egalitarianism : that it is
essentially certain to be counterproductive as well to defeat the very values whose
equalization is required by the theory. Forced transfers from rich to poor, from capitalists to
proletarians, will worsen the lot of the poor even as it decreases the wealth of the rich. Not only

is egalitarianism biased, but the particular people against whom it is biased are the

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productive the source of what the people it is biased in favour of hope to receive in
consequence. It is not too much to say, even, that egalitarianism is a conspiracy against
those it claims to be trying to help. There is a reason for this, whose incomprehension by
philosophers even to this day should be a matter of astonishment. A free economy is one
in which no one forcibly intervenes against the property rights of any other all are free
to use their resources as they judge best, including engaging in commercial exchanges.
In such a system, the only ways to achieve wealth are by means which improve the
situations of others. Successful businesspeople become so by organizing or financially
supporting the production of things that other people want, and want more than the
existing alternatives since those people, having no obligation to buy, would not
otherwise buy them. The only other possibilities are fairly uninteresting: gift, and the
discovery or original acquisition of valuable things. But gift, as such, is pure transfer and
does not create wealth, except in the form of good will . We may praise occasional acts of
charity, but if everyone were only charitable and unproductive , all, including the poor and sick,
would quickly die. And as to acquisition, if we would attain to wealth, those items must be
harnessed to human use nature does not afford a free lunch any more than our fellows. Even
someone who acquired a natural beauty spot, say, and keeps it natural, will be able to
make a decent living thereby only if he is able to charge others for the right to enjoy that
spot. And so on.

No such thing as a utilitarian defense of egalitarianism

Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
An immensely popular argument, thought to provide a clear utilitarian defense for
egalitarianism, appeals to a principle of diminishing marginal utility . The idea is that the

marginal return from possession of some measurable good decreases as a function of

the amount one already has money being the most familiar and obvious case in point.
From this it is inferred that general utility will be promoted by transferring such goods
from those above the midpoint to those below, where the marginal util- ity of unit
increments is much greater. Two major flaws destroy this argument. The first is
fundamental:general (aggregate) utility simply isnt a common value, and therefore cannot be
appealed to. Individuals are not necessarily concerned to promote the aggregate sum of
good. They are mostly concerned to promote the goods of certain particular persons
themselves, friends, countrymen, whatever and not the sum of utility, even if that sum
could be objectively deter- mined. It is therefore inadmissible to appeal to it. Only if the
particular individual addressed can be shown that what matters to himwill be forwarded if the
aggregate of utility grows some- times plausible, to be sure is he rationally interested in its
growth. That special case apart, utilitarian arguments are dismissed. Second, and more
important for present purposes, the argu- ment suffers from myopia: it focuses only on the
consumptionutil- ity of money. But all good things come from somewhere: namely, human
effort and know-how. Allocation of those requires invest- ment. But the poor, obviously, do
not invest the better-off do that. A well-invested dollar yields goods and services in the

future greatly exceeding the stock of consumption goods one could buy with the same
money. The marginal utility of dollars in the upper incomes is therefore greater, not less, than the
marginal utility of dollars for the poor.

Utilitarian calculus not egalitarian doesnt act on the principle of intrinsic

equality.
Page 2007

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Edward. Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian

Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2007, pgs 3-20.
Perhaps the simplest theory of the pattern of justice is that benefits and burdens should be
distributed across some population so that inequality is minimized. We might call this view
intrinsic egalitarianism as it holds that inequality is bad or unjust (I use these terms
interchangeably) in itself and not because of its consequences. As Temkin has put it, the
essence of intrinsic equality is that it is bad for some to be worse off than others through no
fault of their own (Temkin 2003, p. 62). It is worth contrasting intrinsic equality with some
closely associated views. Utilitarians hold that acts and social policies should be evaluated only
in terms of their consequences and that these consequences ought to promote the maximum
amount of welfare possible. Depending on the circumstances the utilitarian may prefer an
equal distribution of well-being because this coincides with the desire to maximize welfare. The
reason for this is that it is generally easier to help the worse off than othersone only has to
give them a little for their welfare level to improve a lot. In this sense, utilitarians are
accidental, rather than intrinsic, egalitarians.

In-egalitarianism solves benefits trickle down

Jan Narveson P.hD @ Harvard University 1997 Egalitarianism: Partial,
Counterproductive and Baseless Blackwell
In short, successful investment enhances the lot of others in society. When people are employed,
this enhances their real incomes, more than any other opportunities they may have had.
And when they spend their money, it is because they judge that expenditure to contribute
maximally to their well-being. Thus, if we wrest the gains from investment or well-paid work from
the investors and workers in question, we take from the productive and transfer to the
unproductive. This takes money that would have produced more and ensures that it will
be used in less productive ways. A large society that undertakes this kind of activity
extensively decrees poverty for itself, in comparison with what it could have done instead in
a freed-up market. And it is the poor, above all, who benefit, relatively speaking, from
commercial activity activ- ity that, if unimpeded, continually drives down prices, continually
finds new employment for available labour, and continually real- locates resources in the way that
does most good for most people, as indicated by the actual choices and preferences of

those people.11

The goal of the judge should not be to make sure each person is equal
rather ensure each person is sufficient
Yuko Hashimoto --ph.d. Japanese. Associate Professor of Economics. June 2005 What Matters is
Absolute Poverty, Not Relative Poverty http://www.cdams.kobe-u.ac.jp/archive/dp05-10.pdf
Therefore, sufficientarianism is an alternative to economic egalitarianism. Sufficientarianism
presents the idea of sufficiency as an alternative to the idea of economic equality. The essence of
sufficientarianism is to show that the idea of economic equality has no intrinsic value. According
to sufficientarianism, when people consider what is important for their own lives, the amount of
goods owned by other people becomes irrelevant. Instead, comparison with the amount of goods
owned by others prevents people from seeking what they consider valuable for themselves. It is
unnecessary to attach moral significance to economic egalitarianism. While Frankfurt enumerates
some reasons for the failure of economic egalitarianism, he indicates that egalitarians do not
actually defend the idea of equality, as indicated by the priority view. In other words, egalitarians
objections are not based on their moral aversion to a person holding a smaller amount of goods as

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compared to other people. In reality, their objection is to the fact that the person owns only a
remarkably small amount of goods.
This naturally gives rise to the following questions. What
does sufficiency imply? What is the standard of sufficiency? Although Frankfurt does not define
the meaning of sufficiency in concrete terms, it does not imply that sufficientarianism is pointless.
Indeed, the meaning of sufficiency can be defined in various ways. However, the essence of
sufficientarianism is to seek what one finds valuable in his/her life and not compare the amount of
goods one owns with that of others; this is crucial to judge sufficiency.

Everything is relativethe goal should not be to carve everyone into the

same statuerather ensure each person is sufficientthis is distinct from
economic egalitarianism
Yuko Hashimoto --ph.d. Japanese. Associate Professor of Economics. June 2005 What Matters is
Absolute Poverty, Not Relative Poverty http://www.cdams.kobe-u.ac.jp/archive/dp05-10.pdf
Irrespective of the definition of sufficiency selected, sufficientarianism cannot justify distribution
to those whose circumstances are above the standard of sufficiency. Therefore, it does not lead
to the implausible conclusion that goods should be distributed to millionaires in a society that
comprises only billionaires and millionaires. Sufficientarianism, which rejects economic
egalitarianism and simultaneously requires distribution to those below the standard of sufficiency,
is consistent with moderate libertarianism or classical liberalism, which rejects distribution aimed
at reducing income disparity and admits the necessity of distribution that guarantees a minimum
standard of living. Indeed, the interpretation of sufficientarianism that I present in this paper
might conflict with the original intention of sufficientarians. As we have seen, I support
sufficientarianism. Despite differences between
sufficientarianism and the priority view, I re-emphasize the fact that they have a common crucial
viewpoint regarding egalitarianism. They share the belief that being worse off than others does
not have moral significance in terms of the ethics of distribution. While the idea of equality that
emphasizes relativity with others is set as a default position in the argument on distribution, both
theories demand criticism of the above assumption. Egalitarians often confuse equality with
priority or sufficiency; however, it is important to bear in mind that the apparent plausibility of
egalitarianism is derived from its humanitarian appeal. The point I wish to emphasize is that
absolute poverty, and not relative poverty, is important. Next, before turning to an examination
of the connection between sufficientarianism and libertarianism, I shall consider the necessity of
highlighting the abuse of egalitarianism.

Egalitarianism fosters never-ending comparison and obligation a

sufficientarian framework should take precedence.
Page 2007 Edward.
Justice Between Generations: Investigating a
Sufficientarian Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April
2007, pgs 3-20.
In contrast to egalitarians and prioritarians, some theorists, such as Harry Frankfurt, hold that
benefits and burdens should be distributed in line with the doctrine of sufficiency. This states
that as many people as possible should have enough (of the currency of justice adopted) to
pursue the aims and aspirations they care about over a whole life; and that this aim has
lexical priority over other ideals of justice (Frankfurt 1987, pp. 2143; 1997, pp. 314).
Attaining what we really care about, for Frankfurt, requires a certain level of well-being, but
once this level is reached there is no further relationship between how well-off a person is and
whether they discover and fulfil what it is that they really care about. Frankfurt holds that,
above the level of sufficiency, it is neither reasonable to seek a higher standard of living nor
expect, as amatter of justice, any additional allocation of some currency of justice to further
improve their prospects. It is important to add that having enough is not the same as living a
tolerable life in the sense that one does not regret ones existence. Rather it means a person
leads a life that contains no substantial dissatisfaction. According to Frankfurt, the flaw in
intrinsic egalitarianism lies in supposing that it is morally important whether one

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person has less than another regardless of how much either of them has (Frankfurt
1987, p. 34). What matters, Frankfurt argues, is not that everyone should have the same but
that each should have enough. If everyone had enough it would be of no moral consequence
whether some had more than others (Frankfurt 1987, p. 21; original emphasis). This does not
mean, however, that egalitarian and prioritarian concerns will always frustrate sufficiency since
each and every person should be helped to the threshold of sufficiency if possible, and those
who can be helped to lead a decent life are often among the worst off in a population. But the
aim of reducing inequality, or of improving the position of the worst off, has no intrinsic value
for sufficientarians.

Moderate sufficentarianism offers a pluralist approach to justice which

maximizes contextual equality
Page 2007
Edward. Justice Between Generations: Investigating a Sufficientarian
Approach. Journal of Global Ethics. Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2007, pgs 3-20.
One way of responding to the problems raised by these two examples would be to construct a
pluralist approach to distributive justice. Pluralism, in this context, means that we would
appeal to contrasting ideals in different contexts (Daniels 1996, p. 208). There are three
possibilities, which I can only sketch here. First, the ideals could apply in different distributive
circumstances. For example, we might give lexical priority to sufficiency when at least some
can be brought up to the threshold, but appeal to equality or priority when all are above, or all
below, the threshold (Crisp 2003, pp. 758ff.). Second, sufficiency might be allocated non-lexical
priority over other values so that large gains in these values will sometimes outweigh lesser
gains in sufficiency. Arneson has usefully labeled this moderate sufficientarianism (Arneson
2006, p. 28). The strength of this view is that it can explain why we should opt for (2) over (1)
since it offers tremendous gains in both equality and priority with no adverse impact
on sufficiency. Similarly, though more controversially, moderate sufficientarians have at least
some reason to opt for (4) over (3) since great benefits arise, in terms of equality and priority, if
we ignore the sufficiency of the few for the prize of giving major benefits to the many. Third, we
might subsume one ideal under another while attributing some degree of intrinsic value to the
subsumed ideal. Sufficientarians generally view inequality as regrettable because of its
consequences, such as the way in which it inhibits economic growth, undermines political
processes, or is a malign influence on cultural life. Yet, there is a more subtle way that
inequality matters. This is that some people might fail to reach the standards of a decent life if
they are continually faced with the discomfiture that many others are far better off. Similarly,
some people might fall below the threshold of sufficiency if they begin to enjoy life less as a
result of identifying with the resentment of others who are worse off (Marmor 2003, pp. 127ff).

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*****PRIVATIZATION*****
**Privatization Good / Government Bad**
So-called welfare rights restrict freedom, rationalize the coercive transfer
of wealth, and destroy charitable feelings, turning the case.
Kelley, Ph.D., Princeton University, 98
(David Kelley, Ph.D, Princeton University, philosopher, author, founder and senior fellow of the Atlas
Society, 98, A Life of Ones Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State, p 151)
We have examined the nature of welfare rights, their history, and the philosophical case for them. We
have examined the arguments for believing in such rights and seen how the many issues they raise
play out in the concrete reality of welfare programs. The conclusion can no longer be resisted: the

concept of welfare rights is invalid. There is no warrant for claiming rights to

food, shelter, and medical care, to income maintenance, child support, and
retirement pensions, at taxpayer expense . Such rights cannot be justified by appeal to
freedom, to benevolence, or to community. They do not expand but curtail freedom that of
program clients as well as of taxpayers. They make charity compulsory, undermining
any genuine benevolence donors might have toward the poor. They replace the
voluntary bonds of a society of contract with the coercive power of the state,
undermining genuine community . The concept does not provide a valid rationale for the
welfare state; it provides a mere rationalization for the coercive transfer of wealth . If we
want a system based on genuine rights, one that promotes genuine human welfare, we should
privatize or simply terminate the government programs. In place of "social
insurance," the market can provide real and affordable insurance to protect against
the risk of illness, accidents, disability, and unemployment. And for retirement, as we saw
in the last chapter, private savings instruments provide a much better return than most
people can expect from Social Security. At the very least, people should be allowed to opt out
of the social insurance programs, forgoing the benefits to which they would otherwise be entitled in
exchange for exemption from payroll taxes. A number of plans have been put forward to allow opting
out without harming the interests of current retirees.

Health care policies are coercive.

Bissell, The Objectivist Center, No Date
(Andrew Bissell, The Objectivist Center, No Date, Health
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/ct-1297-Right_To_Health_Care.aspx)

Care

Is

it

right?

First, it is very important not to conflate the right to life with a right to health care . The right to life is
central to the Objectivist ethics and politics, and health care is certainly essential to maintaining ones
life. However, as Rand puts it: A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other
men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by ones own effort. ("Mans Rights", The
Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 113-114) In this sense, an apt comparison can be drawn to the right of free
speech; your right to speak your mind does not create some obligation on the part of others to support
that expression, financially or otherwise. Ayn Rand unmasks the fallacy at the root of the right to
health care and all other such economic rights: A single question would make the issue clear: At
whose expense? ("Mans Rights", The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 113) Health care doesnt simply grow on

trees; if it is to be made a right for some, the means to provide that right must be confiscated from others.
Health care exists because of the efforts of doctors, nurses, medical technicians, and even the engineers who
design and build lifesaving machines. There are really only a few ways, then, that it can be provided . These
medical personnel can offer their services as part of a mutual exchange of benefit for benefit, in a
system of free, market exchange. Or, they can be forced to provide these services at the point of a

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the government can arrogate to itself the title of the sole health care
provider, funding its operations through forced taxation. The problems with forcing doctors to treat patients
are obviousfirst, of course, it requires wanton violation of their rights, and represents government
enforcement of the principle that a doctors life is not his own, but instead belongs to the state or the
community. And no one will want to enter the medical profession when the reward for years of careful
gun, as in the movie John Q. Or,

schooling and study is not fair remuneration, but rather, patients who feel entitled to ones efforts, and
a government that enslaves the very minds upon which patients lives depend.

Free health care means slavery.

Brown, Staff Writer, 04
(John Brown, Staff Writer, The Daily Beacon, Senior in Political Science, 9/28/04,
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1229567/posts)
A "right" is the ability and autonomy to perform a sovereign action. In a free society
founded on the ideal of liberty, an individual has an absolute ability to perform such an
action - so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of another individual. Health care
is not speech: In order for you to exercise a theoretical "right" to health care, you must
infringe on someone else's rights. If you have a "right" to health care, then it means you

must also have the right to coerce doctors into treating you, to coerce drug
companies into producing medicine and to coerce other citizens into footing your
medical bill. This is Orwellian. "Freedom" for you cannot result in slavery for others . Thus
the concept of a "right" to health care is an oxymoron: It involves tak[es] away the rights of
other individuals.
Surely, though, we can agree that doctors, the pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies earn
excessive profits, you say. Well, that depends on what your definition of "excessive" is. Doctors literally
hold the lives of their patients in their hands. How much is someone who saves lives everyday worth?
The same is true of pharmaceutical companies. While it has become fashionable to condemn their
profits, the fact is that these profits fund medical research, which leads to more medicines being
produced, and, consequently, more lives saved. Insurance companies spread the cost of health care

among many people who might not otherwise be able to afford it, and thus make health care readily
available for many.
The state is dehumanizing because of bureaucracy and the ability to make
war.
Stephens, software engineer, 04
(Robert L. Stephens, software engineer, 6/2/04,
http://robertlstephens.com/essays/essay_frame.php?essayroot=stephensrobert-l/&essayfile=002BadInfluence.html)
Dehumanization, of a sort, is yet one more inevitable consequence of the sheer size and
structure of the modern state. There is simply no way for the agents of an organization claiming
to "serve" hundreds of thousands (or hundreds of millions!) of people to know anything about
the vast majority of those individuals beyond some disembodied entries on a tax return, or an
arbitrary accounting convenience like a Social Security number. To borrow a phrase often used
by critics of large private enterprises, the modern state is "beyond human scale."

Another, more insidious, form of dehumanization is inseparable from the

political process that is the very essence of the state. To see this, let's first consider
the most extreme act of the state: war. In order to break down people's natural
resistance to the killing of other human beings, states have historically made
dehumanization of the enemy one of the major components of their war
propaganda. With the enemy reduced to less-than-human status, it's easier to justify the use
of lethal force against him.

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The government is inherently dehumanizing because it seeks to control

people.
Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law School, 06
(Steven R. Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law School, Criminal Law, Fall 06, Dartmouth Law Journal,
Dehumanization and Recreation: A Lacanian Interpretation of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, pp.
120-121, http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=steven_morrison)
At this point, we have discussed how the law denies a persons humanity . However, it creates
something new in its place, since "[a]t each instant of its intervention, this law creates
something new. Every situation is transformed by its intervention." The re-creation of an
individual depends on what will best eliminate discordant ideas, since "[a] discordant
statement [is] unknown in law." This may be seen as Lacans way of saying `that the law as a

master will do what it must to preserve its power, that is, to preserve "the existing relations of
production and the moral and social order ." Therefore, if society views minorities as criminal,
then the PSG will shape itself to fulfill that prophesy. If judges are seen as abusive of their
discretion in judging, then the FSG will create judges that are "mere automatons, permitted
only to apply a mathematical formula." lf the Sentencing Commission becomes sympathetic
toward the idea of downward departures and the rigid strictures of PROTECT, then Congress
will create a Commission that becomes a mere tool for a tough-on-crime policy of sentence
increases. The master wants uniformity, predictability, and severity, and will censor and recreate

others in its drive to achieve these goals.

Government is stripping doctors rights through coercive action
Jonathan, M.D. Rosman, 2002 psychiatrist in private practice in Pasadena, is
a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, It's My Life! A Doctor Has a Right
to His Own Life, February 20 2002
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?
page=NewsArticle&id=5316&news_iv_ctrl=1021] -=Max Rispoli=th

Every doctor, like individuals in other jobs, has a right to work for himself and for his
own enjoyment, and to make a ton of money at it if he can. As individuals, doctors
have a right to offer their patients treatment according to their best judgment, and to
charge such fees as they judge their expertise to be worth. Conversely, patients have
the right to accept or reject our advice and services, and to shop around for the best
deals they can get. Having the right to your life does not guarantee health or medical
treatment at the doctors' expense, but it does guarantee that every individual has the
freedom to seek whatever treatment he wishes, according to his own judgment and
his own means. Individual rights means the freedom to act within one's means; it
does not mean an entitlement to the goods and services provided by others. However,
not only have American doctors been stripped of their professional freedom by all the various oversight
agencies (which include licensing boards, the Health Care Financing Administration, managed care
companies, peer review committees and more), but--more important--they have also been morally
disarmed. Our intellectuals have taught doctors that need comes before ability, and that healthy and
rich doctors have a duty to support sick and poor patients. They have taught doctors that the
consumers of medical services (patients) are morally superior to the providers of medical services
(doctors), just because the consumers are in need. Bureaucrats have eagerly latched on to this
altruistic idea, and have erected a maze of welfare laws and regulations to satisfy the needs of the
poor and the sick, and to "protect" them from "greedy" doctors. Thanks to these controls, it has
become very difficult for doctors to think or to act freely on their own judgment. And it is the best
doctors, the most dedicated and those least ready to relinquish their independent judgment, who have
been the first to leave the practice of medicine when doctors' rights were trampled on. Who will
ultimately be left if this trend continues? To quote Dr. Hendricks in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged,
"Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in

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the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it-and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't." To save American medicine, American doctors need to
be saved from altruism. To accomplish this, doctors must vigorously challenge the invalid notion of a
"right" to health care. Nobody has a right to an antibiotic made by someone else, just as he does not
have a right to someone else's car. Nobody has a right to have his gallbladder removed, just as he does
not have a right to have his toilet fixed by a plumber . No one has a right to demand that a doctor treat

him, but doctors do have rights, just as do auto workers and plumbers, to practice their profession (or trade)
free from coercion.
The welfare state is flawed it looks only at the outcomes rather than the
process which is immoral because looking at outcomes only assumes that
the poor have been cheated not that they have tried and failed
Walter E. Williams (John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chairman of the
Economics Department at George Mason University) January 15, 1996. THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE
MARKETS: MORALITY VS. EFFICIENCY. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n2-3-3.html
Justice: Process vs. Results
At the heart of most interventionist policy is a vision of justice. Most often this vision evaluates the
presence of justice by looking at results. Social justice has considerable appeal and as such is used as
justification for interventionist statism. There are several criticisms of the concept of social justice that
Hayek has answered well, but defenders of personal liberty must make a greater effort to demystify
the term and show that justice or fairness cannot be determined by examining results. The results
people often turn to in order to determine the presence or absence of justice are educational and
occupational status, income, life expectancy, and other socioeconomic factors. But justice or fairness
cannot be determined by results. It is a process question. Consider, for example, that three individuals
play a regular game of poker. The typical game outcome is: individual A wins 75 percent of the time,
while individuals B and C win 15 percent and 10 percent of the time, respectively. By knowing the
game's result, nothing unambiguous can be said about whether there has been "poker justice.''
Individual A's disproportionate winnings are consistent with his being an astute player, clever cheater,
or just plain lucky. The only way one can determine whether there has been poker justice is to examine
the game's process. Process questions would include: Did the players play voluntarily? Were the poker
rules neutral and unbiasedly applied? Was the game played without cheating? If the process were just,
affirmative answers would be given to those three questions and there would be poker justice
irrespective of the outcome. Thus, justice is really a process issue. The most popular justification for
the interventionist state is to create or ensure fairness and justice in the distribution of income.
Considerable confusion, obfuscation, and demagoguery regarding the sources of income provide
statists with copious quantities of ammunition to justify their redistributionist agenda. Income is not
distributed. In a free society, income is earned. People serving one another through the provision of
goods and services generate income. We serve our fellow man in myriad ways. We bag his groceries,
teach his children, entertain him, and heal his wounds. By doing so, we receive "certificates of
performance.'' In the United States, we call these certificates dollars. Elsewhere they are called pesos,
francs, marks, yen, and pounds. Those certificates stand as evidence (proof) of our service. The more
valuable our service to our fellow man (as he determines), the greater the number of certificates of
performance we receive and hence the greater our claim on goods and services. That free-market
process promotes a moral discipline that says: Unless we are able and willing to serve our fellow man,
we shall have no claim on what he produces. Contrast that moral discipline to the immorality of the
welfare state. In effect the welfare state says: You do not have to serve your fellow man; through
intimidation, threats, and coercion, we will take what he produces and give it to you. The vision that
sees income as being "distributed'' implies a different scenario for the sources of income never made
explicit. The vision that sees income as being distributed differs little from asserting that out there is a
dealer of dollars. It naturally leads to the conclusion that if some people have fewer dollars than others,
the dollar dealer is unfair; he is a racist, sexist, or a multi-nationalist. Therefore, justice and fairness
require a re-dealing (income redistribution) of dollars. That way the ill-gotten gains of the few are
returned to their "rightful'' owners. That vision is the essence of the results-oriented view of justice
underpinning the welfare state. People who criticize the existing distribution of income as being unfair

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and demand government redistribution are really criticizing the process whereby income is earned.
Their bottom line is that millions of individual decision makers did not do the right thing. Consider the
wealth of billionaire Bill Gates, the founder of MicroSoft. Gates earned billions because millions of
individuals voluntarily spent their money on what they wanted--his products. For someone to say that
Gates's income is unfair is the same as saying that the decisions of millions of consumers are wrong.
To argue that Gates's income should be forcibly taken and given to others is to say that somehow third
parties have a right to preempt voluntary decisions made by millions of traders. When sources of
income are viewed more realistically, we reach the conclusion that low income, for the most part, is a
result of people not having sufficient capacity to serve their fellow man well rather than being victims
of an unfair process. Low-income people simply do not have the skills to produce and do things their
fellow man highly values. Seldom do we find poor highly productive individuals or nations. Those who
have low incomes tend to have low skills and education and hence low productive capacity. Our
challenge is to make those people (nations) more productive. Another explanation of low income is
that the rules of the game have been rigged. That is, people do have an ability to provide goods and
services valued by their fellow man but are restricted from doing so. Among those rules are minimum
wage laws, occupational and business licensure laws and regulations, and government-sponsored
monopolies. Hence, another argument for free-market capitalism is that it is good for low-income, lowskilled people.

Capitalism is the best system to foster freedom, which is a moral necessity

David Boaz (executive vice president to the Cato Institute) 1997: Editorial: Pro-Choice.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-19n4-2.html
Kristol and Wolfson are struggling, not just against the principles on which America was founded, but
against the modern world. It is capitalism that has given us moderns so many choices. Capitalism is the
economic system of free people; it is what happens when you let people alone. The virtues that
capitalism rewards--prudence, discipline, initiative, self-reliance, new ideas--and the affluence it
creates tend to push people in the direction of confidence in their own abilities, skepticism about
organized authority, and a desire to manage their own affairs in all realms of life. That's why capitalism
is not in the long run compatible with political repression or governmental restrictions on freedom.
Freedom is also necessary for the development of strong moral character. Surely Kristol and Wolfson
don't want to undermine the bourgeois virtues, but the effect of restricting choice is to eliminate the
incentive and the opportunity for people to make good choices and develop good habits. People do not
develop prudence, self-reliance, thrift, and temperance when their choices are imposed by force.
Welfare-state liberals undermine moral character when they subsidize indulgence in destructive
choices. Big-government conservatives undermine character when they deny people the right to shape
their own characters through their choices.

Limited government is key to prevent tyranny, which killed more people

than both World Wars combined the plan provides positive rights, or
entitlements that causally fail to protect the right to life
Erich Weede (Professor of Sociology at the University of Bonn) Winter 2008: Human Rights, Limited

Government, and Capitalism. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj28n1/cj28n1-3.pdf

Negative rights serve to protect the individual, his liberty, and his property from coercion and violence.
Negative rights prevent others from undertaking some types of actions, but they do not oblige others
to help one. In order to safeguard negative rights government has to be limited. The link between
negative rights and limited government was already well understood long before the term human
rights gained currency. In the late 17th century, Locke ([1690] 2003: 161, 189) wrote: The supreme
power cannot take from any man part of his property without his own consent: for the preservation of
property being the end of government . . . wherever the power, that is put in any hands for the
government of the people, and the preservation of their properties, is applied to other ends, and made
use of to impoverish, harass, or subdue them into arbitrary and irregular commands of those that have
it; there it presently becomes tyranny, whether those that thus use it are one or many.
The right to life certainly is a fundamental human right. It is a negative right since it only requires that
others do not kill one. In this context, one should recall that about 169 million people have been killed
by states or their governments in the 20th century (Rummel 1994). Communists and National Socialists
established the most murderous regimes. Among the victims of communism, there are tens of millions

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of deaths from starvation after the coerced collectivization of agriculture in Stalins Soviet Union or
Maos China. Although the 20th century suffered two world wars and other bloody wars, fewer people
died on the battlefield or because of bombing campaigns than have been murdered or starved to death
by their own governments. Whoever wants to protect human rights should therefore first of all focus on
the necessity of protecting people from the state and its abuses of power.
Positive Rights
Positive rights or entitlements commit the state and its officials to undertake certain types of action
for example, to guarantee certain minimal standards of material well-being. The American Bill of Rights
(1789) is limited to negative or protective rights, while the United Nations General Declaration of
Human Rights (1948) and the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000) encompass both
protective rights and entitlements.1 The trend from short lists of negative rights to long lists of
negative and positive rights has been accompanied by a rapid and sustained increase in public
spending in the West (Tanzi and Schuknecht 2000).
Classical liberals, in contrast to people called liberals in 20th century America and social democrats
in Europe, demanded the primacy of individual liberty and thereby of protective rights and limited
government. Providing people with entitlements forces the state to curtail the negative rights and
liberties of individuals. In order to fund entitlements the state has to tax (i.e., to take coercively from)
some people in order to provide for others. Entitlements have to rest on coercion and redistribution
that is, on a greater restriction of negative rights or individual liberty than would otherwise be
necessary. As the balance of achievements and victims of communism demonstrates, the attempt to
provide entitlements did not prevent tens of millions of deaths from starvation. Actually, the attempt to
provide more than negative rights resulted in something less: the lack of respect of negative and
positive rights. As I shall argue, this association between the attempt to guarantee entitlements by a
monopoly of coercion and central planning is causally related to the repeated failure to protect even
the right to life.

Free markets are inherently non-violent because they rely on voluntary

associations whereas governments force and compel, leading to violence.
Branden, psychotherapist, author, teacher, 95
(Nathaniel, psychotherapist, author, teacher, January 1995, Individualism
and the Free Society, Part 2, http://www.fff.org/freedom/0195d.asp)
Whatever the differences in their specific programs, all the enemies of the free market
economy-communists, socialists, fascists, welfare statists- are unanimous in their belief that

they have a right to dispose of the lives, property, and future of others, that private
ownership of the means of production is a selfish evil , that the more a person has achieved, the greater is his or her
debt to those who have not achieved it, that men and women can be compelled to go on producing under any terms or conditions their rulers decree, that freedom is a
luxury that may have been permissible in a primitive economy, but for the running of giant industries, electronic factories, and complex sciences, nothing less than slave
labor will do. Whether they propose to take over the economy outright, in the manner of communists and socialists, or to maintain the pretense of private property while
dictating prices, wages, production, and distribution, in the manner of fascists and welfare statists, it is the gun, it is the rule of physical force that they consider "kind," they

Since the moral justification offered for the rule of force is

humankind's need of the things that persons of ability produce, it follows (in the
collectivist's system of thought) that the greater an individual's productive ability, the
greater are the penalties he or she must endure, in the form of controls, regulations,
expropriations. Consider, for example, the principle of the progressive income tax: those who produce the most are penalized accordingly; those who
who consider the free market "cruel."

produce nothing receive a subsidy, in the form of relief payments. Or consider the enthusiastic advocacy of socialized medicine. What is the justification offered for placing
the practice of medicine under government control? The importance of the services that physicians perform-the urgency of their patients' need. Physicians are to be
penalized precisely because they have so great a contribution to make to human welfare; thus is virtue turned into a liability. In denying human beings freedom of thought
and action, statists and collectivist systems are anti-self-esteem by their very nature. Self-confident, self-respecting men and women are unlikely to accept the premise that
they exist for the sake of others

A free society cannot be maintained without an ethics of rational

self-interest.

Neither can it be maintained except by men and women who have achieved a healthy level of self-esteem. And a healthy level of self-esteem
cannot be maintained without a willingness to assert-and, if necessary, fight for-our right to exist. It is on this point that issues of psychology, ethics, and politics converge.
If I may allow myself a brief aside, one might imagine that psychologists, social scientists, and philosophers who speak enthusiastically and reverently about freedom, selfresponsibility, autonomy, the beauty of self-regulating systems, and the power of synergy (the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of the parts taken
separately) would naturally be champions of noncoercion. More often than not, as I have already indicated, just the opposite is true. They tend to be among the most
It should be recognized that a
defining feature of a synergistic society is that participation in it is voluntary. If people
do not choose to engage in a given cooperative activity, the implication is that they
do not perceive that activity to be helpful , either for themselves or for others. Efforts to
vociferous in crying for the coercive apparatus of government to further their particular ideals. To quote Waterman once again:

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promote social cooperation within a synergistic society may appropriately include such techniques as
education, persuasion, and negotiation. However, the use of political force to compel
cooperation represents the abandonment of the synergistic ideal. A free society cannot
automatically guarantee the mental or emotional well-being of all its members. Freedom from

external coercion is not a sufficient condition of our optimal fulfillment, but it is a

necessary one. The great virtue of capitalism-laissez-faire capitalism, as contrasted
not only with the more extreme forms of statism but also with the mixed economy we
have today-is that it is the one system whose defining principle is precisely this
barring of physical coercion from human relationships . No other political system pays even
lip service to this principle

Turn aff/neg creates dependence which decreases incentives to work

tanks the economy
Jrg Guido Hlsmann (professor of economics at the University of Angers in France) 2008: The
Political Economy of Moral Hazard
A central occupation of economists is to analyze the nature, causes, and effects of incentives the
circumstances that are held to motivate human action. Economists agree on the positive role that
"good" incentives play to increase production. They also agree that "perverse" incentives have an
opposite impact. One of these perverse incentives is called moral hazard, the subject of our present
essay. Moral hazard is the incentive of a person A to use more resources than he otherwise would have
used, because he knows, or believes he knows, that someone else B will provide some or all of these
resources. The important point is that this occurs against B's will and that B is unable to sanction this
expropriation immediately. The mere incentive to rely on resources provided by others is not per se
problematic. For example, the announcement of a future inheritance might prompt the prospective heir
to spend more in the present than he would otherwise have spent. In such cases we would not speak of
moral hazard. A genuine moral-hazard problem appears however if A has the possibility to use B's
resources against B's will and if he knows this. Laymen would call A's incentives a "temptation to steal"
or a "temptation to act irresponsibly." Economists, ever weary of moralizing, have espoused the
technocratic expression "moral hazard." Thus the essential feature of moral hazard is that it incites
some people A to expropriate other people B. The B-people in turn, if they realize the presence of such
a moral hazard, have an incentive to react against this possible expropriation. They make other choices
than those that they would consider to be best if there were no moral hazard. Many economists have
therefore concluded that moral hazard entails market failures; it brings about a different allocation
of resources than the one that would exist in the absence of moral hazard. Conventional economic
theory explains moral hazard as a consequence of the fact that market participants are unequally well
informed about economic reality. In other words, moral hazard results from "asymmetries of
information" and the theory of moral hazard is therefore considered to be a part of the economics of
information.

Taking wealth forcefully kills charitable desires.

Rothbard, economist, Austrian School, 04
(Murray Rothbard, economist, Austrian School, 04, Welfare and the Images
of Charity, p 465)
The mistake, they say, is to convert moral pressure into compulsion to force people to do
what everyone agrees it would be morally desirable for them to do. Murray Rothbards view is
typical. He recognizes that charity is a good thing, but writes, [I]t makes all the difference in
the world whether the aid is given voluntarily or is stolen by force. [I]t is hardly charity to take
wealth by force and hand it over to someone else. Indeed this is the direct opposite of charity,
which can only be an unbought, voluntary act of grace. Compulsory confiscation can only
deaden charitable desires completely, as the wealthier grumble that there is no point in giving
to charity when the state has already taken on the task. This is another illustration of the truth
that men can become more moral only through rational persuasion, not through violence,

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which will, in fact, have the opposite effect}

The alternative results in beneficial forms of capitalism. Only altruism

results in the dangerous forms of capitalism that their authors assume.
More, founder of Extropy Institute, 86
(Max More, founder of Extropy Institute, 1986, THE IMPORTANCE OF SELFISHNESS, THE DANGERS OF
ALTRUISM, http://www.thedegree.org/philn004.pdf)
Finally, it would be fitting to consider the matter of competition in the context of the pursuit of rational
self-interest. Many people say that capitalism is an entirely competitive economic
system. They say that competition , while it serves a number of useful purposes, breeds

hostility, violence, and unhappiness. The first assertion is false and the second may or
may not be true depending on how it is interpreted. Objectivists are principled moral
agents, not materialists and can therefore happily join in by condemning the rat race. The first
point to note is that capitalism is both cooperative and competitive. Firms compete within
a market but firms also cooperate every time they buy and sell raw materials, semifinished goods, etc., from each other. Individuals within a firm must cooperate to get
their jobs done. Every time anyone buys anything on the free market, cooperation is
occurring; both parties get together to make a mutually beneficial exchange. On the other hand, in a
socialist economy you are told what to produce and have little or no choice as to what
you consume. Where competition exists in a free market it promotes progress and benefits everyone.
In a socialist system, competition is for positions of coercive power. Within a free
market or mixed economy such as ours more than one type of competition is possible.
One can compete in a friendly, relaxed way , always bearing in mind ones values and rational
self-interest. Or one can madly, obsessively, irrationally compete for ends set by other people
whether society, the company, the government, or parents. This second type of competition is truly a
rat race, a scrambling for advancement where ones self-interest and values are lost sight of. It is

not competition between those pursuing their rational self-interest that is bad. It is
competition between those trying to fulfill their irrational whims (perhaps for wealth or
fame), or to conform to standards set by others. It is common for people to wear themselves down
developing heart disease, ulcers, and hypertension, to become heavy drinkers, insomniacs, or
pillpoppers, with no regard for their happiness. Capitalism does not demand this , and though it
does not prevent it (only force, with all its consequences, can do that), it does function better without it.
Studies have shown that most successful managers in business are generally pleasant,
non-compulsive individuals who are a pleasure to work for . It is altruism which
promotes overly strenuous (and misguided) effort since the individual does not

matter only the good of the company/government/ society/ones parents

matters. The rationally self-interested person has a great deal of self-esteem. The altruist lacks
self-esteem. And it is lack of self-esteem that leads to neurotic, inappropriately
competitive behaviour since the esteem of other people must be earned at all cost to
fill the gap. (See Brandens The Psychology of Self-Esteem for the importance of this factor.) If one
has no self-worth one must compete hard to prove oneself to others. Rational people do not need to
win, since that implies that you cant be happy without defeating someone. There is no need to win. To
play the game of life according to ones values, in pursuit of ones happiness, ones self-interest, is all
that matters.

Capitalism solves war economic interdependencies

Erich Weede (Professor of Sociology at the University of Bonn) Winter 2008: Human Rights, Limited
Government, and Capitalism. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj28n1/cj28n1-3.pdf
Capitalist development contributes not only to prosperity but also to reducing the risk of war. From a
human rights perspective, the avoidance of war is a paramount concern because the fog of war has

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frequently been used as a cover for human rights abuses and war crimes (Apodaca 2001; HarrelsonStephens and Callaway 2001; Richards, Gelleny, and Sacko 2001).8 Econometric studies (Gartzke 2005,
2007; Russett and Oneal 2001; Weede 2005) are compatible with the following causal relationships
between economic freedom, prosperity, and peace: Whether assessed by financial market openness,
trade, or property rights, economic freedom contributes to peace. The more trade there is between two
states or the more they are economically interdependent, the less likely military conflict between them
becomes.
In addition to this direct effect of economic freedom on the avoidance of war, there is an indirect effect
via prosperity and democracy that is well documented (Lipset 1994; Russett and Oneal 2001; Weede
2005). The freer an economy is, the more prosperous it is likely to be. The more prosperous a country
is, the more likely it is to be a democracy.9 Military conflict between democracies is extremely unlikely.
Economic freedom and free tradethat is, the global expansion of capitalism and the corresponding
catch-up opportunities for poor countriesconstitute the beginning of the causal chain leading to
democracy and peace, at least to peace among prosperous or capitalist democracies. Economic
freedom and free trade also exert a direct pacifying impact. Therefore, it is preferable to call this set of
pacifying conditions the capitalist (or market-liberal) peace rather than the democratic peace.

Economically free countries are less likely to go to war put away your
democracy add-ons because the alt. solves better
Erik Gartzke (Associate Professor of Political Science PhD, University of Iowa) 2005: Future Depends
on Capitalizing on Capitalist Peace
With terrorism achieving "global reach" and conflict raging in Africa and the Middle East, you may have
missed a startling fact - we are living in remarkably peaceable times.
For six decades, developed nations have not fought each other. France and the United States may
chafe, but the resulting conflict pitted french fries against "freedom fries," rather than French soldiers
against U.S. "freedom fighters." Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac had a nasty spat over the EU, but the
English aren't going to storm Calais any time soon.
The present peace is unusual. Historically, powerful nations are the most war prone. The conventional
wisdom is that democracy fosters peace but this claim fails scrutiny. It is based on statistical studies
that show democracies typically don't fight other democracies.
Yet, the same studies show that democratic nations go to war about as much as other nations overall.
And more recent research makes clear that only the affluent democracies are less likely to fight each
other. Poor democracies behave much like non-democracies when it comes to war and lesser forms of
conflict.
A more powerful explanation is emerging from newer, and older, empirical research - the "capitalist
peace." As predicted by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Norman Angell and others, nations with high levels
of economic freedom not only fight each other less, they go to war less often, period. Economic freedom
is a measure of the depth of free market institutions or, put another way, of capitalism.
The "democratic peace" is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom.
Democracy and economic freedom typically co-exist. Thus, if economic freedom causes peace, then
statistically democracy will also appear to cause peace.
When democracy and economic freedom are both included in a statistical model, the results reveal that
economic freedom is considerably more potent in encouraging peace than democracy, 50 times more
potent, in fact, according to my own research. Economic freedom is highly statistically significant (at the
one-per-cent level). Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels
of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels.
But, why would free markets cause peace? Capitalism is not only an immense generator of prosperity; it
is also a revolutionary source of economic, social and political change. Wealth no longer arises primarily
through land or control of natural resources.

The free market is a moral necessity

Walter E. Williams (John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chairman of the
Economics Department at George Mason University) January 15, 1996. THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE
MARKETS: MORALITY VS. EFFICIENCY. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n2-3-3.html
Conclusion

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The struggle to extend and preserve free markets must have as its primary focus the moral argument.
State interventionists stand naked before well-thought-out moral arguments for private ownership of
property, voluntary exchange, and the parity of markets. People readily understand moral arguments
on a private basis--for example, one person does not have the right to use force against another to
serve his own purposes. However, people often see government redistribution as an acceptable use of
force. In a democratic welfare state that coercion is given an aura of legitimacy. The challenge is to
convince people that a majority vote does not establish morality and that free markets are morally
superior to other forms of human organization.

Government coercion destroys freedom the free market system is the

highest moral ground and will solve all other problems
James A. Dorn (vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute and
professor of economics at Towson University in
Maryland) 2005: Why Freedom Matters.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/dorn-080105.pdf
The future of civilization depends on preserving and spreading freedom. As a moral principle, freedom
means we ought to respect private property rights, broadly understood as the rights to life, liberty, and
property. As a practical matter, when private property rights are protected by law, individuals will be
free to trade for mutual gain and be held responsible for their behavior. Social and economic
coordinationor what F. A. Hayek called spontaneous orderemerges from the voluntary decisions of
millions of free people under limited government and the rule of law. Those nations that have failed to
adopt freedom as a first principle have also failed to realize the benefits of freedom. They have ignored
the great liberal idea, as articulated in The Law by Frdric Bastiat in the mid-nineteenth century, that
the solution of the social problem lies in liberty. By social problem Bastiat meant the problem of
coordination that confronts every societythat is, the problem of satisfying peoples wants for goods
and services without central planning. The beauty of the market system, based on private property
rights and freedom of contract, is that it allows individuals to continuously adjust to new information
about wants, resources, and technology, and to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges. Economic
freedom increases the range of choices and thus the wealth of nations. Those countries with greater
economic freedom have higher standards of living than those with less freedom (figure 1). Moreover,
countries that have liberalized more quicklyas measured by the index of economic freedomhave
tended to grow faster than countries that have failed to liberalize or that have liberalized more slowly
(figure 2). Economists James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, the authors of the Fraser Institutes annual
Economic Freedom of the World, find that long term differences in economic freedom explain
approximately two-thirds of the variation in cross-country per capita GDP. It is no secret that countries
that have opened to the forces of international trade and have restrained the growth of government
have prospered, while those countries that have limited the scope of the market have stagnated. Hong
Kongs consistent adherence to market-liberal principles has resulted in long-run prosperity and the
worlds freest economy since 1970. In its 2005 Index of Economic Freedom, the Heritage Foundation
and the Wall Street Journal once again ranked Hong Kong number one. On hearing the good news,
Financial Secretary Henry Tang remarked,I am pleased virtues we have been upholding to keep Hong
Kong flourishing as a free market economy have once again been reaffirmed by the international
community. Those virtues include credibility and reliability, prudence and thrift, entrepreneurial
alertness, personal responsibility, respect for others, and tolerance. They are fostered by private
property rights, the rule of law, freedom of contract, open trade, low tax rates, and limited government .
Nations that have not followed the virtues of Hong Kong have not reaped the long-run benefits of
economic freedom. North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iraq, and Haiti are but a few examples. The lesson is that
the virtues of the market require constant practice if they are to survive and flourish. Government
policy must be market-friendly and transparent; it cannot be muddled. Markets discount future effects
of current policy changes. If those changes are in the direction of greater economic freedom, they will
be immediately rewarded and wealth created. Illiberal trade policies, higher tax rates, increased
government spending, erratic monetary policy, and wage-price controls undermine private property
rights, send negative signals to the global capital markets, and destroy the wealth of nations. The
failure of central planning in the Soviet Union and China has moved those countries in the direction of
greater economic freedom, but the ghost of communism still haunts Russia, while the Chinese

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Communist Party has yet to abandon its monopoly on power. Leaders of emerging market economies
need to recognize that economic freedom is an important component of personal freedom, that freemarket prices and profits provide useful information and incentives to allocate resources to where
consumers (not politicians or planners) deem them most valuable, and that markets extend the range
of choice and increase human welfare. Most important, leaders must understand that ultimately
economic liberalization requires limited government and constitutionally protected rights. Emerging
market economies, especially in Asia, have discovered the magic of the market; they have also found
that chaos emerges when the institutional infrastructure necessary for free markets is weakened by
excessive government. When politics trumps markets, coercion and corruption follow. The Ethical
Basis the ethical basis of the market system is often overlooked, but not by those like Zhang
Shuguang, an economist at the Unirule Institute in Beijing, who were deprived of their economic
liberties under central planning. He compares the coercive nature of planning with the voluntary nature
of the market and concludes: In the market system . . . the fundamental logic is free choice and equal
status of individuals. The corresponding ethics . . . is mutual respect, mutual benefit, and mutual
credit.1 The moral justification for individual freedom is selfevident. In Ethics for the New Millennium,
the Dalai Lama wrote:We all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering. . . . Ethical conduct is not
something we engage in because it is somehow right in itself but because, like ourselves, all others
desire to be happy and to avoid suffering. Given that this is a natural disposition, shared by all, it follows
that each individual has a right to pursue this goal. Freedom without rules is an illusion. The famous
Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote in his classic text, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind: People, especially
young people, think that freedom is to do just what they want. . . . But it is absolutely necessary . . . to
have some rules. . . . As long as you have rules, you have a chance for freedom. The rules necessary
for a market-liberal order are rules to protect the private sphere so individuals can pursue their selfinterest while respecting the equal rights of others. Without clear rules to limit the use of force to the
protection of persons and property, freedom and justice will sufferand economic development,
properly understood, will cease. In 1740 the great liberal David Hume wrote that the peace and
security of human society entirely depend [on adherence to] the three fundamental laws of nature, that
of the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises (A
Treatise of Human Nature). His legacy of liberty should not be forgotten. Development and Freedom
in Economic Analysis and Policy in Underdeveloped Countries, the late Peter (Lord) Bauer argued that
economic development and freedom are inseparable: I regard the extension of the range of choice,
that is, an increase in the range of effective alternatives open to people, as the principal objective and
criterion of economic development. Economists have found that countries with secure private property
rights create more wealth (as measured by real GDP per capita) than countries in which property is not
protected by law. Trade liberalization is vital to the process of development. Voluntary international
exchange widens consumers range of effective choices and lowers the risk of conflict. There is a saying
in China: Wu wei ze wu shu bu weiIf no unnatural control, then there is nothing you cannot do. In
the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu advocates the principle of nonintervention (wu wei) as the ideal way of ruling.
The wise ruler says,I take no action and the people of themselves are transformed. I engage in no
activity and the people of themselves become prosperous. 2 To take no action does not mean to do
nothing, but rather, as Chinese scholar Derk Bodde has noted, to refrain from those actions that are
forced, artificial, and unspontaneous.3 A natural order is one consistent with free markets and free
people; it is Adam Smiths simple system of natural liberty.As former Czech President Vclav Havel so
elegantly stated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the free-market economy is the only natural
economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the
only one that reflects the nature of life itself.4 Leaders in the West as well as the East should keep the
following five lessons in the forefront of their minds as they contemplate future policy decisions: (1)
private property, freedom, and justice are inseparable; (2) justice requires limiting government to the
protection of persons and property; (3) minimizing the use of force to defend life, liberty, and property
will maximize freedom and create a spontaneous market-liberal order; (4) private free markets are not
only moral, they create wealth by providing incentives to discover new ways of doing things and
increase the range of alternatives; and (5) governments rule best when they follow the rule of law and
the principle of noninterference.

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Government power inevitably leads to war and mass genocide limiting the
power of the government and fostering individual freedom solves
Rudolph Joseph Rummel (professor emeritus of political science at the
University of Hawaii) 1994: Power, Genocide, and Mass Murder. Journalof
Peace Research 31 (1): 110
Now for the overview. The principle conclusion emerging from previous work on the causes of war
and this project is that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely. The more power a government
has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will
make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power
of governments, the more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others
and commit democide.8 At the extremes of power, totalitarian communist governments murder
their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to
execute even serial murderers. As listed in Table 1 , this century's megamurderers--those states
killing in cold blood, aside from warfare, 1,000,000 or more men, women, and children--have
murdered over 151,000,000 people, almost four times the almost 38,500,000 battle-dead for all
this century's international and civil wars up to 1987. The most absolute Power, that is the
communist U.S.S.R., China and preceding Mao guerrillas, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Vietnam, and
Yugoslavia, as well as Nazi Germany, account for near 128,000,000 of them, or 84 percent. No one of
the remaining megamurderers, which include the regimes of Pakistan, 9 wartime Japan, Nationalist China, Cambodia,
communist Vietnam, post-War II Poland, 10 and communist Yugoslavia, were democratic when it committed its democide.
Then there are the kilomurderers, or those states that have killed innocents by the tens or hundreds of thousands, the top
five of which were the China Warlords (1917-1949), Atatrk's Turkey (1919-1923), the United Kingdom (primarily due to the
1914-1919 food blockade of the Central Powers and Levant in and after World War I, and the 1940-45 indiscriminate
bombing of German cities), Portugal (1926-1982), and Indonesia (1965-87). These are shown in Table 1. Some lesser
kilomurderers were communist Afghanistan, Angola, Albania, Rumania, and Ethiopia, as well as authoritarian Hungary,
Burundi, Croatia (1941-44), Czechoslovakia (1945-46), Indonesia, Iraq, the Czar's Russia, and Uganda. For its indiscriminate
bombing of German and Japanese civilians, the United States must also be included on this list. These and other
kilomurderers add almost 15,000,000 people killed to the democide for this century. As listed in Table 2, the most lethal

regime in this century was that of the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during 1975 through
1978. In less than four years of governing they exterminated over 31 percent of their men, women,
and children; the odds of any Cambodian surviving these four long years was only about 2.2 to 1.
As mentioned, the Appendix exemplifies some of the estimates of this killing. The major and better
known episodes and institutions for which these and other regimes were responsible are listed in
Table 3. Far above all is gulag--the Soviet slave-labor system created by Lenin and built up under
Stalin. In some 70 years it likely chewed up almost 40,000,000 lives, over twice as many as
probably died in some 400 years of the African slave trade, from capture to sale in an Arab,
Oriental, or New World market. In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost
170,000,000 men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved,
frozen, crushed, or worked to death; or buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed, or killed in any
other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens or
foreigners. The dead even could conceivable be near a high of 360,000,000 people. This is as
though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague
of absolute power and not germs. Adding the human cost of war to this democide total,
governments have violently killed over 203,000,000 people in this century. Table 4 breaks down
this toll by type of regime. Figure 1 graphs the regime comparisons. Now, democracies themselves
are responsible for some of the democide. Almost all of this is foreign democide during war, and
mainly those enemy civilians killed in indiscriminate urban bombing, as of Germany and Japan in
World War II. It also includes the large scale massacres of Filipinos during the bloody American
colonization of the Philippines at the beginning of this century, deaths in British concentration camps in South Africa
during the Boar War, civilian deaths due to starvation during the aforementioned British blockade, the rape and murder of
helpless Chinese in and around Peking in 1900, the atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam, the murder of helpless
Algerians during the Algerian War by the French, and the unnatural deaths of German prisoners of war in French and
American POW camps after World War II. All this killing of foreigners by democracies may seem to violate

the principle that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely, but really underlines it. For in each
case, the killing was carried out in secret, behind a conscious cover of lies and deceit by those
agencies and power-holders involved. All were shielded by tight censorship of the press and control
of journalists. Even the indiscriminate bombing of German cities by the British was disguised before the House of

Commons and in press releases as attacks on German military targets. That the general strategic bombing policy was to
attack working men's homes was kept secret still long after the war. And finally, Figure 2 (one of the most important
comparisons on democide and power produced by this project) displays the range of democide estimates for each regime,

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that is, level of power. As mentioned over 8,100 estimates of democide from over a thousand sources were collected to
arrive at a most likely low and high for democide committed by 219 regimes or groups. The totals that have been displayed
in previous figures have been the sum of conservatively determined mid-totals in this range. Figure 2 then presents for each
type of regime, such as the authoritarian, this range resulting from the sum of all the lows and highs for all the democide of
all regimes of that type. The difference between the three resulting ranges drawn in the figure can only be understood in
terms of power.11 As the arbitrary power of regimes increase left to right in the figure, the range of their democide jumps
accordingly and to such a great extent that the low democide for the authoritarian regime is above the democratic high, and
the authoritarian high is below the totalitarian low. The empirical and theoretical conclusion from these and

other results is clear. The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be
through restricting and checking power. This means to foster democratic freedom. This is the
ultimate conclusion of this project.

Government provision is inefficient and ineffective three reasons.

Blank, UMich, 2k
(Rebecca M. Blank, UMich, 03-2k, When Can Public Policy Makers Rely on
Private Markets? The Effective Provision of Social Services, Economic
Journal Vol. 110 Issue 462, pC34-C49)
First, government inefficiencies might become large enough that even with
somewhat higher quality, the cost of allowing government management offsets
the benefits. As Stiglitz (1989) has noted, `public management' is itself a public good, and
one that is often hard for voters to observe easily. Wolf (1988) reviews a large number of studies
on the comparative efficiency of the public and private sector, noting that most -- but by no means
all -- of them conclude the private sector is able to operate at lower (in some cases very much
lower) costs.[6] Few of these studies focus on social service areas, however. Poterba (1996)
notes that it is not clear that the government is markedly less efficient in comparison to the
non-profit sector, which provides the primary private-sector alternative to the public sector in
many areas of social services in the United States.

Second, the more that government is plagued by patronage and corruption

problems, the less attractive is the government management of services. Such
problems may be one particular reason why the government is less efficient, but they are likely
to also affect the quality of services provided, as well as the extent to which the government
meets public goals about access and equity in the provision of services. Of course, it is worth
noting that corruption in the public sector in many countries often mirrors corruption in the
private sector. In this situation, it is unclear which sector is the preferred provider of services.

Third, the government may be ineffective in providing higher quality services.

Poor management and inefficiencies in the public sector may be causally
related to low quality services, in which case the price/quality tradeoff posited above is
an inaccurate characterisation; lower prices and higher quality may be complements rather
than substitutes. Indeed, in cases where the public sector underpays workers relative to the
market, or provides particularly bad managerial oversight, the quality of government-provided
services may be very low. (There are plenty of examples of this in my current hometown of
Washington, D.C.) The lower the quality of publicly-provided services, the less apparent force
there is to the argument that the private sector will provide services at too low a quality level.
As Wolf (1988) has noted, there is extensive `nonmarket failure' in government, just as there may

be market failure in the private sector.

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Eliminating licensing requirements for medical establishments and

restrictions on medical supplies, deregulating health insurance, and
eliminating subsidies such as Medicaid key to greater effectiveness and
availability of health care.
Hoppe, Prof. Emeritus of Econ, University of Nevada, 93
(Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Prof. Emeritus of Econ, University of Nevada,
04/1993, A Four-Step Health-Care Solution, Mises Institute,
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=279)
It's true that the U.S. health care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but
government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations
and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all
existing government controls. It's time to get serious about health care reform. Tax credits,
vouchers, and privatization will go a long way toward decentralizing the system and removmg
unnecessary burdens from business. But four additional steps must also be taken: 1. Eliminate all

licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other
health care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater
variety of health care services would appear on the market. Competing voluntary accreditation
agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing --if health care providers
believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers
care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it. Because consumers would no longer be
duped into believing that there is such a thing as a "national standard" of health care, they will

increase their search costs and make more discriminating health care choices. 2. Eliminate all
government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices.
This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and
increases costs. Costs and prices would fall, and a wider variety of better products would reach
the market sooner. The market would force consumers to act in accordance with their own-rather than the government's--risk assessment. And competing drug and device manufacturers
and sellers, to safeguard against product liability suits as much as to attract customers, would
provide increasingly better product descriptions and guarantees. 3. Deregulate the health

insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the
insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for
example, because it is in one's own hands to bring these events about.

Because a person's health, or

lack of it, lies increasingly within his own control, many, if not most health risks, are actually uninsurable. "Insurance"
against risks whose likelihood an individual can systematically influence falls within that person's own responsibility. All
insurance, moreover, involves the pooling of individual risks. It implies that insurers pay more to some and less to
others. But no one knows in advance, and with certainty, who the "winners" and "losers" will be. "Winners" and "losers"
are distributed randomly, and the resulting income redistribution is unsystematic. If "winners" or "losers" could be
systematically predicted, "losers" would not want to pool their risk with "winners," but with other "losers," because this
would lower their insurance costs. I would not want to pool my personal accident risks with those of professional
football players, for instance, but exclusively with those of people in circumstances similar to my own, at lower costs.
Because of legal restrictions on the health insurers' right of refusal--to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable--the
present health-insurance system is only partly concerned with insurance. The industry cannot discriminate freely
among different groups' risks. As a result, health insurers cover a multitude of uninnsurable risks, alongside, and
pooled with, genuine insurance risks. They do not discriminate among various groups of people which pose significantly
different insurance risks. The industry thus runs a system of income redistribution--benefiting irresponsible actors and
high-risk groups at the expense of responsible individuals and low risk groups. Accordingly the industry's prices are
high and ballooning. To deregulate the industry means to restore it to unrestricted freedom of contract: to allow a
health insurer to offer any contract whatsoever, to include or exclude any risk, and to discriminate among any groups
of individuals. Uninsurable risks would lose coverage, the variety of insurance policies for the remaining coverage
would increase, and price differentials would reflect genuine insurance risks. On average, prices would drastically fall.

4. Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or

unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased
breed illness and disease, and promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate
them, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first
instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid. Only these four steps, although drastic, will
And the reform would restore individual responsibility in health care.

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restore a fully free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry will have
serious problems, and so will we, its consumers.
Abolishing federal programs is the first step to solving poverty allows
private sector to grow.
Blanchette, Research Fellow, 07
(Jude Blanchette, Henry Hazlitt Research Fellow at the Foundation for
Economics Education, The Shortcomings of Government Charity May 2007,
The Freeman Volume: 57 Issue: 4
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-shortcomings-of-governmentcharity/) /A.C.
History shows that it is only through private voluntary solutions that we see
true human compassion. Organizations and individuals , in the spirit of compassion,
provided poverty relief that embraced generosity, but recognized the dire
consequences of haphazardly given aid . Most social workers of a century ago
understood that good character, self-reliance, and strong social ties were virtues that must be
instilled in the poor if there were to be any gains made in alleviating poverty. Before the
Depression private solutions played an important moral and material role for the poor.
Whereas government relies on coercion , charities and fraternal societies
embody the qualities that make volunteerism socially advantageous. Conversely,

the past 70 years have shown that government has not prudently handled, and
cannot prudently handle, the plight of the poor . Rather than help those in need of
assistance during times of trouble , the federal government has imprisoned them in a
political power game, resulting in increased dependence. Only abolition of the
government dole will allow the private sector to once again achieve
the levels of social welfare seen in the past.

Lower tax rates induce charitable giving studies prove.

Benzing, economics professor, 04
(Cynthia Benzing, Ph.D Drexel University, Associate Dean of the College of Business and Public Affairs,
Chairperson and Professor of Economics and Finance, Thomas Andrews The effect of tax rates and
uncertainty on contributory crowding out, September 2004, Atlantic Economic Journal
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6413/is_3_32/ai_n29125440/pg_11/?tag=content;col1) /A.C.
According to the results of this experiment, uncertainty and tax rates significantly influence both
the rate of voluntary contributions and the crowding out effect . Subjects voluntarily contributed a
higher percentage of income when the tax rate was low and subjects were uncertain as to
whether they would be disadvantaged. This leads one to conjecture that low income individuals
with less education and skills may be more inclined to voluntarily contribute to income support
and social programs because their probability of needing such support is higher. High income,
two wage earning families are less likely to ever need welfare, food stamps, etc. and,
consequently, are less inclined to voluntarily contribute to such programs. If this is the case,
then taxation to compel the contribution of higher income individuals may well increase the
supply of income support and social programs. This study points to progressive taxation as a
means of maintaining or increasing the supply of social programs. With respect to crowding
out, 97 percent of contributions were crowded out when tax rates were increased from 0 to l0
percent.

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Failure to privatize collapses the economy

Bresiger, business writer & editor, 08
Gregory Bresiger, business writer & managing editor of Traders Magazine, The Non-Issue that
Should be an issue, 7/3/2008, Von Mises http://mises.org/story/3020) /A.C.
But they do matter, according to one of the great economic historians, Joseph Schumpeter.
Indeed, history has endless episodes of nations that experienced incredible economic and social
problems owing to the government, which took over bigger and bigger pieces of the economy.
If the will of the people demands higher and higher public expenditures , if more

and more means are used for purposes for which private individuals have not produced them, if
more and more power stands behind this will, and if finally all parts of the people are gripped by
entirely new ideas about private property and the forms of life then the tax state will have run its
course and society will have to depend on other motive forces for its economy than self-interest.
This limit can certainly be reached. Without doubt, the tax state can collapse.
**Alternative to Government Provision**
The alternative is to reject the coercive policies of the affirmative. By
embracing negative freedoms, the free market will alleviate social ills,
turning the case.
Rothschild, University of Linz, Vienna, Austria, 03
(Kurt Rothschild, University of Linz, Vienna, Austria, 2003, Reflections on an anniversary: Friedman's
Capitalism and Freedom, Journal of Economic Studies, Volume 30, Number 5, pp. 548-557(10),
IngentaConnect) jz

The usual distinction between negative and positive freedom is that the first
demands that individuals should not be interfered with when carrying out their desired
actions (which in turn must not interfere with the plans of other people), while positive freedom is
concerned with the question to what degree individuals are given the opportunity to choose between different
actions. Nothing speaks against adopting one's personal preference as a concept of Freedom which
includes both aspects, the positive and the negative one. Amartya Sen or John Rawls are the
outstanding examples of social scientists adopting such a view. But this wider perspective leads to a
more complicated situation when it comes to practical applications of one's philosophy. While policies
and institutions in both politics and economics may very well foster at the same time both positive
and negative freedoms, there are also frequent cases where the two come into conflict. Then, difficult
problems of trade-offs can arise[2]: How much can be taken away from some people (e.g. through
taxes) reducing the degree of their (negative) freedom, in order to increase the degree of (positive)
freedom of some other people (e.g. through subsidies). Friedman gets rid of such difficult choices in his

abstract and practical deliberations by making negative freedom a dominant and sole target. He draws a
sharp division between equality of rights and equality of opportunity , on the one hand, and material
equality or equality of outcome on the other (p. 195). While he accepts the first target, he rejects the
second because it might come into conflict with the first. This confrontation of the two supposedly
contradictory alternatives has two decisive flaws. First, equality need not (and cannot in practice) be a
question of complete equality, but only of degrees of equality which makes it unnecessary to draw a
sharp either-or line, and second, the two alternatives are not completely independent of each other. In
particular, equality of opportunity is not independent of the degree of equality or inequality of material
means. Friedman, however, insists that the first alternative has to be the dominant principle of a free
society. This does not mean that he does not care about social and other societal problems. He does. But in
his view they should as far as possible be left to voluntary private activities

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with state interference kept at a minimum, because coercion is abhorred . I

find it hard, as a liberal, to see any justification for graduated taxation solely to redistribute income. This
seems a clear case of using coercion to take from some in order to give to others and thus to conflict head-on
with individual freedom (p. 174). Added to this rejection of coercion is Friedman's
belief that the undisturbed free market with its efficiency can contribute to
an alleviation of social problems. Government motives and actions are
regarded with doubt and distrust. This brings problems connected with Friedman's
approaches to capitalism and government. Freedom both in its wider and narrower (Friedman-type)
sense can be divided into political and economic freedom. In both cases, the problem is for Friedman
the only one that power-based coercion can force people to act differently from what they really want
to do. In the political field, this raises the question: how far the state should be allowed to interfere into
private decisions. This will be dealt with later. But political freedom is also connected with economic
freedom, which deals with freedom for transactions in the economic sphere. For Friedman, with his
stress on negative freedom and his scepticism about government power, which would be enhanced by
controlling economic affairs, economic freedom achieves priority. Freedom in economic arrangements
is an end in itself and is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom (p. 8,
italics added).

We should reject coercion for deliberative democracy.

Medearis, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 05

(John Medearis, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 2005, Social
Movements and Deliberative Democratic Theory, British Journal of Political Science, 35 : 53-75
Cambridge University Press)

I adopt a view of coercion rooted in the current conceptualization of deliberation itself .

Indeed, before offering a definition, it is worth exploring the close connection between non-coercion and
deliberation. One of the deliberative theorists basic premises is that only those decisions are legitimate
that are or could be supported by citizens for reasons they have reflected upon and think are good
ones. Coercion, simply as it is conventionally understood as compelling through force or threats
stands in obvious contrast to such a notion of deliberation . For coercion, in this quite ordinary sense, would
bypass the attempt to gain reasoned support. This is surely why Dryzek contrasts coercion with

persuasion and contends that deliberative democratic theory in general (not just his variety) rejects
coercion.11 A principled rejection of coercion runs deep in the writings of Habermas and Rawls, who have
not only endorsed deliberative democracy, but, more importantly, provided much of its intellectual
apparatus. In a frequently-cited formulation, Habermas writes that participants in argumentation cannot
avoid the presupposition that the structure of their communication rules out all external or internal
coercion other than the force of the better argument and thereby also neutralizes all motives other than
that of the cooperative search for truth.12 Such a co-operative search for truth, or action oriented to
reaching understanding, is the principled heart of at least one major strand of deliberation .13 A similar

understanding of coercion is clearly also embedded in Rawlss central insistence that parties to deliberation
offer each other reasons and forms of co-operation that they can accept, as he puts it, for the right reasons
and not merely because of a balance of political and social forces or sanctions.14 Likewise, a number of
central features of Gutmann and Thompsons influential deliberative writings would seem to rule out
coercion: their Rawlsian commitment to reciprocity, one of three putative deliberative values, which
involves a sole reliance on reasons that are shared or could come to be shared; their stringent demand
that people who disagree continue to reason together to reach mutually acceptable decisions; and
their disapproval of outcomes that turn, strategically, on actors self-interests.15 Bohman, similarly,

makes the exposing of coercion one of the three conditions of deliberative legitimacy in pluralistic
societies.16 Of course, deliberative democrats do not claim that politics can be entirely non-coercive,
any more than they claim politics can be entirely deliberative. But they do claim that decisions are
democratically legitimate only in so far as they are deliberative. And thus from their perspective,

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decisions are democratically legitimate only in so far as the processes from which they result are noncoercive.
Reject coercion in favor of capitalism and individual rights.
Biddle, editor and publisher of The Objective Standard, 06

(Craig Biddle, editor and publisher of The Objective Standard, The Objectivist Standard, Spring 2006,
Vol. 1, No. 1, Introducing The Objective Standard, http://theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2006spring/introducing-the-objective-standard.asp)

In the realm of politics, we recognize that in order to take life-promoting action, a

person must be free to do so; he must be free to act on the judgment of his mind, his
basic means of living. The only thing that can stop him from doing so is other people, and the
only way they can stop him is by means of physical force. Thus, in order to live peacefully together in a
societyin order to live together as civilized beings, rather than as barbarianspeople must refrain from
using physical force against one another. This fact gives rise to the principle of individual rights, which is
the principle of egoism applied to politics. The principle of individual rights is the recognition of the fact
that each person is morally an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others ; therefore, he morally must
be left free to act on his own judgment for his own sake, so long as he does not violate that same right
of others. This principle is not a matter of personal opinion or social convention or divine revelation; it

is a matter of the factual requirements of human life in a social context . A

moral societya civilized societyis one in which the initiation of physical force against human beings is
prohibited by law. And the only social system in which such force is so prohibited consistently and on
principleis pure, laissez-faire capitalism. Capitalismwhich, contrary to widespread mis-education, is
not merely an economic systemis the social system of individual rights, including property rights,
protected by a strictly limited government. In a laissez-faire society, if people want to deal with one another,
they may do so only on voluntary terms, by uncoerced agreement. If they want to receive goods
or services from others, they may offer to exchange value for value to mutual benefit; however, they
may not seek to gain any value from others by means of physical force. People are fully free to act on

their own judgment and thus to produce, keep, use, and dispose of their own property as they see fit; the only
thing they are not free to do is to violate the rights of others. In a capitalist society, individual rights cannot
legally be violated by anyoneincluding the government.
Rejection of the collectivist welfare policies of the aff is critical to imagining
a better world. Only through this can we establish concrete foundations for
reasonable change.
Ebeling, president of Foundation for Economic Freedom, 06
(Richard Ebeling, president of Foundation for Economic Freedom, October 2006, Principles Must Come
Before Politics, http://www.nassauinstitute.org/articles/article636.php?view=print)

The real political task, however, is not to try to attract votes or nudge policy in the context of the
existing bell curve of voter preferences. Rather, it is to move the curve in the direction of individual
freedom, limited constitutional government, and a truly free market. In other words, the task is to shift the
curve's dome over to where its individualist tail end is today, so that someday the middle mass of
voters will more or less hold views generally consistent with classical-liberal ideas. But this requires
looking beyond what is politically expedient today. Indeed, it requires ignoring what seem to

be the boundaries of the politically possible and instead thinking in terms of

the politically desirable. If policies really consistent with individual freedom are ever to be
implemented, we must first explain to our fellow citizens what such a society of freedom would look like,
how it would work, and why it is desirable. They must slowly but surely come to see the vision of liberty.

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Maybe part of the reason so many people seem unable or unwilling to think beyond five minutes is that
they are so infrequently challenged to do. Maybe our fellow citizens find it hard to break out of

the current mindset of the existing interventionist welfare state because

they are too rarely offered a clear and consistent case for the classical-liberal ideal
and why it would be good for them and others they care about . Maybe people are often trapped in the
policies of the short run precisely because they almost never are presented with a political and
economic philosophy of freedom for the long run. Politics will always only reflect the existing distribution
of people's political views. Political campaigns , therefore, will never be the primary method for
transforming society from less free to more free. This will only happen outside of the narrow political
process-through a change in the climate of ideas. Though most people don't know it, they are guided by

an implicit set of political and economic principles when they think about and decide on what they want
government to do. These principles are the ideological residues of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
collectivism. They need to be replaced with a new set of political and economic
principles, those of classical liberalism. When a sufficient number of our
fellow citizens accept classical liberalism, politics will follow principle and
the interventionist welfare state will be opposed and finally abolished. This is
why a radical change in principles must come before any successful change in politics.
Alt view the invisible victims
Walter E. Williams (John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chairman of the
Economics Department at George Mason University) January 15, 1996. THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE
MARKETS: MORALITY VS. EFFICIENCY. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n2-3-3.html
Demystification of the State
A. V. Dicey (1914: 257) wrote:
The beneficial effect of State intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and
so to speak visible, whilst its evil effects are gradual and indirect, and lie outside our sight.... Hence the
majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favour upon government intervention.
This natural bias can be counteracted only by the existence, in a given society, ... of a presumption or
prejudice in favour of individual liberty, that is of laissez-faire.
One can hardly determine the casualties of war simply by looking at survivors. We must ask what
happened to those whom we do not see. Similarly, when evaluating interventionist public policy we
cannot evaluate it simply by looking at its beneficiaries. We must discover its victims. Most often the
victims of public policy are invisible. To garner greater public support against government command
and control, we must somehow find a way to make those victims visible.
In all interventionist policy there are those who are beneficiaries and those who are victims. In most
cases the beneficiaries are highly visible and the victims are invisible. A good example is the minimum
wage law. After enactment of an increase in the minimum wage law, politicians accompanied by
television crews readily point to people who have benefitted from the legislation. The beneficiaries are
those with a fatter paycheck. Thus, the politician can lay claim to the wisdom of his legislation that
increased minimum wages. Moreover, the politician is also a beneficiary since those now earning higher
wages will remember him when election time comes around. By parading minimum wage beneficiaries
across the stage, those who oppose minimum wage increases can be readily portrayed as having a
callous, mean-spirited disregard for interests of low-wage workers.
A political strategy of those who support liberty should be that of exposing the invisible victims of
minimum wage laws. We need to show those who have lost their jobs, or do not become employed in
the first place, because their productivity did not warrant being employed at the minimum wage. We
should find a way to demonstrate jobs destroyed by minimum wages such as busboys, gasoline station
attendants, and movie ushers. We must show how marginally profitable firms have been forced out of
business, though surviving firms may have the same number of employees. We should show how
capital was artificially substituted for labor as a result of higher mandated wages and how firms have
adjusted their production techniques in order to economize on labor. The particular adjustments firms
make in response to higher mandated wages are less important than the fact that adjustments will be
made.

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A more dramatic example of the invisible victims of interventionist state policy can be found in the
regulation of medicines and medical devices, as in the case of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
in the United States. Essentially, FDA officials can make two types of errors. They can err on the side of
undercaution and approve a drug with dangerous unanticipated side effects. Or they can err on the side
of overcaution, not approving a useful and safe drug, or creating costly and lengthy drug approval
procedures.
Errors on the side of undercaution lead to embarrassment and possibly loss of bureaucratic careers and
promotions because the victims of unsafe drugs will be visible through news stories of sick people,
congressional investigations, and hearings. However, errors on the side of overcaution, through
extensive delay in the approval of drugs--as in the cases of propranolol, Septra, and other drugs-impose virtually no costs on the FDA. Victims of FDA errors on the side of overcaution are mostly
invisible to the press, the public, and politicians.
Those victims should be made visible. Once the FDA (or some other approving agency) approves a drug
widely used elsewhere with no untoward effects, we should find people who died or needlessly suffered
as a result of the FDA's delay. For political efficiency we cannot simply offer intellectual arguments. We
must get pictures and stories of FDA victims in an effort to appeal to a sense of fair play, decency, and
common sense among the citizenry. But there is also a role for intellectual arguments in the sense of
teaching people that any meaningful use of "safe'' must see safety as a set of tradeoffs rather than a
category. The attempt to get a "safe'' drug means that people will die or needlessly suffer during the
time it takes to achieve greater safety. That toll must be weighted against the number of people who
might die or become ill because of the drug's earlier availability and attendant unanticipated harmful
side effects. People should also be taught to understand that if a 100 percent safe drug is ever
achieved, it will be the only thing in this world that is 100 percent safe.

Americans want smaller government when taxes matter

Boaz, Cato's executive vice president, 09
(David Boaz, Cato's executive vice president, 6/23/09, CATO Institute, http://www.cato-atliberty.org/2009/06/23/americans-want-smaller-government/)

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll again shows that voters prefer smaller
government with fewer services to larger government with more
services:Obama has used the power and financial resources of the federal government
repeatedly as he has dealt with the countrys problems this year, to the consternation of his
Republican critics. The poll found little change in underlying public attitudes toward government

since the inauguration, with slightly more than half saying they prefer a smaller government with
fewer services to a larger government with more services. Independents, however, now split 61 to
35 percent in favor of a smaller government; they were more narrowly divided on this question a
year ago (52 to 44 percent), before the financial crisis hit.The Post calls a 54 to 41 lead for
smaller government barely more than half, which is fair enough, though its twice as large as
Obamas margin over McCain. Its also twice as large as the margin the Post found in the same
poll in November 2007.Ive always thought the smaller government question is incomplete. It
offers respondents a benefit of larger governmentmore servicesbut it doesnt mention that
the cost of larger government with more services is higher taxes. The question ought to give

both the cost and the benefit for each option. A few years ago a Rasmussen poll did ask the question
that way. The results were that 64 percent of voters said that they prefer smaller government with
fewer services and lower taxes, while only 22 percent would rather see a more active government
with more services and higher taxes. A similar poll around the same time, without the information
on taxes, found a margin of 59 to 26 percent. So its reasonable to conclude that if you remind
respondents that more services means higher taxes, the margin by which people prefer smaller
government rises by about 9 points. So maybe the margin in this poll would have been
something like 59 to 37 if both sides of the question had been presented.

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AT: Cant imagine. Confinement to the politically possible makes change

impossible. Prefer the reformist policies
Ebeling, president of Foundation for Economic Freedom, 06
(Richard Ebeling, president of Foundation for Economic Freedom, October 2006, Principles Must Come
Before Politics, http://www.nassauinstitute.org/articles/article636.php?view=print)

there are many people who talk about dealing with the dangers of bigger and bigger
government and the budgetary burdens it imposes on all of us . But, again, rather than focusing on
fundamentals, theirs is often only an attempt to find short-term gimmicks to deal with the problems.
This, too, is the result of focusing on politics. It's often pointed out that the political preferences of
voters are distributed in the shape of a bell curve. At the ends are the political "extremists," collectivists
At the same time,

and individualists respectively. In between, under the dome, are the vast majority of voters who are
somewhere "in the middle." If a politician is to be elected , it is explained, he [or she] must appeal to a
significant number in that middle, since there are just not enough votes at either end of the curve to win
an election. Thus he [or she] must weave together a patchwork of inconsistent and often contradictory

positions that will reflect the diverse political views of his potential constituents. This also limits what
market-oriented think tanks in either Washington or in the various state capitals can offer as policy
options in the debates about the role of government. Even while seeming to be nudging the debate more in a
free-market, smaller government direction, the boundaries in which they can frame their
proposals are constricted by what the politicians consider "politically
possible." Beyond those boundaries the policy advocate becomes a "kook ," a pie-in-the-sky "nut," an
extremist who does not realize that "nobody" is going to take those views seriously. The policy advocate
risks losing political legitimacy and a hearing in the halls of power -which is why his organization is located
in that center of political decision-making. This often means that policy proposals are
"watered down" to be politically acceptable . Even the defense of a policy is often
couched in terms designed to avoid the impression that its advocates support anything as radical as,
well, laissez faire and the end to the interventionist welfare state. Any detailed and fundamental
discussion of government policy is therefore implicitly ruled out of court. Once attention is

focused on influencing what government is doing right now, the debate is

defined by what is politically practicable today.

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**Private Charities CP**

Private charities are more successful than the government at providing aid
Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96
(Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute,
December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html)
Private efforts have been much more successful than the federal government's
failed attempt at charity. America is the most generous nation on earth.
Americans already contribute more than $125 billion annually to charity. In
fact, more than 85 percent of all adult Americans make some charitable
contribution each year. In addition, about half of all American adults perform
volunteer work; more than 20 billion hours were worked in 1991. The dollar
value of that volunteer work was more than $176 billion. Volunteer work and
cash donations combined bring American charitable contributions to more than
$300 billion per year, not counting the countless dollars and time given informally to family
members, neighbors, and others outside the formal charity system. Private charities have been
more successful than government welfare for several reasons. First, private charities are able to
individualize their approach to the circumstances of poor people in ways that governments can
never do. Government regulations must be designed to treat all similarly situated recipients alike.
Glenn C. Loury of Boston University explains the difference between welfare and private
charities on that point. "Because citizens have due process rights which cannot be fully abrogated .

. . public judgments must be made in a manner that can be defended after the fact, sometimes even
in court." The result is that most government programs rely on the simple provision of cash or other
goods and services without any attempt to differentiate between the needs of recipients.
Government eligibility requirements skew aid distribution
Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96
(Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute,
December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html)
In addition to being better able to target individual needs, private charities are
much better able to target assistance to those who really need help. Because
eligibility requirements for government welfare programs are arbitrary and
cannot be changed to fit individual circumstances, many people in genuine
need do not receive assistance, while benefits often go to people who do not
really need them. More than 40 percent of all families living below the poverty
level receive no government assistance. Yet more than half of the families
receiving means-tested benefits are not poor. Thus, a student may receive food
stamps, while a homeless man with no mailing address goes without. Private
charities are not bound by such bureaucratic restrictions.

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Governmental programs are inefficient; Private charities arent

Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96
(Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute,
December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html)
Private charity also has a better record of actually delivering aid to recipients.
Surprisingly little of the money being spent on federal and state social welfare
programs actually reaches recipients. In 1965, 70 cents of every dollar spent by the
government to fight poverty went directly to poor people. Today, 70 cents of every dollar goes,
not to poor people, but to government bureaucrats and others who serve the poor. Few private
charities have the bureaucratic overhead and inefficiency of government programs.
A greater diversity of solutions makes private charities more effective
Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96
(Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute,
December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html)
Second, in general, private charity is much more likely to be targeted to short-term emergency
assistance than to long-term dependence. Thus, private charity provides a safety net, not a way of
life. Moreover, private charities may demand that the poor change their behavior in exchange for
assistance. For example, a private charity may reduce or withhold benefits if a recipient does not
stop using alcohol or drugs, look for a job, or avoid pregnancy. Private charities are much more
likely than government programs to offer counseling and one-on-one follow-up rather than simply
provide a check. By the same token, because of the separation of church and state, the
government cannot support programs that promote religious values as a way out of poverty. Yet
church and other religious charities have a history of success in dealing with the problems that often
lead to poverty.
Private Charity causes an attitudinal shift encouraging recipients to escape
poverty
Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96
(Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute,
December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html)
Finally, and perhaps most important, private charity requires a different
attitude on the part of both recipients and donors. For recipients, private
charity is not an entitlement but a gift carrying reciprocal obligations. As Father
Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute describes it, "An impersonal check given without any
expectations for responsible behavior leads to a damaged sense of self-worth. The beauty of local
[private charitable] efforts to help the needy is that . . . they make the individual receiving the aid
realize that he must work to live up to the expectations of those helping him out." Private charity
demands that donors become directly involved. Former Yale political science professor James
Payne notes how little citizen involvement there is in government charity:

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Private Charity promotes participatory democracy

Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, 96
(Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute,
December 96, Cato Policy Report, Replacing Welfare,
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-18n6-1.html)
Private charity demands that donors become directly involved. Former Yale
political science professor James Payne notes how little citizen involvement
there is in government charity: We know now that in most cases of government policy
making, decisions are not made according to the democratic ideal of control by ordinary citizens.
Policy is made by elites, through special interest politics, bureaucratic pressures, and legislative
manipulations. Insiders decide what happens, shaping the outcome according to their own
preferences and their political pull. The citizens are simply bystanders.
Private charity, in
contrast, is based on "having individuals vote with their own time, money, and energy."
Only the counterplan solves informal private networks are not only solve
poverty but protect key values
Walter E. Williams (John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Chairman of the
Economics Department at George Mason University) January 15, 1996. THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE
MARKETS: MORALITY VS. EFFICIENCY. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj15n2-3-3.html
Ultimately, the struggle to achieve and preserve freedom must take place in the habits and
minds of individuals. And, as admonished by the Constitution of the State of North Carolina
(Art. I, Sec. 35), "The frequent reference to fundamental principles is absolutely necessary to
preserve the blessings of liberty.'' It is those fundamental principles that deliver economic
efficiency and wealth, not the other way around. Fundamental moral principles or values are
determined in the arena of civil society. Values such as thrift, hard work, honesty, trust and
cooperative behavior, based on shared norms, are the keys to improving the human condition
and provide the undergirding for a free-market economy. Just as important are such social
institutions as respect for private property, sanctity of contracts, educational institutions, clubs,
charities, churches, and families. All those institutions provide the glue to hold society together
in terms of common values and provide for the transmission of those values to successive
generations. Too often informal institutions and local networks are trivialized and greater favor
is given to the intellectual's narrow conception of what constitutes knowledge and wisdom. The
importance of informal networks such as friends, church members, neighbors, and families
cannot be underestimated--as demonstrated in the following example of small proprietorships.
[1] The critical determinants of a proprietor's success are perseverance, character, ability, and
other personal characteristics. Banks seldom finance the establishment of such business. Most
small businesses are financed through friends and family. The reason is that those are the
people who have the lowest cost in acquiring the necessary information about the proprietor's
characteristics deemed critical for success. Also, friends and family, who lend the proprietor
money, have a personal stake in the business and have an incentive to moderate their likely
bias in favor of the borrower. Clearly, a formal lending institution could query friends and
relatives. However, the information obtained would have greater bias because friends and
relatives would not have sufficient stake in the business to offset any personal bias they had in
favor of the borrower.

Privatization promotes choice and increases quality of services to all people

The case for privatization includes other claims besides improved efficiency, budget savings, and
increased economic growth. The key word is choice. Advocates claim that privatization will enlarge

the range of choice for individuals while serving the same essential functions as do traditional
programs. Thus, if Social Security were privatized, the Federal government would still require
people to put aside funds for retirement but would allow them to choose their own retirement

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investments.

Educational vouchers would not abolish laws requiring children to go to school but would
allow families to choose which one. Asset sales and shifts of services from public agencies to private
contractors might permit greater choice among suppliers. Proponents of privatization maintain that

greater choice would serve the interests of equity. The rich have always been able to afford private
schools; educational vouchers would give the middle classes and the poor that ability. Social
Security, they say, favors whites, whose longer life expectancy enables them to receive greater
retirement benefits than do blacks; privatization would allegedly correct that bias. According to the
privatizers, greater freedom of choice will generally lead to a more just distribution of benefits.
Product choice because of privatization will resolve the inefficiency
preventing high quality goods and services
Choice is unquestionably the single strongest point in the case for privatiza tion.
The uniformity of public programs and services is often a grave limitation. Even
where it is not logically required, the demands of equal treatment are often
interpreted to prohibit heterogeneity in public services. Rules requiring uniform
pricing also impede the production of varied services, especially those of high
quality. These barriers to heterogeneity have long been a weakness of public
services, but the problem grows more serious as personal income increases
with economic growth. Larger numbers of consumers demand the more varied, specially designed
services available previously only to those with the highest incomes. This demand for qualityor rather
for different qualities constitutes a source of dissatisfaction with the public sector that may be
expected to grow.

Privatizing is a prerequisite to eliminating poverty.

Blanchette, Research Fellow, 07
(Jude Blanchette, Henry Hazlitt Research Fellow at the Foundation for
Economics Education, The Shortcomings of Government Charity May 2007,
The Freeman Volume: 57 Issue: 4
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-shortcomings-of-governmentcharity/) /A.C.
For large charities such as the Salvation Army and smaller local charities run by
churches and other private organizations, the fight against poverty has been
going on for the past 150 years . Tragically, standing in their way has been
the federal government. Besides an effort to wage war on poverty beginning
in the 1960s, the federal government has attempted to intercede and dole out aid
since the beginning of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal. These interventions have proven
costly and yielded disastrous results . By continually siphoning funds away
from the private sector, lawmakers and bureaucrats further diminish the
ability of civil society to deal with the problem of poverty. (As Charles
Murray shows in Losing Ground, poverty was declining steadily through the 1950s and 1960s
up until the Great Society programs kicked in during the early 1970s.)
If the plight of the poor is to be truly addressed, Americans should study the lessons of the
past. Earlier in the twentieth century , private charities offered a more effective
cure for chronic indigence, and it was through mutually beneficial activities and
voluntary funding that the spirit of American compassion was unleashed. In the best
interests of the poor, the government should withdraw itself

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completely from all activities designed to help them and allow civil
society its full range of motion.
Unfortunately, most social commentators see increased state action as the best (indeed, the
only) way to fight poverty. With apologies to Ian McEwan, the welfare state has become the
repository of collective fantasy. Private charities, they often argue, financed by volunteers and
private donations, cannot meet the immense burden of welfare provision. Advocates of public
assistance see private enterprise as an economic system that functions on Hobbesian selfinterest and that would leave the poor to suffer if profit could not be squeezed from their labor.
Many proponents of laissez faire recognize these common protestations, but are unable to
provide cogent rebuttal. On the surface it would seem that only government, with its vast
infrastructure and immense financial resources, can improve the plight of the poor. Private
charities, subject to the vagaries of voluntary donations, are a far less reliable source of
income.
Yet if this were the case , how is it that after more than 40 years since the Great Society and
more than $8 trillion spent (in 2000 dollars) so little headway has been made by the government in
alleviating poverty? This is not to say that poverty has not diminished in America . Indeed, the
market economy has virtually eliminated extreme poverty in the United States. The average poor
American lives a lifestyle that would be envied by most of the worlds citizens. But this is a
product of the market economy not government handouts. It is only through wealth creation, not
wealth distribution, that we see the wellspring of human progress.

Private charities solve poverty

Awenius, retired attorney, 84
(Robert Awenius, retired attorney, Why Not Private Charity, November 1984 The Freeman Volume: 34
Issue: 11 http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/why-not-private-charity/) /A.C.

For some period of time there has been considerable evidence that private
charity is superior to government welfare as a means of overcoming poverty in
America. Empirical data suggests that private charity indeed would do more for the poverty-level
families of this nation than is being achieved under the present welfare system. However, we must
not conclude that this seemingly radical plan is anything new in the annals of mankind. In the
nineteenth century one of Englands most powerful voices for social reform, Charles Dickens,
professed a belief in private charity as opposed to public charity. He opposed government
charity because of its ineffectiveness. He was convinced that the polestar of charity was the
human beings innate concern for another creature. He felt that the aid and assistance extended
by private persons was more powerful , useful, and kind than the charity of government . Just to cite
his views is to affirm the favored position of private charity, as in the following statement:
Following the Napoleonic Wars much discontent and unrest prevailed in England, but instead of
revolution the Victorian Age brought relative peace, manifested by great reforms such as the
Reform Acts of 1832, the Factory Reform of 1833, and the Poor Laws of 1834. With these
reforms passed, the general bent of the programs was to treat the symptoms of poverty, not
the causes. As a result, there was a great alienation of the working masses and only partial
satisfaction within the commercial and industrial strata of society. That is the very same
complaint we hear today concerning our welfare laws: alienation of welfare clients and
complaint of the taxpayers who are shouldering the burden of the necessary taxation to
support the system. Today in the United States the bulk of the donating public make their
contributions to philanthropy by taxes through their government or privately to organized charities .
There is negligible warmth of heart between the public donors (taxpayers) and the recipients
albeit, there is slight concern by those giving funds as to direct knowledge of the state of affairs
or indigency of the beneficiaries. There is undoubtedly more concern in this regard in the case
of private charities. Also, there is some little suspicion on the part of many contributors that a
considerable number of those who ask for charity are undeserving . This same attitude was true

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during Dickens time when, beginning about 1818, the upper classes made attempts to protect
themselves by forming a Mendicity Society, where subscribers contributed funds to the Society
rather than give directly to beggars. The Society investigated each case to see if each had
merit.

Government programs are ineffective and trade-off with private efforts.

Awenius, retired attorney, 84
(Robert Awenius, retired attorney, Why Not Private Charity, November 1984 The Freeman Volume: 34
Issue: 11 http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/why-not-private-charity/) /A.C.

The adoption of welfare state procedures and plans tends to encourage the
destructive activity of the modern state in the mass liquidation and
redistribution of wealth. The normal and hitherto accepted role of government has been to
maintain law, justice, and order, defend the nation abroad, and to permit every man the ownership
of his property. In general, the governments business in the past was to protect the common
welfare of its citizens.

The destructive effect of the welfare state is manifested in its expropriation ,

taxation, or arbitrary creation of money and creditall done in the name of the poor. The effect of
this damaging tendency is to abolish the independent citizen and foster the idea that all the people
should look to Washington for subsistencei.e., to become parasites, wholly dependent on
government for all their needs and wants. With this tendency, the politicians follow a short-term
expediency of approving sophisticated theft (in redistributing the wealth) without regard to
ultimately damaging long-term results.

The very people who have done so much and will do so much in aiding private
charitythe great middle classare economically squeezed by the welfare state and find its
capacity to support private charity greatly diminished.
Private charities solve coercion.
Reed, adjunct scholar, 01
(Lawrence W. Reed, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, president of the Mackinac Center for
Public Policy in Midland, Michigan, Charity and Free Will, 8/9/2001 http://mises.org/story/751)/A.C.
From start to finish, what private charities do is a manifestation of free will . No
one is compelled to provide assistance. No one is coerced to pay for it. No one is required to accept
it. All parties come together of their own, individual volition . And thats the magic of it. The link
between the giver, the provider, and the receiver is strong precisely because each knows he can
walk away from it at the slightest hint of insincerity, broken promises, or poor performance.
Because each party is giving of his own time or resources voluntarily, he tends to focus on the
mission at hand and doesnt get bogged down or diverted by distant or secondary agendas, like
filling out the proper paperwork or currying favor with the political powers-that-be.

Private charity best targets causes, not symptoms.

Johnston, economist, 98
Jim Johnston, economist and a member of the board of directors of the Heartland Institute,Welfare
and Charity: Yes, There Is a Difference, Juny/July 1998 http://www.newcoalition.org/Article.cfm?
artId=768

There are probably more solutions than there are causes for poverty . The reason
is that many "solutions" are not well considered, and sometimes they actually worsen the
condition of the poor. Clearly, effective help for the poor takes more than just good intentions.
Wealth and poverty have been important topics in economics for more than 200 years since

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1776. One
of the most important contributions made recently to the literature is by
Jennifer Roback Morse, a fellow economist who is a person of deep religious conviction.
Morse has compared government welfare and private charity in a way that
helps to understand the issue in a new light . She points out that private charity
operates to treat particular causes of poverty . The help is tailored to the
individual person. By contrast, government welfare does not, and should not,
discriminate among recipients. The discretion of social workers must be circumscribed in
Adam Smith, a professor of moral philosophy, published The Wealth of Nations in

order to reduce corruption in the system.

Taxes trade off with charity.

Garret and Rhine, economic researchers, 09

Thomas A. Garrett and Russell M. Rhine, economic researchers at the Federal Reserve,Government
Growth and Private Contributions to Charity, July 2009 http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2007/2007012.pdf)/A.C.
We obtained the interesting result that a decrease in state and local government spending on
education increases private giving to education, and that increased education giving then leads
to a reduction in federal government spending on education. We argued that this one-way
relationship is a result of changing fundraising efforts and the nature of state and local
government versus federal government education expenditures (general appropriations versus
grants, respectively) and the relative size of each toward total education expenditures . In

addition to a reduction in private charitable contributions resulting from government spending on

charitable organizations, government growth itself, ignoring the destination of government
spending, may reduce private charitable contributions. Private contributions may decrease because
of reduced disposable income that results from higher taxes used to fuel future government growth.

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*****UTILITARIANISM GOOD / DEON BAD*****

**Util Good For Rights**
Utilitarianism upholds self-ownership and thus liberty.
Bailey, lecturer Politics at Princeton, 97
(James Bailey, lecturer Politics at Princeton, 1997, Utilitarianism,
Institutions, and Justice, Oxford University Press, p. 160)
attempts to subvert utilitarianism through appeals to
formal properties about theories of justice such as finality and publicitydo not
work either. The finality of utilitarianism is unlikely to be in jeopardy in a world in which
people cannot suffer horrible acts as patients or alienating acts as agents. The rules
protecting self-ownership, which are necessary to prevent exploitation , also
forbid the horrible acts and allow individuals the liberty to do much of what
they see as with their lives. The question of utilitarianism's subversion in its
finality by grossly, unfair distributive arrangements is answered by a set of
institutions in which no deep suffering is allowed and a generous provision is made
I have also tried to show that

for educational opportunities for all.

Utilitarianism is best it protects rights while not totally rejecting all

policies that might infringe.
Harvey, J.D. Yale, 02
(Philip Harvey, J.D. Yale, Spring 2002, Human Rights and Economic Policy
Discourse: Taking Economic and Social Rights Seriously, 33 Colum. Human
Rights L. Rev. 353)
Perhaps the clearest illustration of this compromise or balancing principle is the distinction drawn in constitutional jurisprudence between the standard of

Laws
that do not infringe on certain constitutionally protected rights will pass muster
if there is a mere rational basis for their enactment, whereas laws that do
infringe on such rights require more compelling justification , with the level of
justification varying depending on the right at issue. 196 Human rights claims have bite
precisely because they declare that certain actions may be improper, even if
those actions are supported by a majority of the population, indeed, even if the
actions in question would increase the total utility of the population as a whole.
But it is not necessary to take the position that rights-based claims should
always trump conflicting utility-maximizing purposes . 197 It should be possible
to honor multiple goals in public policy decision-making.
review applied by courts in deciding whether legislative enactments comply with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Util protects rights in social and constitutional hierarchies.

Bailey, lecturer Politics at Princeton, 97
(James Bailey, lecturer Politics at Princeton, 1997, Utilitarianism, Institutions, and Justice, Oxford
University Press, p. 153-154)
Even in a world full of rules and institutionslike that of Imperfectia there is still
normative work for utilitarianism to do. The foundation for this work stems from an
argument in chapter 1 that the work of utilitarianism is more likely a form of local

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rather than global maximizing, of making the best use of new information and
opportunities on the margin rather than a complete revolution of social
relations. In imperfect worlds, this work thus includes local maximization,
constitutional change, and exceptional case guidance. In addition there is a kind of
distinctive normative work specifically for utilitarians in venal oligarchies. To provide anything
like a full theory of any of these things here would require an entire new book. What I do
provide is merely a series of thumbnail sketches of the problems. The aim is to show that
there is still plenty of value in a consciously held global theory of utilitarianism ,
and therefore we should not fall hack only on common sense and whatever reasonable
institutions are lying about.

Utilitarian calculus is the only way to determine rights relative importance.

Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992
Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press.
Pg 199.
Before turning to possible " deeper" difficulties, let me make just one point favorable to the
utilitarian view, that it tells us, in principle, how to find out what are a person's rights, and how
stringent they are, relative to each other, which is much more than can be said of most other
theories, unless reliance on intuitions is supposed to be a definite way of telling what a person's
rights are. How does one do this, on the utilitarian theory? The idea, of course, is that we have
to determine whether it would maximize long-range expectable utility to include recognition of
certain rights in the moral code of a society, or to include a certain right with a certain degree
of stringency as compared with other rights. (For instance, it might be optimistic to include a
right to life with more stringency than a right to liberty and this with more stringency than the
right to pursue happiness.) Suppose, for instance, one wants to know what should be the scope
of the " right to life." Then it would be proper to inquire whether the utility-maximizing moral
system would require people to retrain from taking the life of other adults, more positively to
support life by providing adequate medical care, to abstain from life-termination for seriously
defective infants or to refrain from abortion, to require abstaining from assisting a person with
terminal illness in ending his own life if he requests it, to refrain from assisting in the discharge
of a sentence of capital punishment, or to refrain from killing combatants in war time and so
on. If one wants to know whether the right to life is stronger than the right of free speech on
political subjects, it is proper to inquire whether the utility maximizing moral code would prefer
free speech to the cost of lives (and in what circumstances).

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**Util Good: Generics**

Their moral imperatives revolve around a flawed libertarian methodconsequences must be evaluated first to escape the cycle
Friedman, Political Science at Bernard University, 97
(Jefferey Friedman, PoliSci Bernard U, 1997, "What's Wrong with
Libertarianism," Critical Review, Volume: 3, pp. 435-436)
The effect of libertarian straddling on libertarian scholarship is suggested by a passage in the
scholarly appendix to Boazs collection of libertarian essays, The Libertarian Reader. There,
Tom G. Palmer (also of the Cato Institute) writes that in libertarian scholarship, the moral
imperatives of peace and voluntary cooperation are brought together with a rich understanding
of the spontaneous order made possible by such voluntary cooperation, and of the ways in
which coercive intervention can disorder the world and set in motion complex trains of
unintended consequences (Boaz r997b, 416, emphasis added). Palmers ambiguous brought
together suggests (without coming right out and saying) that even if there were no rich

understanding of spontaneous order, libertarianism would be sustained by moral imperatives? But

in that case, why develop the rich understanding of spontaneous order in the first place, and why
emphasize its importance now that it has been developed? Spontaneous order is, on Palmers own
terms, irrelevant, since even if a rich understanding of it yielded the conclusion that markets
are less orderly or less spontaneous than states, or that the quality of the order they produce is
inferior to that produced by states, we would still be compelled to be libertarians by moral
imperatives. The premise of the philosophical approach is that nothing can possibly trump
freedom-cum-private property. But if libertarian freedom is an end in itself and is the greatest of

all values, ones endorsement of it should not be affected in the slightest by such empirical
questions as whether libertarianism would spell starvation or warfare. The premise of the empirical
approach is, conversely, that such consequences do matter. Why investigate the effects of
libertarianism if they could not conceivably outweigh the putative intrinsic value of private
property? If a priori reasoning tells us that laissez-faire capitalism is just, come what may, then why
should we care to find out what may, in fact, come?
Policy must be viewed through a consequentialist framework- slipping into
the libertarian mindset only recreates the root cause of the affirmative
harms
Friedman, Political Science at Bernard University, 97
(Jefferey Friedman, PoliSci Bernard U, 1997, "What's Wrong with
Libertarianism," Critical Review, Volume: 3, pp. 458-459)
On the one hand, the reclamation of the Enlightenment legacy can lead in far more directions
than the politicalscience path I have suggested. It is surely important to launch
anthropological, economic, historical, sociological, and psychological investigations of the
preconditions of human happiness. And post-libertarian cultural historians and critics are
uniquely positioned to analyze the unstated assumptions that take the place of the requisite
knowledge in determining democratic attitudes. A prime candidate would seem to be the

overwhelming focus on intentions as markers for the desirability of a policy. If a policy is well
intended, this is usually taken to be a decisive consideration in its favor. This heuristic might
explain the moralism that observers since Tocqueville have noticed afflicts democratic cultures.
To date, this phenomenon is relatively unexplored. Analogous opportunities for insightful
postlibertarian research can be found across the spectrum of political behavior. What is
nationalism, for example, if not a device that helps an ignorant public navigate the murky
waters of politics by applying a simple us-versus-them test to any proposed policy? Pursuit of
these possibilities, however, must be accompanied by awareness of the degeneration of
postwar skepticism into libertarian ideology. If the post-libertarian social scientist yields to the

hope of re-establishing through consequentialist research the antigovernment politics that has until

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now been sustained by libertarian ideology; she will only recreate the conditions that have served to
retard serious empirical inquiry. It is fashionable to call for political engagement by scholars and to
deny the possibility that one can easily isolate ones work from ones political sympathies . But
difficulty is no excuse for failing to try. Libertarians have even less of an excuse than most, since,
having for so long accused the intellectual mainstream of bias and insulation from refutation, they
should understand better than anyone the importance of subverting ones own natural intellectual
complacency with the constant reminder that one might be wrong. The only remedy for the
sloppiness that has plagued libertarian scholarship is to become ones own harshest critic. This
means thinking deeply and skeptically about ones politics and its premises and, if one has
libertarian sympathies, directing ones scholarship not at vindicating them, but at finding out if they
are mistaken.
Governments must weigh consequences
Harries, editor and founder of National Interest, Senior Fellow at Centre for
Independent Studies, 94
(Owen Harries, editor and founder of National Interest, Senior Fellow at
Centre for Independent Studies, Spring 1993/1994, Power and Civilization,
The National Interest)
Performance is the test. Asked directly by a Western interviewer, In principle, do you believe
in one standard of human rights and free expression?, Lee immediately answers, Look, it is
not a matter of principle but of practice. This might appear to represent a simple and rather
crude pragmatism. But in its context it might also be interpreted as an appreciation of the
fundamental point made by Max Weber that, in politics, it is the ethic of responsibility
rather than the ethic of absolute ends that is appropriate. While an individual
is free to treat human rights as absolute, to be observed whatever the cost,
governments must always weigh consequences and the competing claims of
other ends. So once they enter the realm of politics, human rights have to take
their place in a hierarchy of interests, including such basic things as national
security and the promotion of prosperity. Their place in that hierarchy will vary with
circumstances, but no responsible government will ever be able to put them
always at the top and treat them as inviolable and over-riding. The cost of
implementing and promoting them will always have to be considered.

Moral absolutism suffers from tunnel vision that generates evil and political
irrelevance
Isaac, PhD.Yale, Prof. PoliSci Indiana-Bloomington, dir. Center for the Study
of Democracy and Public Life, 02
(Jeffrey C. Isaac, PhD.Yale, Prof. PoliSci Indiana-Bloomington, dir. Center for
the Study of Democracy and Public Life, Spring 2002, End, Means, and
Politics, Dissent Magazine, vol. 49, no. 2)
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have
taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern
may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal
flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of ones intention does not ensure the achievement of what
one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised
parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view
them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see
that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness;
it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as

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opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating

violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails
to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the
effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment
with good may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of good that generates evil. This is
the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that ones goals be sincere or
idealistic; it is equally important , always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to
judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits
this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it

undermines political effectiveness.

Utilitarianism key to policy making
Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.731-2, professor
of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative:
Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline)
Evolutionary progression toward majoritarian decision-making follows from the utilitarian
function of social organization to enhance human need/want fulli1lment. Because the

need/want preference of community members are best known to them,

resource allocations and behavior constraints that significantly reflect their input best implement those preferences. The need/want fulfillment of such
members expands with their approval of community decision-making
institutions. Such approval lowers the costs of dissenter disruption while
increasing psychological security and productive efficiency. The utilitarian
enhanced-fulfillment goal is most effectively implemented by communities that
optimize (not maximize) individual participation in policy formulation . Optimal
participation involves the selection of capable officials who make independent community
fulfillment decisions but remain subject to effective community supervision. Self-constrained
majoritarianism thus appears to be the evolving political counterpart of utilitarianism, a
continuity suggested by the progression of western nations from autocracy toward
representative democracy, the enhanced need/want fulfillment that has accompanied the
progression, and the inability of totalitarian governments to match that fulfillment.

Policymakers should adapt utilitarian calculus applicable throughout

society
Goodin90
[RobertE.
Goodin
The
Utilitarian
Response.
Ed
p.
140-1
http://books.google.com/books?id=l3ZBwjK_1_QC&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=%22That,+I+submit,
+is+a+fallacy
%22+goodin&source=bl&ots=9hUQGnLTzV&sig=URHUw3uamFPyVmKwTyG1onBQvZI&hl=en&ei=z
KxmSsfVMpCEtgfLvP3yDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1]
The distinction I shall here propose works along a dimension orthogonal to that one. Instead of
differentiating utilitarianisms on the basis of what they are used to choose, I suggest doing so on
the basis of who is supposed to use the utilirarian calculus to make choices, Implicitly,
contemporary discussions of varieties of utilitatianism are all standardly addresses, first and
foremost, to individuals acting in their personal capacities and making choices which, while they
may affect others as well, principally affect the choosers own lives, Implicitly, public officials
choices of general social policy. A different menu of options in some respects greater, in others,
less, but in any case different- is available to public and private users. That, I submit, is a fallacy. It
does not matter who is using the utilitarian calculus, in what circumstances and for what purposes.

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Using the felicific calculus for micro-level purposes of guiding individuals choices of personal
conduct is altogether different from using it for macro-level purposes of guiding public officials
shoices of general social policy. A different menu of options in some respects greater, in others,
less, but in any case different is available to public and private choosers. Those differences are
such as to neutralize in the public sphere, most of the objections standardly lodged against
utilitarianism in the private sphere. True through such complaints may be as applied to
utilitarianism as a standard of personal conduct, they are irrelevant (or anyway much less
problematic) as applied to utilitarianism as a standard of public policy. Or so I shall argue.

In a nuclear world, you have to weigh consequences

Bok, Prof. Phil. Brandeis, 88
(Sissela Bok, Prof. Phil. Brandeis, 1988, Applied Ethics and Ethical Theory,
ed. David Rosenthal and Fudlou Shehadi, pp. 202-203)
The same argument can be made for Kants other formulations of the Categorical Imperative:
So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, always
at the same time as an end, never simply as a means; and So act as if you were always
through actions a law-making member in a universal Kingdom of Ends. No one with a
concern for humanity could consistently will to risk eliminating humanity in the
person of himself and every other or to risk the death of all members in a universal Kingdom of
Ends for the sake of justice. To risk their collective death for the sake of following ones
conscience would be, as Rawls said, irrational, crazy. And to say that one did not intend
such a catastrophe, but that one merely failed to stop other persons from bringing
it about would be beside the point when the end of the world was at stake. For

although it is true that we cannot be held responsible for most of the wrongs
that others commit, the Latin maxim presents a case where we would have to take
such a responsibility seriouslyperhaps to the point of deceiving, bribing, even
killing an innocent person, in order that the world not perish.

Utilitarianism necessitates public policy that requires that leaders take the
action which is in the best interest of people
Shaw Philosophy Professor 1999 (William H. Shaw, 1999, Philosophy and
Chair of the Philosophy at SJSU, contemporary ethics: taking account of
utilitarianism p 171-2)
Utilitarianism ties right and wrong to the promotion of well-being, but it is not only n personal
ethic or a guide to individual conduct. lt is also a "public philosophy" - that is, a normative
basis for public policy and the structuring of our social, legal, and political institutions. Indeed,
it was just this aspect of utilitarianism that primarily engaged Bentham, john Stuart Mill, his
father James, and their friends and votaries. For them utilitarianism was, first and foremost, a
social and political philosophy and only secondarily a private or personal moral code. In
particular, they saw utilitarianism as providing the yardstick by which to measure, assess, and,
where necessary, reform government social and economic policy and the judicial institutions of
their day. In the public realm, utilitarianism is especially compelling. Because of its

consequentialist character, a utilitarian approach to public policy requires

officials to base their actions, procedures, and programs on the most accurate
and detailed understanding they can obtain of the circum- stances in which
they are operating and the likely results of the alternatives open to them .

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Realism and empiricism are the hallmarks of a utilitarian orientation, not customary practice,
unverified abstractions, or wishful
Promotion of the well being of all seems to be the
appropriate, indeed the only sensible, touchstone for assessing public policies and institutions,
and the standard objections to utilitarianism as a personal morality carry little or
no weight against it when viewed as a public philosophy . Consider, for instance, the
criticisms that utilitarianism is too impersonal and ignores one's individual attachments and
personal commitments, that it is coldly calculating and concerned only with maximizing, that it
demands too much of moral agents and that it permits one to violate certain basic moral
restraints on the treatment of others. The previous two chapters addressed sorne of these
criticisms; others will be dealt with in Chapter 8. The point here, though, is that far from
undermining utilitarianism as a public philosophy , these criticisms highlight its
strengths. We want public officials to be neutral, impersonal. and detached and

to proceed with their eyes firmly on the effects of the policies they pursue and
the institutions that their decisions shape. Policy making requires public
officials to address general issues, typical conditions. and common circumstances. Inevitably, they must do this through general rules, not on a case by case basis. As
explained later in this chapter, this fact precludes public officials from violating the
rights of individuals as a matter of policy. Moreover, by organizing the efforts of
countless individuals and compelling each of us to play our part in collective endeavors to
enhance welfare, public officials can make it less likely that utilitarianism will demand too much
of any one individual because others are doing too little. Utilitarians will seek to direct

and coordinate people's actions through effective public policy and to reshape,
in utility-enhancing ways, the institutions that structure the choices people
face. By doing so, utilitarians can usually accomplish more good than they can
through isolated individual action, however dedicated and well intentioned . For
this reason, they will strive to Easter institutions that false over from individuals much of the
task of promoting the general welfare of society. General welfare is a broad goal, of

course, and sensible policies and institutions will typically focus on more
specific desiderata - such as promoting productivity, increasing individual
freedom and opportunity, improving peoples physical health, guaranteeing
their personal security, and so on that contribute significantly to people's
well-being. Implementing even there goals can prove difficult. Furthermore, many of the
problems facing society have no simple answers because they are tangled up with contested
issues of fact and controversial questions of psychology, sociology, and economics. To the
extent that utilitarians disagree among themselves over these matters, their policy
recommendations will diverge. Nevertheless, by clarifying what is at stake and continually
orienting discussion toward the promotion of well-being, a. utilitarian approach provides the
necessary framework for addressing questions of institutional design and for fashioning
effective public policy. The present chapter explicates the utilitarian approach to three matters
that have long engaged social and political philosophers and that concern.

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Consequences matter the tunnel vision of moral absolutism generates evil

and political irrelevance

Deontology is bad in the context of public policy five reasons

Woller, 1997 (Gary, Economics Professor at BYU, Policy Currents, June,
http://apsapolicysection.org/vol7_2/72.pdf , p. 11)
At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for
public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas
in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they
create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem
or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no
means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori
reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any
number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral
principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental
policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based
environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by streetlevel enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental
policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross
purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of
regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example,
Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even
the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The
above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically
involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all,
the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so
conclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy . It is seldom the case
that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows
that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between
policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured
that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end
language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are
an insufficient, though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.

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Maximizing all lives is the only way to affirm equal and unconditional human
dignity
Cummiskey, 1996 (David, Associate Philosophy Professor at Bates College, Kantian
Consequentialism, p. 145-146)
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for
some abstract social entity. It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for
some elusive overall social good. Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the
inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that to use a
person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate
person, that his is the only life he has. But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do
not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if
we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons,
each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction . In such a situation, what
would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational
beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the
principle that rational nature exists as an end in itself (GMM 429). Rational nature as such is the
supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an

equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting
the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible (chapter 5). In order to avoid this
conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we
saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered
constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kants normative theory is
based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead
to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses
of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then
what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of
value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not
deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have dignity, that is, an
unconditional and incomparable worth that transcends any market value (GMM 436), but

persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give
way for the sake of others (chapters 5 and 7). The concept of the end-in-itself does not
support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit
others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration
suggests that one may have to sacrifice some to save many .

Utilitarianism is the most moral outlookprovides the most benefits for the
most number of people
Calculating Consequences: The Utilitarian Approach to Ethic, Developed by Manuel Velasquez,
Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer, This article appeared originally in
Issues in Ethics V2 N1 (Winter 1989), http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/calculating.html
Over the years, the principle of utilitarianism has been expanded and refined so that today there
are many variations of the principle. For example, Bentham defined benefits and harms in terms
of pleasure and pain. John Stuart Mill, a great 19th century utilitarian figure, spoke of benefits and
harms not in terms of pleasure and pain alone but in terms of the quality or intensity of such
pleasure and pain. Today utilitarians often describe benefits and harms in terms of the satisfaction
of personal preferences or in purely economic terms of monetary benefits over monetary costs.
Utilitarians also differ in their views about the kind of question we ought to ask ourselves when
making an ethical decision. Some utilitarians maintain that in making an ethical decision, we must
ask ourselves: "What effect will my doing this act in this situation have on the general balance of
good over evil?" If lying would produce the best consequences in a particular situation, we ought
to lie. Others, known as rule utilitarians, claim that we must choose that act that conforms to the
general rule that would have the best consequences. In other words, we must ask ourselves:
"What effect would everyone's doing this kind of action have on the general balance of good over

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evil?" So, for example, the rule "to always tell the truth" in general promotes the good of everyone
and therefore should always be followed, even if in a certain situation lying would produce the
best consequences. Despite such differences among utilitarians, however, most hold to the
general principle that morality must depend on balancing the beneficial and harmful
consequences of our conduct.

Ethics are accessed through the evaluation of consequences through an

impartial outlook
David Sanford Horner, Policies for a nanosociety: Can we learn now from our future mistakes?
2005 - bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar
At the same time Moor wishes to retain the notion that consequences count that is that the
evaluation of a given policy requires the evaluation of the consequences and often the
consequences of that policy compared with other the consequences of other possible policies
(Moor, 1999, p.66). Moors approach involves two stages. Firstly, the application of an
impartiality test and then secondly the appraisal of the various outcomes and consequences
of actions and policies, weighing the good consequences and the bad consequences, of
those policies surviving the impartiality test. In the first stage deliberation takes place over the
various policies to determine whether or not they meet ethical criteria. A policy is determined to
be ethical if (a) it does not cause any unnecessary harm to individuals and groups and (b) it
supports individual rights, the fulfilling of duties etc. In the second stage the best policy is
selected from the set of just policies arrived at in the deliberation stage by ranking ethical
policies in terms of benefits and (justifiable) harms. In carrying out this evaluation of policies we
are required to: (a) weigh carefully between the good consequences and bad consequences in
ethical policies, and (b) distinguish between disagreements about facts and disagreements about
principles and values, when deciding which ethical policy should be adopted (Tavani, 2004, 60
61).

Turn calculation is inevitable and justified every action requires

calculation, and refusing to engage in calculation means allowing the worst
atrocities to occur.
Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998
[David, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia, p. 186-188]
"that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the
unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as alibi for stay ing out of juridicopolitical battles, within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and
others." Indeed, "incalculable justice requires us to calculate." From where do these insistences come? What
That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues,

109

is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship

"left to itself, the incalculable and giving (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be
reappropriated by the most perverse cal culation." 170 The necessity of calculating the
incalculable thus responds to a duty, a duty that inhabits the instant of madness and
compels the decision to avoid "the bad," the "perverse calculation," even "the worst."
This is the duty that also dwells with deconstructive thought and makes it the starting
point, the "at least necessary condition," for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its
forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we rec ognize
that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences "we
recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, antiSemitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."
that because of its undecidability multiplies responsi bility, and the fact that

Furthermore, the duty within the decision, the obligation that recognizes the necessity of negotiating the possibilities provided by the
impossibilities of justice, is not content with simply avoiding, con taining, combating, or negating the worst-violence-though it could certainly begin with
those strategies. Instead, this responsibility, which is the responsibility of responsibility, commissions a "utopian" strat egy. Not, a strategy that is
beyond all bounds of possibility so as to be considered "unrealistic," but one

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the necessity of calculation takes the possibility summoned by the calculation as far as possible, "must
take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or
politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and inter national, public and private, and so on." "' As Derrida
which in respecting

declares, "The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible:
the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention.""' This leads Derrida to enunciate a
proposition that many, not the least of whom are his Habermasian critics, could hardly have expected: "Nothing seems to me less outdated than
the classical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without treating it too
lightly and forming the worst complicities."14
Residing within-and not far below the surface-of Derrida's account of the experience of the undecidable as the context
for the decision is the duty of deconstructive thought, the responsibility for the other, and the opposition to totalitarianism it
entails. The Levinasian supplement that Critchley argues deconstruction requires with respect to politics thus draws out that which
is already present. It is, though, perhaps an element that needs to be drawn out, for Derrida has been candid about, and often
criticized for, his political hesitancy. In answer to a question about the potential for translating the "theoretical radicality of

praxis," Derrida confessed (his term) "that I have never succeeded in directly relating
deconstruction to existing political codes and programmes."
This "failure" is derived not from any
apolitical sentiment within deconstructive thought but from the
"fundamentally metaphysical" nature of the political codes within which both
the right and the left presently operate. The problem for politics that this
disjuncture creates is, according to Derrida, that one has "to gesture in opposite di rections at the same time: on the one hand to preserve a distance and
suspicion with regard to the official political codes governing reality; on the
other, to intervene here and now in a practical and engaged man ner
whenever the necessity arises." This, Derrida laments, results in a "dual allegiance" and "perpetual
deconstruction" into a "radical political

115

uneasiness" whereby the logic of an argument structured in terms of "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" may mean
that political action, which follows from a decision between the competing hands, is in the end insufficient to the intellectual promise
of deconstructive thought16 But in The Other Heading, Derrida's reflection on the question and politics of European identity,
the difficulty of simultaneously gesturing in different directions is posed in an affirmative political manner.

Rejection of prediction is an implicit prediction which undercuts good

predictions.
Fitzsimmons 06

(Michael, defense analyst in Washington D.C. for Global Politics and Strategy. The Problem of
Uncertainty in Strategic Planning. 484.4 (2006), pp. 131-146.
<http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/00396330601062808>; d/l 7/15/09)
Finally, the planning for post-war operations in Iraq offers another perspective on the tangled
relationship between uncertainty and strategy. Problems of predicting the future are at the heart of
intelligence analysis and its role in national-security strategy. While few would question the fragility of
intelligence estimates or the chequered history of judgements made by the US intelligence community,
prediction remains an important part of its mission. Beyond collecting and reporting raw information,
intelligence organisations are often expected to identify trends and consider the implications of
alternative strategies on the behaviour of allies and adversaries. To accomplish this difficult mission,
intelligence analysts must rely on two crucial resources: good analytic tradecraft that provides
transparent standards of evidence, and subject-matter expertise that enables an appreciation for the
subtleties of complex human phenomena. But standards of evidence and subject-matter expertise are
exactly the sorts of factors decision-makers sceptical of the reliability of prediction might be apt to
discount. If uncertainty defines the strategic environment, then what greater insight can the expert
analyst bring to bear on strategy than the generalist? This attitude could marginalise intelligence
analysis in strategic decision-making. US planning for the aftermath of the Iraq War exemplifies how
such marginalisation has played a significant role in recent strategic decision-making. In the judgement
of Paul Pillar, the senior US intelligence official for Middle East analysis from 2000 to 2005, what is most
remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled
policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in
recent decades.26 While great volumes of ink have been spilled in the debate over intelligence
estimates of Iraqi nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, there is much more clarity about the
intelligence communitys estimates of the political environment the US would face in post-war Iraq.
Those estimates accurately predicted most of the major challenges that developed, from insurgency
and sectarian violence to the strengthening of Irans geopolitical hand and the galvanising effect on
foreign radical Islamists.27 The reported expectations of most key administration officials bore little

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resemblance to these predictions.28 Rumsfelds famous distinction between known unknowns and
unknown unknowns came in response to a reporters question on the intelligence supporting
assertions of linkages between the Iraqi government and terrorist organisations.29 The implication of
his remark was that presumption of a genuine Iraqiterrorist linkage was justified because the absence
of evidence to support the presumption did not conclusively disprove it. Here, as with the post-war
planning assumptions, uncertainty served to level the playing field between facts and analysis, on the
one hand, and the preconceptions of senior leadership on the other. Many of the US governments
experts on Iraq and the Arab world outside the intelligence community were also marginalised in the
planning for the Iraq War. In 2002, the State Department launched the Future of Iraq Project to write a
detailed plan for the governance of a post-Saddam democratic Iraq. Participants included dozens of
career Middle East specialists from the State Department and the intelligence community, as well as
native Iraqis. The projects report covered a wide variety of topics, from development of a constitution
to the management of municipal utilities. In the end, however, leaders in the White House and the
Pentagon viewed the report as too pessimistic and ignored many of its conclusions.30 Another wellpublicised instance where decision-makers rejected expert advice on weak grounds was the public
exchange between Pentagon civilian leaders and the Army chief of staff regarding the number of
ground troops required for successful post-hostilities operations in Iraq. One month prior to the invasion,
General Eric Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that establishing security and
conditions for political stability in Iraq following the end of major combat operations would take several
hundred thousand coalition ground troops. His estimate was based on the application of trooptopopulation ratios from previous security and stabilisation operations.31 While fairly rudimentary, the
thrust of this analysis was shared by a variety of expert analysts outside the government.32 Two days
after Shinsekis testimony, both Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz publicly
renounced the estimate. Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee that Shinseki was wildly off the
mark, and offered several unsubstantiated and, in retrospect, incorrect predictions about post-war
attitudes toward American forces among Iraqis and US allies. Having made these predictions, he then
proceded to reject the validity of making predictions, insisting that the most fundamental point is that
we simply cannot predict ... we have no idea what we will need unless and until we get there on the
ground.33 In effect, by denying the validity of prediction, Wolfowitz locked himself into a very specific
but implicit prediction that conformed to his own preconceptions. The point is neither that Army
generals are always better qualified to make such judgements than civilians, nor that hindsight shows
Shinsekis judgement to be better than Wolfowitzs. It is that the grounds for the decision that was
actually made on troop levels were conspicuously shakier than those of Shinsekis judgement, and yet
they prevailed. The mistakes that were made in the Bush administrations post-war planning for Iraq are
entirely consistent with a bias in decision-making against the authority of expertise in predicting the
future, and the invocation of uncertainty in this instance became a rationale for rigidity in planning
rather than flexibility.

Predictions are key to check disasters

Kurasawa 04

[Fuyuki Kurasawa, Professor of Sociology York University of Toronto, Cautionary Tales: The Global
Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight, Constellations, 11(4), 2004]
When engaging in the labor of preventive foresight, the first obstacle that one is likely to encounter
from some intellectual circles is a deep-seated skepticism about the very value of the exercise. A
radically postmodern line of thinking, for instance, would lead us to believe that it is pointless,
perhaps even harmful, to strive for farsightedness in light of the aforementioned crisis of
conventional paradigms of historical analysis. If, contra teleological models, history has no intrinsic
meaning, direction, or endpoint to be discovered through human reason, and if, contra scientistic
futurism, prospective trends cannot be predicted without error, then the abyss of chronological
inscrutability supposedly opens up at our feet. The future appears to be unknowable, an outcome of
chance. Therefore, rather than embarking upon grandiose speculation about what may occur, we
should adopt a pragmatism that abandons itself to the twists and turns of history; let us be content
to formulate ad hoc responses to emergencies as they arise While this argument has the merit of
underscoring the fallibilistic nature of all predictive schemes, it conflates the necessary recognition of
the contingency of history with unwarranted assertions about the latters total opacity and
indeterminacy. Acknowledging the fact that the future cannot be known with absolute certainty does

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not imply abandoning the task of trying to understand what is brewing on the horizon and to prepare
for crises already coming into their own. In fact, the incorporation of the principle of fallibility into the
work of prevention means that we must be ever more vigilant for warning signs of disaster and for
responses that provoke unintended or unexpected consequences (a point to which I will return in the
final section of this paper). In addition, from a normative point of view, the acceptance of historical
contingency and of the self-limiting character of farsightedness places the duty of preventing
catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of present generations. The future no longer appears to be a
metaphysical creature of destiny or of the cunning of reason, nor can it be sloughed off to pure
randomness. It becomes, instead, a result of human action shaped by decisions in the present
including, of course, trying to anticipate and prepare for possible and avoidable sources of harm to
our successors. Combining a sense of analytical contingency toward the future and ethical
responsibility for it, the idea of early warning is making its way into preventive action on the global
stage. Despite the fact that not all humanitarian, techno- scientific, and environmental disasters can
be predicted in advance, the multiplication of independent sources of knowledge and detection
mechanisms enables us to foresee many of them before it is too late. Indeed, in recent years, global
civil societys capacity for early warning has dramatically increased, in no small part due to the
impressive number of NGOs that include catastrophe prevention at the heart of their mandates.
These organizations are often the first to detect signs of trouble, to dispatch investigative or factfinding missions, and to warn the inter- national community about impending dangers; to wit, the
lead role of environ- mental groups in sounding the alarm about global warming and species
depletion or of humanitarian agencies regarding the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, fre- quently
months or even years before Western governments or multilateral institu- tions followed suit

Despite studies predictions experts are still trustworthy

Caplan 5
[Bryan Caplan, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, EconLog, 12-26-2005,
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/12/tackling_tetloc_1.html]
Philip Tetlock, one of my favorite social scientists, is making waves with his new book, Expert Political
Judgment. Tetlock spent two decades asking hundreds of political experts to make predictions about
hundreds of issues. With all this data under his belt, he then asks and tries to answer a bunch of Big
Questions, including "Do experts on average have a greater-than-chance ability to predict the future?,"
and "What kinds of experts have the greatest forecasting ability?" This book is literally awesome - to
understand Tetlock's project and see how well he follows through fills me with awe. And that's tough for
me to admit, because it would be easy to interpret Tetlock's work as a great refutation of my own. Most
of my research highlights the systematic belief differences between economists and the general public,
and defends the simple "The experts are right, the public is wrong," interpretation of the facts. But
Tetlock finds that the average expert is an embarassingly bad forecaster. In fact, experts barely beat
what Tetlock calls the "chimp" stategy of random guessing. Is my confidence in experts completely
misplaced? I think not. Tetlock's sample suffers from severe selection bias. He deliberately asked
relatively difficult and controversial questions. As his methodological appendix explains, questions had
to "Pass the 'don't bother me too often with dumb questions' test." Dumb according to who? The implicit
answer is "Dumb according to the typical expert in the field." What Tetlock really shows is that experts
are overconfident if you exclude the questions where they have reached a solid consensus.

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Consequentialism accesses their internal linkwe make the best decisions

based on moral AND utilitarian consequences
Normative Ethics by Shelley Kagan, Westview Press 1997, Page 61, http://books.google.com/books?
id=YllnYJ9R0q0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=deontology+vs.+consequentialism&client=firefoxa&source=gbs_similarbooks_s&cad=1

Consequentialism is not calculativein fact, it rejects complete calculation

because thats not an accurate way to determine impacts
Normative Ethics by Shelley Kagan, Westview Press 1997, Page 61, http://books.google.com/books?
id=YllnYJ9R0q0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=deontology+vs.+consequentialism&client=firefoxa&source=gbs_similarbooks_s&cad=1

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Concrete decision making - Only Utilitarianism makes justifications based on

the end result rather then ambiguous language
Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.758-9, professor
of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative:
Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline)
Disregarding the significance of evolutionary survival, nonutilitarian intuitionists deny that
utilitarianism provides a "moral" basis for choice between competing need/want fulfillments.
They seek instead to identify the intuitive "preexisting rights that must, they insist, underlie
such choice.' But they disclose no nonrnystical. source of the rights,*' which are, in fact,
derived from the search for increased per capita need/want fulfillment. Although frequently
accorded a transcendental immutability, rights identify the resource and behavior allocations
that are perceived by the community as enhancing such fulfillment. Indeed, revelation of

various a priori rights or moral standards is often accompanied by

disparagement of other such rights or standards as crypto-nti1itarian. A priori
rights divorced from need/want fulfillment depend on the magic power of
language. When not determined by social consequences, the morality of
behavior tends to be resolved by definition of the words used to characterize
the behavior. Necessarily ambiguous generalizations, evolved to describe and
correlate heterogeneous events, acquire a controlling normative role . Definition,
of course, reflects human experience. But the equivocal significance of that experience may be
replaced with the illusory security of fixed meaning. Ethical connotations are then drawn not
from the underlying empirical lessons that provide a context for meaning, but from inflexible
linguistic "principles and their emotional overtones. Derivation of meaning from the social
purposes that engender the terminology leads to a utilitarian appraisal of need] want
fulfillment. The preexisting rights of nonutilitarian morality are usually identified

as components of "liberty," "equality, and autonomy,"' labels that suggest a

concern with individual need/want fulfillment and its social constraints. Liberty
is perceived as freedom for behavior that improves the quality of existence,
such as speech, religion, and other "civil rights activity; equality as rejection of
disparate individual worth and "discriminatory" treatment; autonomy as the
individual choice implied by liberty and equality.
Utilitarianism prevents nuclear war
Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.758, professor
of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative:
Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline)
Without effective reciprocity, self-defense is the only survival remedy. Passive resistance to a
Hitler has survival costs that are acceptable to few communities. Rejection of those costs is
perhaps being accommodated with the intolerable survival costs of nuclear warfare by
payment of more immediate nuclear-deterrence costs. Negotiations to reduce the nucleardeterrence costs confront the participants with a predicament like the "prisone1s dilemma"' if
nuclear weapons can escape detection: although both participants would benefit from a
reduction, each is impelled to increase its nuclear weapons as protection against an
undetected increase by the other. But each may also be impelled to refrain from their use. If
that accommodation fails, so may the evolutionary process. While the accommodation

holds, nonnuclear self defense re- mains the survival remedy pending a
reciprocity solution. The survival costs of nonnuclear warfare of course
continue to be high, but when the survival costs of capitulation are perceived

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as exceeding them, compensation for combatants commensurate with risk

would provide a kind of market accommodation for those induced thereby to
volunteer and would reduce the disproportionate wartime-con-scription
assessment.

Utilitarianism inevitable
Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.727, professor
of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative:
Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline)
utilitarianism reconciles autonomy and reciprocity, surmounts the strident intuitionist attack,
and exposes the utilitarian underpinning of a priori rights." In the context of the information
provided by biology, anthropology, economics, and other disciplines, a functional description of
evolutionary utilitarianism identities enhanced per capita need/want fulfillment as
the long-term utilitarian-majoritarian goal, illuminates the critical relationship of self
interest to that goal, and discloses the trial-and-error process of accommodation and priority
assignment that implements it. The description confirms that process as arbiter of the tension

between individual welfare and group welfare (i.e., between autonomy and reciprocity)* and
suggests a utilitarian imperative: that utilitarianism is unavoidable, that morality rests ultimately on
utilitarian self interest, that in the final analysis all of us are personal utilitarians and most of us are
social utilitarians.
Utilitarianism is inevitable - people are inherently utilitarians
Gino et al 2008 [Francesca Gino Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Don Moore Tepper Business School, Carnegie
Mellon University, Max H. Bozman Harvard Business School, Harvard
University No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments
http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-080.pdf]
A home seller neglects to inform the buyer about the homes occasional problems with flooding
in the basement: The seller intentionally omits it from the houses legally required disclosure
document, and fails to reveal it in the negotiation. A few months after the closing, the
basement is flooded and destroyed, and the buyer spends $20,000 in repairs. Most people
would agree that the sellers unethical behavior deserves to be punished. Now consider the
same behavior on the part of a second seller, except that it is followed by a long drought, so
the buyer never faces a flooded basement. Both sellers were similarly unethical, yet
their behavior produced different results . In this paper, we seek to answer the
question: Do people judge the ethicality of the two sellers differently, despite the
fact that their behavior was the same ? And if so, under what conditions are peoples
judgments of ethicality influenced by outcome information? Past research has shown

some of the ways that people tend to take outcome information into account in
a manner that is not logically justified (Baron & Hershey, 1988; Allison, Mackie, &
Messick, 1996). Baron and Hershey (1988) labeled this tendency as the outcome bias.
Extending prior work on the effect of outcome severity on judgments (Berg-Cross, 1975;
Lipshitz, 1989; Mitchell & Kalb, 1981; Stokes & Leary, 1984), their research found that people

judge the wisdom and competence of decision makers based on the nature of the outcomes they
obtain. For instance, in one study participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario of a

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surgeon deciding whether or not to perform a risky operation (Baron & Hershey, 1988). The
surgeon knew the probability of success. After reading about identical decision processes,
participants learned either that the patient lived or died, and were asked to rate the quality of the No
Foul 4 surgeons decision to operate. When the patient died, participants decided it was a mistake to
have operated in the first place.
Consequentialism is best, short term impacts are key even when the longterm impacts are uncertain
Cowen 2004 [Tyler Cowen, Department of Economics George Mason
University The epistemic Problem does not refute
consequentialismNovember2,2004 http://docs.google.com/gview?
a=v&q=cache:JYKgDUM8xOcJ:www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/Epistemic2.pdf+
%22nuclear+attack+on+Manhattan%22+cowen&hl=en&gl=us]
Let us start with a simple example, namely a suicide bomber who seeks to detonate a nuclear
device in midtown Manhattan. Obviously we would seek to stop the bomber, or If we stop the
bomber, we know that in the short run we will save millions of lives, avoid a massive tragedy,
and protect the long-term strength, prosperity, and freedom of the United States. Reasonable
moral people, regardless of the details of their meta-ethical stances, should not argue against
stopping the bomber. No matter how hard we try to stop the bomber, we are not, a priori,
committed to a very definite view of how effective prevention will turn out in the long run. After
all, stopping the bomber will reshuffle future genetic identities, and may imply the birth of a
future Hitler. Even trying to stop the bomber, with no guarantee of success, will remix the
future in similar fashion.Still, we can see a significant net welfare improvement in the short run,
while facing radical generic uncertainty about the future in any case. Furthermore, if we can
stop the bomber, our long-run welfare estimates will likely show some improvement. The bomb
going off could lead to subsequent attacks on other major cities, the emboldening of terrorists,
or perhaps broader panics. There would be a new and very real doorway toward general
collapse of the world. While the more distant future is remixed radically, we should not
rationally believe that some new positive option has been created to counterbalance the
current destruction and the new possible negatives. To put it simply, it is difficult to see the
violent destruction of Manhattan as on net, in ex ante terms, favoring either the short-term or
long-term prospects of the world. We can of course imagine possible scenarios where such
destruction works out for the better ex post; perhaps, for instance, the explosion leads to a
subsequent disarmament or anti-proliferation advances. But we would not breathe a sigh of
relief on hearing the news of the destruction for the first time. Even if the long-run expected
value is impossible to estimate, we need only some probability that the relevant time horizon is
indeed short (perhaps a destructive asteroid will strike the earth). This will tip the
consequentialist balance against a nuclear attack on Manhattan.

Concept of morals not mutually exclusive with utilitarianism

Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992
Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press.
Pg 204-205.
There is, however, another line of thinking that connects desirability with moral obligation for
the utilitarian, and in fact shows why a utilitarian requires a concept of moral obligation
and what the concept will be. This line of reasoning goes as follows. We begin with the
assumption that the utilitarian wants to maximize happiness in society. Now, he knows that one
important means to his goal, indeed the only one within our control, is human actions with that
effect. So he will want acts that produce welfare, ideally ones that will maximize it as compared
with other options. Let us say, then, that he will want expedient acts as a means to happiness. But the thoughtful

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utilitarian will further ask himself how he can bring it about that people perform acts which, taken together, will
maximize happiness. One way, and surely a good way up to a point, is to employ moral education to make people more
sympathetic or altruistic; if they become so, they will tend to act more frequently to produce happiness in others. It
looks, however, ;as if such educational encouragement of sympathy is not enough, mainly because people are illinformed about the probable consequences of what they do, and in any case because the intent to do as much good as
one can may lead to action at cross-purposes rather than to more beneficial cooperative behavior. S o the

utilitarian, who wants maximal happiness, will do something more than just try to motivate
people to aim directly at it. It will occur to him that a legal system, with its sanctions and
implicit directives, will both guide people what to do, and at the same time provide motivation
to conform to the legal standards. He will want, with Bentham, a legal system which as a whole
will maximize happiness by producing pro-social conduct at the least cost. Moreover, the one
thing should be clear: If the moral system has been carefully devised, there will not be gross
disparity between what it requires and conduct that promises to maximize benefit. To avoid
such disparity, an optimal rule-utilitarian moral code will contain " escape clauses." For
instance, it will permit a driver to obstruct a driveway illegally when there is an emergency
situation. But suppose there is a minor disparity between the requirements of the moral code
and what will do most good: suppose Mary will have to walk to work tomorrow, but the gain in
convenience to the person who obstructs her driveway will be: greater than the loss to her. Will
the consistent utilitarian then advise the driver to park illegally? Let us suppose the utilitarian
has decided that a utility maximizing moral code will not direct a person to do what he thinks
will maximize expectable utility in a particular situation, but to follow certain rules - roughly, to
follow his conscientious principles, as amended where long-range utility requires. If he has
decided this, then it is inconsistent of him to turn around and advise individuals just to follow
their discretion about what will maximize utility in a particular case. Of course, the utilitarian
will want everyone to be sensitive to the utility of giving aid to others and avoiding injury;
requirements or encouragement to do so are pan of our actual moral cede, and it is optimal for
the code to be $0. But once it is decided that the optimal code is not that of act-utilitarianism,
the utilitarian will say it is desirable for a person to follow the optimal moral code, that is, follow
conscience except where utility demands amendment of the principles of the code, So it seems
the consistent utilitarian will conclude that there is a moral obligation not to obstruct Mary' s
driveway illegally, in accordance with the optimal code.

Successful integration of morality into utilitarian calculus possible

Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992
Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press.
Pg 212.
My conclusion is that if we are to be utilitarians in the sense that we think morality should
maximize long-range utility, and at the same time think that a utilitarian morality should have
room for recognition of rights that cannot be overridden by marginal gains in utility, there are
two positions we must espouse. First, we must hold that a person does the right act, or the
obligatory act, not by just following his actual moral principles wherever they may lead, but by
following the moral principles the acceptance of which in society would maximize expectable
utility. Of course, this means that people who want to do what is right may have to do some
thinking about their moral principles in particular situations. Second, we must emphasize that
the right act is the one permitted by or required by the moral code the acceptance of which
promises to maximize utility, and not compromise, except in extreme circumstances, in order
to do what in a particular situation will maximize utility , where so doing conflicts with the
utility-maximizing code. Only if we do this will we have room for a concept of " a right" which
cannot be overridden by a marginal addition to the general welfare. It is clear that acting
morally in this sense will never be very costly in utility, and where it is costly at all, that is the
price that has to be paid for a policy, a morality of principle. If my exegesis of J. S. Mill is
correct, these recommendations are ones in which he would join.

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Utilitarianism is inevitable it will indefinitely permeate human thought

Allison, Professor of Political Philosophy at University of Warwick, 1990

(Lincoln, The Utilitarianism Response)
And yet if an idea can be compared to a castle, though we find a breached wall, damaged foundation and a weapons spiked where not actually destroyed, there still remains a keep,
some thing central and defensible, with in utilitarianism. As Raymond Frey puts it,

utilitarianism has never ceased to occupy a

moral theorizing

central place in
... [and] has come to have a significant impact upon the moral thinking of many laymen. The simple core of the doctrine lies in the ideas that actions should be
judged by their consequences and that the best actions are those which make people, as-a whole, better off than do the alternatives. What utilitarianism always excludes there fore, is any idea-about

The wide acceptance of utilitarianism in

this broad sense may well be residual for many people . Without a serious God (one, this is, prepared to
reveal Truth and instruction) or a convincing deduction of ethical prescription from pure reason, we are likely to turn towards Bentham and to judge actions
on there consequences for people's well-being.
the Tightness or wrongness of actions which is not explicable in terms of the consequences of those actions.

Because of the advent of nuclear omnicide, ethics should not be held absolute

Joseph Nye, Director of the Center for Science and International Affairs @
Harvard University, Nuclear Ethics, 1986
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case. Imagine that you are visiting a Central American country and you
happen upon a village square where an army captain is about to order his men to shoot peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village
shot at the captains men last night. Why you object to the killing of possibly innocent people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all
have dirty hands in such situations, the captain hands you a rifle and tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free the other. Otherwise both die. He warns you not to try any
tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by
refusing to play his dirty game? The point of the story is to show the value and limits of both traditions, Integrity is clearly an important value, and many of us would refuse to shoot. But

What
if killing or torturing one innocent person could save a city of 10 million
persons from a terrorists nuclear device ? At some point does not integrity become the ultimate egoism of fastidious selfat what point does the principle of not taking an innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it matter if there were 20 or 1,000 peasants to be saved?

righteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the lives of countless others? Is it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit remorse or regret over the
immoral means, but justify the actions by consequences? Do absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons

Do what is

right though the world should perish was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there is
some evidence that he did not mean it to be taken literally even then. Now that it may be literally possible in the Nuclear
age, it seems more than ever to be self-contradictory. Absolutist ethics bear
a heaver burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.
Once an action enters the policy realm we must use a Consequentialist approach, this is
necessary to minimize suffering and conflict.

Murray in 97, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh,

[Alastair J. H., Reconstructing Realism: between Power Politics and
Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 110]
Weber emphasised that, while the 'absolute ethic of the gospel' must be taken seriously, it is inadequate to the tasks of evaluation presented by politics. Against this 'ethic of ultimate
ends' Gesinnung he therefore proposed the 'ethic of responsibility' Verantwortung. First, whilst the former dictates only the purity of intentions and pays no attention to
consequences, the ethic of responsibility commands acknowledgement of the divergence between intention and result. Its adherent 'does not feel in a position to burden others with the
] own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say: these results are ascribed to my action'. Second, the 'ethic of ultimate
ends' is incapable of dealing adequately with the moral dilemma presented
by the necessity of using evil means to achieve moral ends : Everything that is striven for through
results of his [OR

HER

political action operating with violent means and following an ethic of responsibility endangers the 'salvation of the soul.' If, however, one chases after the ultimate good in a war of
beliefs, following a pure ethic of absolute ends, then the goals may be changed and discredited for generations, because responsibility for consequences is lacking. The 'ethic of
responsibility', on the other hand, can accommodate this paradox and limit the employment of such means, because it accepts responsibility for the consequences which they imply.
Thus, Weber maintains that only the ethic of responsibility can cope with the 'inner tension' between the 'demon of politics' and 'the god of love'. 9 The realists followed this conception
closely in their formulation of a political ethic.10 This influence is particularly clear in Morgenthau.11 In terms of the first element of this conception, the rejection of a purely

the political actor has, beyond the general moral duties, a special
moral responsibility to act wisely ... The individual , acting on his own behalf, may act
unwisely without moral reproach as long as the consequences of his inexpedient action concern only [her
or] himself. What is done in the political sphere by its very nature concerns others who must suffer from unwise action. What is here done with good intentions but
deontological ethic, Morgenthau echoed Weber's formulation, arguing that:

unwisely and hence with disastrous results is morally defective; for it violates the ethics of responsibility to which all action affecting others, and hence political action par excellence, is
subject.12

Utilitarianism and other forms of calculation are inevitable

Stelzig, Tom J.D. candidate at U PENN, 1998 (University of Pennsylvania Law

Review)

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when
substantially more good will result - Thomason's Trade Off Idea n. 107 - then almost ever situation
will involve a true conflict of rights. Determining the resolution of these
rights-conflicts would require that morality be supplemented with principles other than rights. If
this is correct, rights would perform relatively little theoretical work beyond triggering these principles. Whatever
principles would be regularly invoked for resolving rights-conflicts would do
the bulk of the work of determining right action . Such a notion does not sit well with the claim that deontology
If the latter is true, no more need be said to show that deontological norms do not exhaust morality. If the former is correct, because rights claims may be overridden only

exhausts morality, for the reason already discussed.

Individual and government choices on morality are different, once we play the role of policy
makers we must follow a utilitarian calculus

Goodin, Fellow of philosophy at Austialian National University, 1990 (Robert,

The Utilitarian Response)
It does matter who is using the utilitarian calculus, in what
circumstance and for what propose . Using the felicific calculus for micro-level purposes of guiding individuals choices of personal
conduct is altogether different from using it for macro-level purposes of guiding public officials choices of general social policy. A different menu of
option in some respects greater, in others, less, but in any case different is available to public and private
choosers. Thos differences are such as to neutralized in the public sphere,
most of the objections standardly lodged against utilitarianism in the private
sphere. True though such complaints may be as applied to utilitarianism as a
standard of personal conduct they are irrelevant (or anyway much less
problematic) as applied to utilitarianism as a standard of public policy . Or so I shall
That, I submit is a fallacy.

argue.

Consequences come first for governments - only our evidence draws the
distinction between moral theories for individuals and governments
Harries, editor of National Interest, 1994 (Owen, The National Interest,
Spring, p. 11)
Performance is the test. Asked directly by a Western interviewer, "In principle, do you believe in one standard of human rights and free expression?", Lee immediately answers, "Look, it
is not a matter of principle but of practice." This might appear to represent a simple and rather crude pragmatism. But in its context it might also be interpreted as an appreciation of the

in politics, it is "the ethic of responsibility" rather than

"the ethic of absolute ends" that is appropriate. While an individual is free to
treat human rights as absolute, to be observed whatever the cost.
Governments must weigh consequences and the competing claims of other
ends. So once the enter the realm of politics, human rights have to take their place in a hierarchy of
interests, including such basic things as national security and the promotion of prosperity.
fundamental point made by Max Weber that,

Moral rights and wrongs are based on consequences proves

Consequentialism is best
Johnson, 85 (Conrad D. Johnson, 'The Authority of the Moral Agent', Journal
of Philosophy 82, No 8
(August 1985), pp. 391)
the wrongness must in
some wav be connected to the consequences . That an innocent person is killed must be a consequence that has some
important bearing on the wrongness of the action; else why be so concerned about the killing of an innocent? Further, if it is wrong in certain
cases for the agent to weigh the consequences in deciding whether to kill or
to break a promise, it is hard to deny that this has some connection to the
If we follow the usual deontological conception, there are also well-known difficulties. If it is simply wrong to kill the innocent,

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consequences. Following one line of thought, it is consequentialist considerations of mistrust

that stand behind such restrictions on what the agent may take into account .3
But then again it is hard to deal with that rare case in which the agent can truly claim that his judgement about the consequences is accurate, or, in that last resort of the philosophical
thought experiment, has been verified by the Infallible Optimizer.

Ignoring consequences is immoral - they sacrifice others to preserve moral

purity. It is most moral to act to produce the best end regardless of the
moral cleanliness of the means
Ailinsky 1971

(Saul D., Activist, Prof, Social Organizer with Int'l Fame, Founder of Industrial Areas Foundation, Rules for Radicals, p.

24-7)
"Does this particular end justify this particular means?" Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends. The end is what you want, and the means is how you get it. Whenever we
think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The person [man] of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other
problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only
whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a
corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. The practical revolutionary

conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action in

action one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both
with one s individual conscience and the good of [humankind. The choice
must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the
individual's personal salvation. He [or she1 who sacrifices the mass good for
his personal conscience has peculiar conception of "personal salvation"; he
doesn't care enough for people to be "corrupted" for them . The people [men] who pile up the heaps of
will understand Geothe's "

discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends-which with rare exception is conspicuous for its sterility-rarely write about their won experiences in the perpetual struggle of
life and change. They are strangers, moreover, to the burdens and problems of operational responsibility and the unceasing pressure for immediate decisions. They are passionately
committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if
studying a navigational chart on land. They can be recognized by one of two verbal brands; "We agree with the ends but not the means," or "This is not the time." The means-and- end
moralists or non-doers always wind up on their ends without any means. The means-and- 'ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots
against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive-but real-allies of the Haves. They are the ones Jacques Maritain referred to in his

The fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not

virtue, but a way of escaping virtue." These non-doers were the ones who
chose not to fight the Nazis in the only way they could have been fought; they were the ones who drew their window blinds to shut out the
shameful spectacle of Jews and political prisoners being dragged through the streets; they were the ones who privately deplored the horror of it all-and did nothing. This is
the nadir of immorality. The most unethical of all means is the nonuse of any
means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences
statement, "

between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced from the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not to men. The
standards ofjudgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be. 1 present here a series of
rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends: first, that one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue. When we are not
directly concerned our morality overflows; as La Rochefoucauld put it, "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others."

Justice must save humanity and weigh

Sissela Bok, Professor of Philosophy, Brandeis, Applied Ethics and Ethical
Theory, Ed. David Rosenthal and Fudlou Shehadi, 1988
The same argument can be made for Kant's other formulations of the Categorical Imperative: "So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other,

No
one with a concern for humanity could consistently will to risk eliminating humanity in the
person of himself and every other or to risk the death of all members in a universal Kingdom of Ends for the sake of justice. To risk their collective death
for the sake of following one's conscience would be, as Rawls said, "irrational, crazy." And to say that one did not intend such a
catastrophe, but that one merely failed to stop other persons from bringing it about would be
beside the point when the end of the world was at stake , For although it is true that we cannot be held
responsible for most of the wrongs that others commit, the Latin maxim presents a case where we would have to take such a
responsibility seriously - perhaps to the point of deceiving, bribing, even killing an innocent
person, in order that the world not perish .
always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means"; and "So act as if you were always through actions a law-making member in a universal Kingdom of Ends."

Utilitarian actions only act as a last resort. Lack of alternatives means the
only inhuman action is to not act at all.
Nielsen, 93 Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary (Kai, Absolutism
and Its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber Pg 170-71)

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If there really is no other way of

unsticking our fat man and if plainly, without blasting him out, everyone in the cave
will drown, then, innocent or not, he should be blasted out. This indeed overrides the principle that
Forget the levity of the example and consider the case of the innocent fat man.

the innocent should never be deliberately killed, but it does not reveal a callousness toward life, for the people involved are
caught in a desperate situation in which, if such extreme action is not taken, many lives will be lost and far greater misery will

Moreover, the people who do such a horrible thing or acquiesce in the doing of it
are not likely to be rendered more callous about human life and human suffering as a
result. Its occurrence will haunt them for the rest of their lives and is as likely as not to make them more rather than less
morally sensitive. It is not even correct to say that such a desperate act shows a lack of
respect for persons. We are not treating the fat man merely as a means. The fat man's
person-his interests and rights-are not ignored. Killing him is something which is
undertaken with the greatest reluctance. It is only when it is quite certain that there is
no other way to save the lives of the others that such a violent course of action is
justifiably undertaken. Alan Donagan, arguing rather as Anscombe argues, maintains that "to use any
innocent man ill for the sake of some public good is directly to degrade him to being a
mere means" and to do this is of course to violate a principle essential to morality , that
obtain.

is, that human beings should never merely be treated as means but should be treated as ends in themselves (as persons worthy

it need not be the case, and in the above situation it is

not the case, that in killing such an innocent man we are treating him merely as a
means. The action is universalizable, all alternative actions which would save his life
are duly considered, the blasting out is done only as a last and desperate resort with
the minimum of harshness and indifference to his suffering and the like. It indeed sounds
of respect).l1 But, as my above remarks show,

ironical to talk this way, given what is done to him. But if such a terrible situation were to arise, there would always be more or

And in acting in the more humane ways toward the

fat man, as we do what we must do and would have done to ourselves were the roles
reversed, we show a respect for his person.12 In so treating the fat man-not just to
further the public good but to prevent the certain death of a whole group of people (that
is to prevent an even greater evil than his being killed in this way}- the claims of justice are not overriden
either, for each individual involved, if he is reasonably correct, should realize that if he
were so stuck rather than the fat man, he should in such situations be blasted out.
Thus, there is no question of being unfair. Surely we must choose between evils here, but is there anything
less humane ways of going about one's grim task.

more reasonable, more morally appropriate, than choosing the lesser evil when doing or allowing some evil cannot be avoided?
That is, where there is no avoiding both and where our actions can determine whether a greater or lesser evil obtains, should we

is it not obviously a greater evil that all those other

innocent people should suffer and die than that the fat man should suffer and die?
Blowing up the fat man is indeed monstrous. But letting him remain stuck while the whole group
drowns is still more monstrous.
not plainly always opt for the lesser evil? And

Overriding rights is justified when more rights of others and lives are at
stake.
Kateb 92 William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton
University (George, Cornell University Press; The Inner Ocean: Individualism
and Democratic Culture pg 12)
One can even think, against utilitarianism, that any substantive outcome achieved by morally proper procedure is morally right

utilitarianism has a
necessary pace in any democratic country's normal political deliberations . But its advocates
and hence acceptable (so long as rights are not in play). The main point, however, is that

must know its place, which ordinarily is only to help to decide what the theory of rights leaves alone. When may rights be
overridden by government? I have two sorts of cases in mind:

overriding a particular right of some persons

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for the sake of preserving the same right of others, and overriding the same right of
everyone for the sake of what I will clumsily call "civilization values." An advocate of rights
could countenance, perhaps must countenance, the state's overriding of rights for these two reasons. The subject is painful and
liable to dispute every step of the way. For the state to override-that is, sacrificea right of some so that others may keep it.

The situation must be desperate. I have in mind, say, circumstances in which the choice is
between sacrificing a right of some and letting a right of all be lost. The state (or some
other agent) may kill some (or allow them to he killed), if the only alternative is letting
every-one die. It is the right to life which most prominently figures in thinking about desperate situations. I cannot
see any resolution but to heed the precept that "numbers count." Just as one may prefer saving
one's own life to saving that of another when both cannot be saved, so a third parrylet us say, the statecan (perhaps must)
choose to save the greater number of lives and at the cost of the lesser number, when there is otherwise no hope for either
group. That choice does not mean that those to be sacrificed are immoral if they resist being sacrificed. It follows, of course, that
if a third party is right to risk or sacrifice the lives of the lesser for the lives of the lesser for the lives of the greater number when
the lesser would otherwise live, the lesser are also not wrong if they resist being sacrificed.

We must choose the lesser evil. Hard and fast rules about what is right must
be made to limit further atrocities against civilization
Issac 02 Professor of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the
Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale (Jeffery C.,
Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, Ends, Means, and Politics, p. Proquest)
WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean

There is a tendency in some quarters

of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the
world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It
is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong . It may even be true
that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever
hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent
civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make
the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their
defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an
extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent
with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion. Because it threatens
everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought . And it must be
fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped .
taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism.

Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century
Marxist left--that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends . A
just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will

such situations
our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the
wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to oppose it . In such
situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power . But equally
great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to
sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In

do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be
wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are
not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the
means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.

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Moral policy only blocks decision making necessary to limit further damage.
Injustice can only be destroyed by inaction to make sacrifices
Issac, 02 Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the
Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale (Jeffery C.,
Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, Ends, Means, and Politics, p. Proquest)

It is assumed that U.S. military

intervention is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression
to which intervention is a response. The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace
activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime--the
Taliban--that rose to power through brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that
most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a
Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring
criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and
important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also
vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how
diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand . The
campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in
which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked.

exercise of power.
Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in

Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power.
To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are
necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is
not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to
morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an
unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility . The concern may
the world.

be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of

Abjuring violence or refusing to make

common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if
such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good
beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real
violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a
form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to
religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating
violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and
(3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about
intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most
significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil.
This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is
equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to
judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral
absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It
promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends.

Utilitarianism is the only moral framework and alternatives are inevitability

self-contradictory

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Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as

Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; Nuclear
Ethics pg. 18-19)

Imagine
an army captain is
about to order his men to shoot two peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason,
The significance and the limits of the two broad traditions can be captured by contemplating a hypothetical case.34
that you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where

you are told someone in this village shot at the captain's men last night. When you object to the killing of possibly innocent
people, you are told that civil wars do not permit moral niceties. Just to prove the point that we all have dirty hands in such

and tells you that if you will shoot one peasant, he will free
the other. Otherwise both die. He warns you not to try any tricks because his men have their guns trained on you. Will
you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to
die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play his dirty game? The point of the
story is to show the value and limits of both traditions. Integrity is clearly an important
value, and many of us would refuse to shoot. But at what point does the principle of
not taking an innocent life collapse before the consequentialist burden? Would it matter if
there were twenty or 1,000 peasants to be saved? What if killing or torturing one innocent person could
save a city of 10 million persons from a terrorists' nuclear device? At some point does not
situations, the captain hands you a rifle

integrity become the ultimate egoism of fastidious self-righteousness in which the purity of the self is more important than the

Is it not better to follow a consequentialist approach, admit remorse

or regret over the immoral means, but justify the action by the consequences? Do
lives of countless others?

absolutist approaches to integrity become self-contradictory in a world of nuclear weapons? "Do what is right though the world
should perish" was a difficult principle even when Kant expounded it in the eighteenth century, and there is some evidence that

Now that it may be literally possible in the nuclear

age, it seems more than ever to be self-contradictory.35 Absolutist ethics bear a
heavier burden of proof in the nuclear age than ever before.
he did not mean it to be taken literally even then.

Politics can only be one of responsibility. Rational policy makers must

consider first whether to put rights before all else.
Harris, 94 (Owen Spring 1994; Editor of National Interest Journal of
International affairs and diplomacy; Power of Civilizations Via Questia)
Performance is the test. Asked directly by a Western interviewer, "In principle, do you believe in one standard of human rights and
free expression?", Lee immediately answers, "Look, it is not a matter of principle but of practice." This might
appear to represent a simple and rather crude pragmatism. But in its context it might also be interpreted as an appreciation of

politics, it is "the ethic of responsibility" rather than

"the ethic of absolute ends" that is appropriate. While an individual is free to treat
human rights as absolute, to be observed whatever the cost, governments must
always weigh consequences and the competing claims of other ends. So once they enter the
realm of politics, human rights have to take their place in a hierarchy of interests , including such
basic things as national security and the promotion of prosperity. Their place in that hierarchy will vary with
circumstances, but no responsible government will ever be able to put them always at
the top and treat them as inviolable and over-riding. The cost of implementing and
promoting them will always have to be considered. Lee's answer might also be compared to Edmund
the fundamental point made by Max Weber that, in

Burke's conclusions on how England should govern its colonies, as expressed in his Letter to the Sheriffs of the City of Bristol in
1777: |I~t was our duty, in all soberness, to conform our government to the character and circumstances of the several people

I never was wild enough to conceive that one

method would serve for the whole, that the natives of Hindostan and those of Virginia
could be ordered in the same manner, or that the Cutchery court and the grand jury of
Salem could be regulated on a similar plan. I was persuaded that government was a
who composed this mighty and strangely diversified mass.

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practical thing made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a spectacle
of uniformity to gratify the schemes of visionary politicians.
Only consequentialism can resolve conflicting moral values and promote
healthy society
Bailey, 97 (James Wood 1997; Oxford University Press; Utilitarianism,
institutions, and Justice pg 9)

A consequentialist moral theory can take account of this variance and direct us in our
decision about whether a plausible right to equality ought to outweigh a plausible right
to freedom of expression. 16 In some circumstances the effects of pornography would surely be malign enough to
justify our banning it, but in others they may be not malign enough to justify any interference in freedom. I? A deontological
theory, in contrast, would be required either to rank the side constraints, which forbid agents from interfering in the free
expression of others and from impairing the moral equality of others, or to admit defeat and claim that no adjudication
between the two rights is possible. The latter admission is a grave failure since it would leave us no principled resolution
of a serious policy question. But the former conclusion is hardly attractive either. Would we really wish to establish as true for
all times and circumstances a lexical ordering between two side constraints on our actions without careful attention to
consequences? Would we, for instance, really wish to establish that the slightest malign inegalitarian effect traceable to a form of
expression is adequate grounds for an intrusive and costly censorship? Or would we, alternatively, really wish to establish that we
should be prepared to tolerate a society horrible for women and children to live in, for the sake of not allowing any infringement

Consequentialist accounts can avoid such a deontological dilemma. In so doing,

they show a certain healthy sense of realism about what life in society is like. In the world outside the theorist's study, we
meet trade-offs at every tum. Every policy we make with some worthy end in Sight imposes costs in terms of diminished
achievement of some other plausibly worthy end. Consequentialism demands that we grapple with these costs as
directly as we can and justify their incurrence. It forbids us to dismiss them with moral sophistries or to ignore them as if
we lived in an ideal world.
on the sacred right of free expression?18

Morals and questions of human dignity will constantly conflict making

deontological policy making impossible
Kateb 92 William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, Princeton
University (George, Cornell University Press; The Inner Ocean: Individualism
and Democratic Culture pg 14-15)
Let us say that a society of rights-based individualism encourages these and other crepuscular activities to become topics for

that that fact can be taken as a paradoxical sign of the moral

grandness of such a society, for practically every desire can be honestly admitted and
talked about despite shame or without shame; that a society devoted to rights has no
absolutely compelling arguments, in every case, to prohibit them and that, nevertheless, civilization (democratic
open and popular discussion;

or not) so we are trained to understand it commits us to continue to condemn and prohibit them. The issue must be raised in

is not agreeable to admit that a

particular right of one person may apparently conflict with a different right of someone else.
Familiar antagonisms include that between the rights to a fair trial unprejudiced by
excessive publicity and the right of press to report a story and its background fully, or
that between the right to privacy again, the right of the press to do what it thinks is its
work. Though I believe, as I have said, that some rights (including freedom of the press) are more
fundamental than others, in some conflicts no clear priority is likely to be established
and only ad hoc adjustments are desirable. To be sure, although these conflicts may
be less frequent or stark than is claimed by those who are impatient with the rights in
question, conflicts nevertheless take place. This is a fact of life which no appeal to an elaborated theory of
dismay, and I am not able to deal with it adequately. Can rights conflict? It

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rights can eliminate. If it is a shortcoming in the theory of rights, it is also a shortcoming that no supplementary principle such as
utilitarianism can make good.

Human value and dignity is impossible to determine externally,

utilitarianism is only alternative.
Kateb 92 William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton
University (George, Cornell University Press; The Inner Ocean: Individualism
and Democratic Culture pg 13-14)

We can say in regard to the relevant examples that no one has the right to enslave or
mutilate or ritually kill another, even with the others permission. There is no right to accept
anothers renunciation of a right. One cannot cooperate with or take advantage of another
persons abdication of humanity. We can also say, for other activities, that one has no right to use ones freedom
to abandon it altogether (as with drug addiction) or alienate it (as with voluntary slavery), for freedom is meaningless when it

All these arguments are true but do not reach the deepest level of
objection, for all these activities arouse deep and wide spread disgust and revulsion.
To be guided by these feelings, however, is risky because many activities once
thought disgusting and horrible are now allowed and sometimes welcomed and
celebrated, at least in some democratic societies. Also, we cannot say that the
feelings hostile to these activities are instinctual; though common, such feelings are
culturally deposited. I can understand the wish to say that these activities injure the human dignity of people who do
becomes the instrument of bondage.

them. It can be argued that the injury results not merely because (in some cases) they are renouncing a right and (in other cases)

Rather, these free or consensual

activities degrade people who do them below the level of decent humanity. The
practitioners forfeit respect: that is the reason they must be controlled. I do not think,
however, that I can follow this line because I do not associate human dignity with any
teleology or reason for being, or even with a more bounded perfectionism . As I understand
the theory of rights-based individualism, it disallows universal and enforceable
answers to the questions, Why do we live? What is the point of living? I am therefore
reluctant to rest a case for control on the notion of human dignity itself.
using their rights in ways never contemplated by advocates of rights.

The impossibility to attain knowledge of every outcome or abuse leaves

utilitarianism as the only option for most rational decision-making
Goodin 95 Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social
Sciences at the Australian National University (Robert E., Cambridge University
Press, Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy pg 63)

there is something special about the situation of

public officials that makes utilitarianism more plausible for them (or, more precisely, makes them
My larger argument turns on the proposition that

adopt a form of utilitarianism that we would find more acceptable) than private individuals. Before proceeding with that larger

their situations that makes it

both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of
utilitarianism. Consider, first the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their
choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices-public and private alike- are
made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually
have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and
on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public
officials, in contrast, at relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices
argument, I must therefore say what it is that is so special about public officials and

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will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities:
averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a
result of their various possible choices. But that is all. That is enough to allow public
policy makers to use the utilitarian calculus if they want to use it at all to choose general rules of
conduct. Knowing aggregates and averages, they can proceed to calculate the utility payoffs from adopting each alternative

they cannot be sure what the payoff will be to any given individual or
on any particular occasion. Their knowledge of generalities, aggregates and averages
is just not sufficiently fine-grained for that.
possible general rule. But

Not knowing conditions for each individual or ramifications forces us to

adopt utilitarianism. Policy makers must use in their decision making
Goodin 95 Professor of Philosophy at the Research School of the Social
Sciences at the Australian National University (Robert E., Cambridge University
Press, Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy pg 63)
Furthermore, the argument from necessity would continue,

the instruments available to public policy-

makers are relatively blunt. They can influence general tendencies, making rather more people behave in certain
sorts of ways rather more often. But perfect compliance is unrealistic. And (building on the previous point) not knowing
particular circumstances of particular individuals, rules and regulations must
necessarily be relatively general in form. They must treat more people more nearly
alike than ideally they should, had we perfect information. The combined effect of
these two factors is to preclude public policy-makers from fine-tuning policies very
well at all. They must, of necessity, deal with people in aggregate, imposing upon
them rules that are general in form. Nothing in any of this necessarily forces them to
be utilitarian in their public policy-making, of course. What it does do, however, is
force them- if they are inclined to be utilitarian at all-away from direct (act)
utilitarianism. The circumstances surrounding the selection and implementation of
public policies simply do not permit the more precise calculations required by any
decision rule more tailored to peculiarities of individuals or situations.
True equality is only attainable under utilitarian framework.
Dworkin 77 Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University (Ronald
1977, Taking Rights Seriously pg 274-5)

The liberal conception of equality sharply limits the extent to which ideal arguments of
policy may be used to justify any constraint on liberty. Such arguments cannot be used if the idea in
question is itself controversial within the community. Constraints cannot be defended , for example, directly on the ground
that they contribute to a culturally sophisticated community , whether the community wants the sophistication or not, because
that argument would violate the canon of the liberal conception of equality that prohibits a government from relying on
the claim that certain forms of life are inherently more valuable than others . Utilitarian argument of policy, however,
would seem secure from that objection. They do not suppose that any form of life is inherently more valuable than any
other, but instead base their claim, that constraints on liberty are necessary to advance some collective goal of the
community, just on the fact that that goal happens to be desired more widely or more deeply than any other. Utilitarian
arguments of policy, therefore, seem not to oppose but on the contrary to embody the fundamental right of equal concern
and respect, because they treat the wishes of each member of the community on a par with the wishes of any other, with
no bonus or discount reflecting the view that that member is more or less worthy of concern, or his views more or less
worthy of respect, than any other. This appearance of egalitarianism has, I think, been the principal source of the great appeal
that utilitarianism has had, as a general political philosophy, over the last century. In Chapter 9, however, I pointed out that the

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egalitarian character of a utilitarian argument is often an illusion. I will not repeat, but only summarize, my argument here.

Utilitarian arguments fix on the fact that a particular constraint on liberty will make more people happier, or satisfy more
of their preferences, depending upon whether psychological or preference utilitarianism is in play . But people's overall
preference for one policy rather than another may be seen to include, on further analysis, both preference that are personal,
because they state a preference for the assignment of one set of goods or opportunities to him and preferences that are

a utilitarian argument that

assigns critical weight to the external preferences of members of the community will not be egalitarian in the sense
under consideration. It will not respect the right of everyone to be treated with equal concern and respect.
external, because they state a preference for one assignment of goods or opportunities to others. But

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**AT: Rights / Liberty Come First**

Upholding life is the ultimate moral standard.
Uyl and Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 81
(Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and
St. Johns, 1981, Reading Nozick, p. 244)
Rand has spoken of the ultimate end as the standard by which all other ends
are evaluated. When the ends to be evaluated are chosen ones the ultimate
end is the standard for moral evaluation. Life as the sort of thing a living entity
is, then, is the ultimate standard of value; and since only human beings are
capable of choosing their ends, it is the life as a human being-man's life qua
man-that is the standard for moral evaluation.
Life is the end toward which all purposeful action is directed.
Uyl and Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 81
(Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 1981, Reading
Nozick, p. 244-245)
Why should this be the standard for moral evaluation? Why must this be the ultimate moral
value? Why not "death" or "the greatest happiness for the greatest number"? Man's life must be

the standard for judging moral value because this is the end toward which all goal-directed action
(in this case purposive action) is directed, and we have already shown why goal-directed behavior
depends on life. Indeed, one cannot make a choice without implicitly choosing life as the end.
Life is the prerequisite to all other value.
Uyl and Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and St. Johns, 81
(Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, Prof.s Philosophy Bellarmine and
St. Johns, 1981, Reading Nozick, p. 245)
In so far as one chooses, regardless of the choice, one choose (value) man's life. It makes no sense to value some X without also valuing that which makes the

If one lets X be equivalent to

"death" or "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," one is able to
have such a valuation only because of the precondition of being a living being.
Given that life is a necessary condition for valuation, there is no other way we
can value something without also (implicitly at least) valuing that which makes
valuation possible.
valuing of X possible ~:notice that this is different from saying "that which makes X possible").

Utilitarianism precludes any claim of moral rights rights not quantifiable.

McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984
HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and
Rights. Pgs 121-122.
In spite of this, Bentham's clear apprehension of utilitarianism's commitment to rejecting the
view that there are certain basic natural human moral rights that hold of human beings as
human beings, very many utilitarians today seek to reconcile their utilitarianism with theories
of human moral rights, with theories of natural moral rights of persons of the kinds set out in
the UN Declarations, according to which we are claimed to possess various basic, fundamental
moral rights simply by virtue of being human beings, or human persons, and not by virtue of

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the utility of a belief in and action on the basis of respect for such rights. Utilitarianism denies,
and is committed to denying, that there are natural moral rights that hold of persons as
persons, of human beings qua human beings. If its ethic is to be expressed in the language of
moral rights, it might be said to hold that it is the greatest good or the greatest /pleasure that
has a moral right to exist, that individual persons and animals have no moral right to a specific
share in or of the greatest good, I their roles being those of being instruments for achieving or
vehicles for bringing into being and sustaining the greatest good, they having a moral right to
contribute to the common good as vehicles or instruments thereof. Of course, strictly
speaking, an abstraction such as the greatest good cannot in any literal sense of 'moral right,'
possess moral rights, whilst the rights individuals may possess as vehicles or instruments of
the greatest good would be a mixed bunch, including such rights as the rights to live or to be
killed, to be free or to be constrained, to be helped or to be harmed or used-the rights varying
from person to person, situation to situation, from time to lime. Thus, if the greatest good could
be realized by promoting the pleasure of only one or other of two distinct groups of one
hundred persons, then, in terms of utilitarianism, it would morally be indifferent which
group was chosen, and no member of either group would have a moral right to the pleasure.
Similarly, if, in a war, the greatest good could be achieved only be sending a particular platoon
on a suicide mission, the officer in charge would have the moral right to order the platoon to go
on the mission, and the members of the platoon would have the moral right to be killed for the
sake of the greatest good. This is a very different way of thinking about moral rights from that
in terms of there being certain basic human moral rights.

No legitimate reason to include rights discussion under util f/w

McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984
HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and
Rights. Pg 124.
A utilitarian might seek to accommodate talk about human moral rights within the utilitarian
framework by arguing that there are good utilitarian reasons for attributing human rights to
persons who do not possess moral rights, just as there may be good utilitarian reasons for
ascribing responsibility to persons who are not morally responsible for their actions. This might
be urged in terms of act-utilitarianism as a tactical move for maximizing good. Alternatively, it
could be developed as an element of a rule-utilitarianism. Clearly it would be difficult to
find plausible act-utilitarian reasons for propagating such a falsehood. On the other
hand, whilst a rule-utilitarianism that incorporated such a human moral rights component
would normatively be more attractive than many versions of rule-utilitarianism, it would remain
exposed to the basic criticisms of rule-utilitarianism set out by JJ. C. Smart, myself, and
others.'

Utilitarianism is the only calculus that takes into account human response
Ratner, professor of law at USC, 1984 (Leonard G. Ratner p.735, professor
of law at USC, 1984 Hofstra Law Journal. The Utilitarian Imperative:
Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution HeinOnline)
utilitarianism is concerned with human survival and depends on
human response, its goal is necessarily fulfillment of human needs and wants.
Utilitarian choices are made by existing humans. The decisions of every human are
derived from the experience, and reflect the desires, of that human. Humans may be
Because evolutionary

concerned with the needs and wants of animals or of future generations, but that concern is
inescapably a product of existing human needs and wants.

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Rights dont come first conflicting values and ideologies.

McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984
HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and
Rights. Pg 129.
Problems of a different kind are encountered by the claim that certain negative rights, for
example, the right to life interpreted as a right not to be killed, are always absolute, namely,
that such a claim leads to morally unacceptable conclusions. Different rights, for example, the
rights to life and to moral autonomy and integrity, may conflict with one another, such that we
have morally to determine which to respect and in what way; the one right, such as the right to
life, may give rise to conflicts, such that we can protect, save one life, only by sacrificing or not
saving another life. And rights may conflict with other values , such as pleasure or pain, in
ways that morally oblige us to qualify our respect for the right, as in curtailing acts directed at
a persons' self-development to prevent gross cruelty to animals. Thomists have offered partial,
but only partial, replies to criticisms based on these difficulties in terms of theories such as the
Doctrine of Double Effect, the theory of the Unjust Aggressor (who may be neither unjust nor
morally responsible for what he does). However these replies themselves encounter difficulties
of many kinds, including those of involving their exponents in morally abhorrent conclusions
not unlike those to which they object when such I conclusions are shown to follow from rival
theories.

Rights not absolute doesnt take into account intended good.

McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984
HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and
Rights. Pg 129.
Thus the Doctrine of Double Effect permits the knowing, unintentional killing of thousands of
innocent children for the sake of a proportional good; yet it commits its exponents to losing a
just war if success can be achieved, and millions of innocent lives be saved, only by the
intentional killing of one innocent person. Similarly objectionable conclusions follow about the
permissibility of killing morally innocent 'unjust aggressors' to save one's life. At the same time,
acceptance of these supporting theories amounts to an admission that human rights such as
the right to life are not always absolute. How can it be so if we are said to have the moral right
intentionally to kill the morally innocent unjust aggressor, and knowingly, albeit unintentionally,
to kill innocent persons, when and if the intended good is proportionately good, and cannot be
achieved without bringing about the unintended, foreseen good?

No appropriate duty to satisfy rights of conscience.

McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984
HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and
Rights. Pg 123..
The view that rights and duties are correlative would, if true, lend support to the reducibility-ofrights-to-duties thesis.' However, whilst duties and rights may be correlative-as when by a
voluntary act a person enters into a promise, contract, becomes a parent - commonly / rights,
and more evidently, basic human moral rights, and duties are not correlative. This is so with
the examples cited above. There may be no correlative duty to a right of conscience.
With rights of recipience, rights to aids and facilities, the duties that arise from the right are not
the determinate, fixed, finite duties, correlative duties are thought of as being. Equally, we may
have important duties in respect of other persons, without those persons necessarily having
rights against us. This is often so in respect of duties of benevolence towards determinate
persons. The duty to maximize good, which dictates that we visit our lonely, ailing I aunt in
hospital, need give her no moral right to our visit.

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No absolute rights competing values and rights of different groups.

McCloskey, professor of philosophy, 1984
HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. R. G. Frey. Utility and
Rights. Pg 129.
A similar distinction needs to be drawn and a similar terminology is required in respect of basic
human rights. They are always rights-inalienable, intrinsic rights-but they are simply prima
facie rights; they are rights that are absolute rights only if they are not overridden by more
stringent moral rights or other moral considerations. The introduction of this distinction into
human moral rights theory is both right and necessary. It does however greatly complicate the
problem of determining what are the absolute, morally operative rights of a person in any
concrete situation. Yet the acknowledgment of this feature of basic human rights is necessary
for two reasons, the one because (physical resources may be inadequate to allow all to enjoy
their basic rights, and the other because, in specific situations, we may have to decide between
the rights of different persons, and between respecting rights and securing other values.

Priority of liberty not viable as basis of government at best it would be a

competing theory among other liberal conceptions of justice.
Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003.
Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian
Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31,
No. 3, Pg 24. Project MUSE.
Is such acceptance likely? Consider the important example of the adherents of utilitarian
reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Would a utilitarian be able to endorse a Kantian
conception of free persons, with its elevation of rationality over the satisfaction of desire and its
consequent implications for agent motivation in the Original Position? It seems unlikely that
any utilitarian (with the possible exception of John Stuart Mill in his most syncretic mood) would
countenance this variety of asceticism. Thus, utilitarians would be likely to focus on another
interpretation of the idea of free persons or perhaps on an entirely different fundamental idea
or set of ideas; doing so would lead them to structure the Original Position differently and
would presumably produce a political conception of justice that did not include the Priority of
Liberty. Rawls argues in Political Liberalism that classical utilitarians (such as Jeremy Bentham
and Henry Sidgwick) would be likely to endorse a political conception of justice liberal in
content, but he never suggests that they would choose the Priority of Liberty, or Justice as
Fairness more generally (PL, p. 170). We can conclude from this finding that the class of liberal
political conceptions of justice constituting the focus of a realistic overlapping consensus would
include conceptions that did not endorse the Priority of Liberty (although they would all give
the basic liberties special priority). Moreover, Justice as Fairness might not be alone among
the liberal conceptions in endorsing the Priority of Liberty: a reasonable comprehensive
doctrine might, for example, support a Kantian conception of free persons but not Rawlss
particular interpretation of society as a fair system of cooperation, leading through the
procedures of political constructivism to a liberal conception of justice that endorsed the
Priority of Liberty but rejected, say, the Difference Principle. Thus, the Priority of Liberty would
be one competitor idea among many in an overlapping consensus, endorsed by both adherents
of Kantian comprehensive doctrines and their fellow travelers, but rejected by others.

No justification for violation of rights to prevent external loss - principle of intervening

actions means that government is not held responsible for death of others.
Gewirth, prof of philosophy @ U Chicago. 1994.
Alan. Are There Any Absolute Rights? Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics. Joram Graf
Haber. Pgs 143.
He may be said to intend the many deaths obliquely, in that they are a foreseen but unwanted
side-effect of his refusal . But he is not responsible for that side-effect because of the terrorist

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s' intervening action. It would be unjustified to violate the mother's right to life in order to
protect the rights to life of the many other residents of the city. For rights cannot be
justifiably protected by violating another right which, according to the criterion of
degrees of necessity for action, is at least equally important. Hence, the many other residents
do not have a right that the mother' s right to life be violated for their sakes . To be sure , the
mother also does not have a right that their equally important rights be violated in order to
protect hers. But here too it must be emphasized that in protecting his mother's right the son
does not violate the rights of the others; for by the principle of the intervening action, it
is not he who is causally or morally responsible for their deaths . Hence too he is not
treating them as mere means to his or his mother's ends.

Government cannot act to uphold the rights of the subject on the basis of moral
principle
Gewirth, professor of philosophy, 81.
Alan. Reason and Morality. Pg 65.
In the agent's statement, 'I have rights to freedom and well-being,' the subject of the rights is
the agent himself, the same person for whom freedom and well-being are necessary goods.
The object of the rights is these same necessary goods. Now in rights-judgments, the subject
who is said to have rights is not always the same as the person who makes a claim or a rightjudgment attributing the rights to the subject. Moreover, a rights-judgment need not be set
forth independently; it may, instead, figure as a subordinate clause wherein the attribution of
rights to the subject is only conditional. In all cases. however, there is assumed some reason or
ground that is held, at least tentatively, to justify that attribution. This reason may, but need
not, be some moral or legal code. In the present case, where what is at issue is the
justification of a moral principle, such a principle cannot, of course, be adduced as
constituting the justifying ground for the attribution of the generic rights to the
agent. Rather, in his statement making this attribution, the justifying reason of the generic
rights as viewed by the agent is the fact that freedom and well-being are the most general and
proximate necessary conditions of all his purpose- fulfilling actions, so that without his having
these conditions his engaging in purposive action would be futile or impossible. Because of this
necessity, the agent who is the subject of the generic rights is assumed to set forth or uphold
the rights-judgment himself, as knowing what conditions must be fulfilled if he is to be a
purposive agent; and he upholds the judgment not merely conditionally or tentatively but in an
unqualified way.

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**AT: Util No Rights**

Utility cant be maximized in the long term by violating rights.
Robert Goodin, fellow Philosophy, Australian National Defense U, 1990, The Utilitarian
Response, p. 148
My main argument, though, is that at the level of social policy the problem usually does
not even arise. When promulgating policies, public officials must respond to typical conditions
and common circumstances. Policies, by their nature, cannot be case- by-case affairs.

In choosing general rules ot govern a wide range of circumstances, it is

extraordinarily unlikely that the greatest happiness can ever be realized by
systematically violating peoples rights. Liberties or integrity or even, come to that,
by systematically contravening the Ten Commandments. The rules that maximize utility
over the long haul and over the broad range of applications are also rules that
broadly conform to deontologists demands.
Utilitarianism Protects Fairness
Robin Barrow, Prof. Simon Fraser U, 1991, Utilitarianism, p. 29
the principle of justice may also be equated with the principle of fairness,
and utilitarianism does have such a principle, as it must do, since a fully fledged
ethical theory tells us what is right, and no account of what is right can compete if
it makes no reference to the distribution of the good.
However

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**AT: Freedom / Liberty Outweighs Life/Util**

Libertarianism denies emotional satisfaction outside that of freedom.
Locke, Writer for American Conservative, 05
(Robert Locke, Writer for American Conservative, Marxism of the Right, 314-2005, Marxism of the Right, The American Conservative,
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_03_14/article1.html)
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good
thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a
prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to
freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be
rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoons wife. A family is in fact one of the least free
things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are
either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk
away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk

of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern
governments. Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the
only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of
choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to
partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods.
But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature ,
independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature,
not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of
the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad
choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks
has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill. Furthermore, the reduction
of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like
national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It
may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be
comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the
factory that emitted it and sue?

Utilitarian policy-making ensures there will be no unnecessary constrains on

liberty because each scenario is weighed.
Dworkin 77 Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University (Ronald
1977, Taking Rights Seriously pg 275-276)

Suppose, for example, that a number of individuals in the community holds racist rather than
utilitarian political theories. They believe, not that each man is to count for one and no one for more than one
in the distribution of goods, but rather that a black man is to count for less and a white man
therefore to count for more than one. That is an external preference, but it is nevertheless a
genuine preference for one policy rather than another, the satisfaction of which will bring pleasure.
Nevertheless if this preference or pleasure is given the normal weight in a utilitarian
calculation, and blacks suffer accordingly, then their own assignment of goods and
opportunities will depend, not simply on the competition among personal preferences
that abstract statements of utilitarianism suggest, but precisely on the fact that they
are thought less worthy of concern and respect than others are. Suppose, to take a different

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that many members of the community disapprove on moral grounds of

homosexuality, or contraception, or pornography, or expressions of adherence to the
Communist party. They prefer not only that they themselves do not indulge in these
activities, but that no one else does so either, and they believe that a community that
permits rather than prohibits these acts is inherently worse a community. These are external
case,

preferences, but, once again, they are no less genuine, nor less a source of pleasure when satisfied and displeasure when

if these external preferences are counted,

so as to justify a constraint on liberty, then those constrained suffer, not simple
because their personal preferences have lost in a competition for scarce resources
with the personal preferences of the others, but precisely because their conception of
a proper or desirable form of life is despised by others . These arguments justify the following
important conclusion. If utilitarian arguments of policy are to be used to justify constraints on
liberty, the care must be taken to insure that the utilitarian calculations on which the
argument is based fix only on personal and ignore external preferences. That is an
important conclusion for political theory because it shows for example, why the
arguments of John Stuart Mill in On Liberty are not counter-utilitarian, but on the
contrary, arguments in service of the only defensible form of utilitarianism .
ignored, than purely personal preferences. Once again, however

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**AT: Calculations Bad**

Turn calculation is inevitable and justified every action requires
calculation, and refusing to engage in calculation means allowing the worst
atrocities to occur.
Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998
[David, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia, p. 186-188]
"that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the
cannot and should not serve as alibi for staying out of juridicopolitical battles, within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and
others." Indeed, "incalculable justice requires us to calculate." From where do these insistences come? What
That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues,
unpresentable exceeds the determinable

109

is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship

"left to itself, the incalculable and giving (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be
reappropriated by the most perverse cal culation." 170 The necessity of calculating the
incalculable thus responds to a duty, a duty that inhabits the instant of madness and
compels the decision to avoid "the bad," the "perverse calculation," even "the worst."
This is the duty that also dwells with deconstructive thought and makes it the starting
point, the "at least necessary condition," for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its
forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we rec ognize
that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences "we
recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, antiSemitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."
that because of its undecidability multiplies responsi bility, and the fact that

Furthermore, the duty within the decision, the obligation that recognizes the necessity of negotiating the possibilities provided by the
impossibilities of justice, is not content with simply avoiding, con taining, combating, or negating the worst-violence-though it could certainly begin with
those strategies. Instead, this responsibility, which is the responsibility of responsibility, commissions a "utopian" strat egy. Not, a strategy that is
beyond all bounds of possibility so as to be considered "unrealistic," but one

the necessity of calculation takes the possibility summoned by the calculation as far as possible, "must
take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or
politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and inter national, public and private, and so on." "' As Derrida
which in respecting

declares, "The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible:
the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention.""' This leads Derrida to enunciate a
proposition that many, not the least of whom are his Habermasian critics, could hardly have expected: "Nothing seems to me less outdated than
the classical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at least not without treating it too
lightly and forming the worst complicities."14
Residing within-and not far below the surface-of Derrida's account of the experience of the undecidable as the context
for the decision is the duty of deconstructive thought, the responsibility for the other, and the opposition to totalitarianism it
entails. The Levinasian supplement that Critchley argues deconstruction requires with respect to politics thus draws out that which
is already present. It is, though, perhaps an element that needs to be drawn out, for Derrida has been candid about, and often
criticized for, his political hesitancy. In answer to a question about the potential for translating the "theoretical radicality of

praxis," Derrida confessed (his term) "that I have never succeeded in directly relating
deconstruction to existing political codes and programmes."
This "failure" is derived not from any
apolitical sentiment within deconstructive thought but from the
"fundamentally metaphysical" nature of the political codes within which both
the right and the left presently operate. The problem for politics that this
disjuncture creates is, according to Derrida, that one has "to gesture in opposite di rections at the same time: on the one hand to preserve a distance and
suspicion with regard to the official political codes governing reality; on the
other, to intervene here and now in a practical and engaged man ner
whenever the necessity arises." This, Derrida laments, results in a "dual allegiance" and "perpetual
deconstruction" into a "radical political

115

uneasiness" whereby the logic of an argument structured in terms of "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" may mean
that political action, which follows from a decision between the competing hands, is in the end insufficient to the intellectual promise
of deconstructive thought16 But in The Other Heading, Derrida's reflection on the question and politics of European identity,
the difficulty of simultaneously gesturing in different directions is posed in an affirmative political manner.

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Multiplying probability by magnitude is the only moral option hard moral

rules result in circular preferences and horrible consequences
Yudkowsky 08 Full-time Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for
Artificial Intelligence and Cofounder (Eliezer, January 22nd 2008, Circular
Altruism)
Suppose that a disease, or a monster, or a war, or something, is killing people. And suppose you only have enough resources to
implement one of the following two options:

1. Save 400 lives, with certainty.

2. Save 500 lives, with 90% probability; save no lives, 10% probability .
Most people choose option 1. Which, I think, is foolish; because if you multiply 500
lives by 90% probability, you get an expected value of 450 lives, which exceeds the
400-life value of option 1. (Lives saved don't diminish in marginal utility, so this is an appropriate calculation.)
"What!" you cry, incensed. "How can you gamble with human lives ? How can you think about numbers when so much is at

stake? What if that 10% probability strikes, and everyone dies? So much for your damned logic! You're following your rationality

here's the interesting thing. If you present the options this way :
1. 100 people die, with certainty.
2. 90% chance no one dies; 10% chance 500 people die.
Then a majority choose option 2. Even though it's the same gamble . You see, just as a
certainty of saving 400 lives seems to feel so much more comfortable than an unsure gain, so too, a certain loss feels
worse than an uncertain one. You can grandstand on the second description too: "How can you condemn 100 people to certain
death when there's such a good chance you can save them? We'll all share the risk! Even if it was only a 75% chance of
saving everyone, it would still be worth it - so long as there's a chance - everyone makes it, or no one does!" You know
what? This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades,
is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel
too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up
and multiply. Previously on Overcoming Bias, I asked what was the least bad, bad thing that could happen, and suggested that it was getting a dust speck in your eye
off a cliff!" Ah, but

that irritated you for a fraction of a second, barely long enough to notice, before it got blinked away. And conversely, a very bad thing to happen, if not the worst thing,

Now, would you rather that a googolplex people got dust specks in their eyes, or that one
person was tortured for 50 years? I originally asked this question with a vastly larger number - an incomprehensible
mathematical magnitude - but a googolplex works fine for this illustration . Most people chose the dust specks over the
torture. Many were proud of this choice, and indignant that anyone should choose otherwise: "How dare you condone
torture!" This matches research showing that there are "sacred values", like human lives, and "unsacred values", like
money. When you try to trade off a sacred value against an unsacred value, subjects express great indignation
would be getting tortured for 50 years.

(sometimes they want to punish the person who made the suggestion). My favorite anecdote along these lines - though my books

team of researchers who evaluated the effectiveness of a

certain project, calculating the cost per life saved, and recommended to the government that the project be implemented
because it was cost-effective . The governmental agency rejected the report because, they said, you couldn't put a dollar
value on human life. After rejecting the report, the agency decided not to implement the measure . Trading off a sacred
are packed at the moment, so no citation for now - comes from a

value (like refraining from torture) against an unsacred value (like dust specks) feels really awful. To merely multiply utilities

Suppose you had to choose

between one person being tortured for 50 years, and a googol people being tortured for 49 years, 364 days, 23 hours,
59 minutes and 59 seconds. You would choose one person being tortured for 50 years, I do presume; otherwise I give
up on you. And similarly, if you had to choose between a googol people tortured for 49.9999999 years, and a googolsquared people being tortured for 49.9999998 years, you would pick the former . A googolplex is ten to the googolth power. That's a
would be too cold-blooded - it would be following rationality off a cliff... But let me ask you this.

googol/100 factors of a googol. So we can keep doing this, gradually - very gradually - diminishing the degree of discomfort, and multiplying by a factor of a googol each
time, until we choose between a googolplex people getting a dust speck in their eye, and a googolplex/googol people getting two dust specks in their eye.

your preferences are circular here, that makes rather a mockery of moral grandstanding .

If you find

If you drive from San Jose to San

Maybe you
think it a great display of virtue to choose for a googolplex people to get dust specks rather than one person being
tortured. But if you would also trade a googolplex people getting one dust speck for a googolplex/googol people getting
Francisco to Oakland to San Jose, over and over again, you may have fun driving, but you aren't going anywhere.

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two dust specks et cetera, you sure aren't helping anyone. Circular preferences may work for feeling noble, but not for
feeding the hungry or healing the sick. Altruism isn't the warm fuzzy feeling you get from being altruistic. If you're doing it for
the spiritual benefit, that is nothing but selfishness. The primary thing is to help others, whatever the means. So shut up and
multiply!

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**AT: Catastrophes Low Probability**

Policy-making requires assessment of all risks despite probability
Yudkowsky 08 Full-time Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for
Artificial Intelligence and Cofounder (Eliezer, January 22nd 2008, Circular
Altruism)

Overly detailed reassurances can also create false perceptions of safety: "X is not an
existential risk and you don't need to worry about it, because A, B, C, D, and E"; where the failure of
any one of propositions A, B, C, D, or E potentially extinguishes the human species . "We don't need to worry about
nanotechnologic war, because a UN commission will initially develop the technology and prevent its proliferation until such time
as an active shield is developed, capable of defending against all accidental and malicious outbreaks that contemporary

Vivid, specific scenarios can inflate our

probability estimates of security, as well as misdirecting defensive investments into needlessly narrow or implausibly
detailed risk scenarios. More generally, people tend to overestimate conjunctive probabilities and underestimate
disjunctive probabilities. (Tversky and Kahneman 1974.) That is, people tend to overestimate the probability that, e.g., seven
nanotechnology is capable of producing, and this condition will persist indefinitely."

events of 90% probability will all occur. Conversely, people tend to underestimate the probability that at least one of seven events
of 10% probability will occur. Someone judging whether to, e.g., incorporate a new startup, must evaluate the probability that
many individual events will all go right (there will be sufficient funding, competent employees, customers will want the product)
while also considering the likelihood that at least one critical failure will occur (the bank refuses a loan, the biggest project fails,
the lead scientist dies). This may help explain why only 44% of entrepreneurial ventures survive after 4 years . (Knaup
2005.) Dawes (1988) observes: 'In their summations lawyers avoid arguing from disjunctions ("either this or that or the other
could have occurred, all of which would lead to the same conclusion") in favor of conjunctions. Rationally, of course, disjunctions

The scenario of humanity going extinct in the next century is a disjunctive

event. It could happen as a result of any of the existential risks discussed in this book - or some other cause which none
of us fore saw. Yet for a futurist, disjunctions make for an awkward and unpoetic-sounding prophecy .
are much more probable than are conjunctions.'

Policy makers risk political backlash when proper action isnt taken to
prevent catastrophe
Yudkowsky 08 Full-time Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for
Artificial Intelligence and Cofounder (Eliezer, January 22nd 2008, Circular
Altruism)

People are surprised by catastrophes lying outside their

anticipation, beyond their historical probability distributions . Then why are we so taken aback when
The lesson of history is that swan happens.

Black Swans occur? Why did LTCM borrow leverage of $125 billion against $4.72 billion of equity, almost ensuring that any Black

After September 11th, the

U.S. Federal Aviation Administration prohibited box-cutters on airplanes. The hindsight
bias rendered the event too predictable in retrospect, permitting the angry victims to
find it the result of 'negligence' - such as intelligence agencies' failure to distinguish
warnings of Al Qaeda activity amid a thousand other warnings. We learned not to allow hijacked
Swan would destroy them? Because of hindsight bias, we learn overly specific lessons.

planes to overfly our cities. We did not learn the lesson: "Black Swans occur; do what you can to prepare for the unanticipated."
Taleb (2005) writes:It

is difficult to motivate people in the prevention of Black Swans...

Prevention is not easily perceived, measured, or rewarded; it is generally a silent and
thankless activity. Just consider that a costly measure is taken to stave off such an
event. One can easily compute the costs while the results are hard to determine. How can one tell its
effectiveness, whether the measure was successful or if it just coincided with no
particular accident? ... Job performance assessments in these matters are not just tricky, but may be biased in favor of
the observed "acts of heroism". History books do not account for heroic preventive measures.

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**A2: Strive for Perfection (Imagination)**

Imagination fails cant change reality.
Biddle, editor and publisher of The Objective Standard, 06

(Craig Biddle, editor and publisher of The Objective Standard, The Objectivist Standard, Spring 2006,
Vol. 1, No. 1, Introducing The Objective Standard, http://theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2006spring/introducing-the-objective-standard.asp)

reality is an absolutethat facts are facts, regardless of anyones hopes, fears, or desires.
There is a world independent of our minds to which our thinking must correspond if our ideas are to be true
and therefore of practical use in living our lives, pursuing our values, and protecting our rights . Thus, we
reject the idea that reality is ultimately determined by personal opinion or social convention or divine
decree. An individuals ideas or beliefs do not make reality what it is, nor can they directly change
anything about it; they either correspond to the facts of reality, or they do not. A person might think that the
Sun revolves around the Earth (as some people do); that does not make it so.
We hold that

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**Deontology Bad**
Deontology is bad when people disagree about what is right or wrong.
Daar 03 (Judith F. Daar, professor of law at Whittier Law School, The Prospect of Human Cloning: Improving
Nature or Dooming the Species? Seton Hall Law Review, LexisNexis Academic)
A second criticism of deontology is its assumption about the moral rightness and wrongness of human conduct.
Deontologists operate from the premise that there are moral absolutes in the world; certain conduct is
morally correct and other actions are morally wrong. n121 But in our diverse and changing world, a
system that depends on moral absoluteness is destined for challenge. Who or what is to be the
arbiter of moral rightness? Actions that a large [*540] group might consider morally wrong an
equally large group could view as morally acceptable. A Gallup Poll conducted in March 2002 is a
chilling illustration that one person's sin is another person's sanctity. n122 The poll asked citizens of Kuwait, the
country the United States defended in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, if the September 11, 2001
attacks on the World Trade Center could be morally justified. n123 A full thirty-six percent
responded that the perpetrators were morally justified in killing nearly 3000 individuals. n124
Though the survey was not conducted on U.S. citizens, it seems reasonable to assume that few if any Americans
would find moral justification for the September 11th attacks.

While the ethical choice is normally a good idea, a threshold should be used
in the face of a catastrophe.
Alexander and Moore 07 (Larry Alexander and Michael Moore, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Deontological Ethics, November 1, 2007 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/)

The second plausible response is for the deontologist to abandon Kantian absolutism for what is
usually called threshold deontology. A threshold deontologist holds that deontological norms
govern up to a point despite adverse consequences; but when the consequences become so dire
that they cross the stipulated threshold, consequentialism takes over (Moore 1997, ch. 17). A may
not torture B to save the lives of two others, but he may do so to save a thousand lives if the
threshold is higher than two lives but lower than a thousand.

Morality co-opts ethical behavior because the focus falls on ideology, not
action
Economic Analysis, Common-Sense Morality and Utilitarianism Author(s): J. Moreh Source: Erkenntnis
(1975-), Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jul., 1992), pp. 115-143 Published by: Springer Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20012427 Accessed: 22/07/2009 13:24
Moral rules are very stringent. Lying is allowed only in a small number of situations, e.g., in a crisis
(if one's life or that of another person is endangered by a malevolent character, it is permitted to
lie to the latter to protect the victim) or in certain market places where it is accepted that telling
lies is part of the bargaining process. In the latter case, care should be taken that deceit does not
spill over into other situations (Bok, 1980, Chap. 8 and p. 131). Moral philosophers generally agree
that moral rules are severe. Some argue in favour of severity, e.g., Bok whose book (1980) is
concerned mainly with lying and refers to many authorities favouring stringency of the rule
forbidding lying. Bar-Elli and Heyd (1986) uphold the stringency of the rule against vengeance,
though they grudgingly admit that it may be regarded as morally justified by the special kind of
personal relationship in the particular situation (p. 85). Some philosophers criticize the severity of
the demands made by some moral rules, because of the inconsistencies and asymmetries or even
absurdity they are thought to lead to. I shall refer to two authors: Williams and Slote. Williams
criticizes morality for attaching disproportionate importance to obligations and giving them
priority over other ethical considerations. One may not break a promise even if what was
promised was in itself of minor importance and keeping it would prevent one from furthering some
important cause (Williams, 1985, pp.
118 J. MOREH 6-7, 180, 187 and 222, footnote 7). Slote (1985, Chap. 1) notes the asymmetry in the
prescriptions of moral rules and permissions allowed by them between the moral agent and
others. A moral agent is allowed to sacrifice a great deal of his3 welfare for the purpose of
promoting the welfare of others by a much smaller amount, yet he is forbidden to do the reverse

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(i.e., promote his welfare by a great deal at the expense of someone else's welfare). Slote
contends that if all people count equally, the latter action should be permitted. Nor is one entitled
to sacrifice the life of one person in order to save the lives of several others. Such an exemption to
the rule 'do not kill' is not allowed. Nevertheless, a person is permitted to sacrifice his own life for
the sake of saving that of others. Slote mentions these examples to show that morality is not
impartial between the self and others, as it should be. I am, however, using them to illustrate the
austerity of moral rules.

Deontology is unable to distinguish between better ethics, but is logically

no longer ethical when peoples lives are at risk.
Alexander and Moore 07 (Larry Alexander and Michael Moore, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Deontological Ethics, November 1, 2007, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/)

Fourth, there is what might be called the paradox of relative stringency. There is an aura of
paradox in asserting that all deontological duties are categorical to be done no matter the
consequences and yet asserting that some of such duties are more stringent than others. A
common thought is that there cannot be degrees of wrongness with intrinsically wrong acts,
(Frey 1995, 78 n. 3). Yet relative stringency degrees of wrongness seems forced upon the
deontologist by two considerations. First, duties of differential stringency can be weighed against
one another if there is conflict between them, so that a conflict-resolving, overall duty becomes
possible if duties can be more or less stringent. Second, when we punish for the wrongs consisting
in our violation of deontological duties, we (rightly) do not punish all violations equally. The
greater the wrong, the greater the punishment deserved; and relative stringency of duty violated
(or importance of rights) seems the best way of making sense of greater versus lesser wrongs.
Fifth, there are situations unfortunately not all of them thought experiments where
compliance with deontological norms will bring about disastrous consequences. To take a stock
example of much current discussion, suppose that unless A violates the deontological duty not to
torture an innocent person (B), ten, or a thousand, or a million other innocent people will die
because of a hidden nuclear device. If A is forbidden by deontological morality from torturing B,
many would regard that as a reductio ad absurdum of deontology.

Hatred between groups of people make human rights violations inevitable

Kohen, Assistant Professor. Ph.D. Duke University Contemporary Political
Science 05
Ari Kohen. "The Possibility of Secular Human Rights: Alan Gewirth and the
Principle of Generic Consistency" Peer Reviewed Paper presented at the
annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, March 17,
2005, http://www.springerlink.com/content/8crjwyet6g6mr9fh/fulltext.pdf
The trouble with this response is pointed out by Richard Rorty, who offers the rejoinder,
made by an agent who wants to infringe upon the rights of another, that philosophers like
Gewirth "seem ,oblivious to blatantly obvious moral distinctions, distinctions
any decent person would draw. ''8~ For Rorty, the problem cannot be solved by
sitting down with a chalkboard and diagramming how the agent and his
potential victim are both PPAs. It is, he argues, a problem that will not be solved
by demonstrating that the agent violates his victim on pain of self-contradiction
because, for this agent, the victim is not properly a PPA, despite looking and acting very much
like one. The old adage about looking, swimming, and quacking like a duck

comes to mind here; no amount of quacking will convince the agent that his
victim is, in fact, a duck. As Rorty points out,
This rejoinder is not just a rhetorical device, nor is it in any way irrational. It is heartfelt. The
identity of these people, the people whom we should like to convince to join our Eurocentric
human rights culture, is bound up with their sense of who they are not . . . . What is crucial for

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their sense of who they are is that they are not an infidel, not a queer, not a woman, not an
untouchable .... Since the days when the term "human being" was synonymous with "member
of our tribe," we have always thought of human beings in terms of paradigm members of the
species. We have contrasted us, the real humans, with rudimentary or perverted or deformed
examples of humanity. 82
There are, I believe, two problems for Gewirth's theory here. The first is that an agent can quite
clearly sidestep rational inconsistency by believing that his victim is somehow less of an agent
(and, in the case presented by Rorty, less of a human being) than he is himself. The agent,
here, might recognize that his victim is a PPA, but other factors (being an infidel, a queer, a
woman, or an untouchable) have far greater resonance and preclude her having the same rights as
the agent. He might also recognize his victim as a potential PPA, but not one in the fullest sense
of that term or one who has actually achieved that status; as Gewirth himself notes, "there are
degrees of approach to being prospective purposive agents. ''83 It seems to me that the Nazis
knew quite well that their Jewish victims could be PPAs in some sense ; the Nuremberg Laws of
1935 confirm their awareness that Jews could plan and execute the same sorts of actions they
could (voting and working, for example). The rights of the Jews could be restricted, however,
because Jews were quite different from Germans; rather than PPAs in the fullest sense, they
were, in the eyes of the Nazis, what Rorty calls "pseudohumans. ''~4 On this point, Rorty's
point is both clear and compelling: " Resentful young Nazi toughs were quite aware that many
Jews were clever and learned, but this only added to the pleasure they took in beating such Jews .
Nor does it do much good to get such people to read Kant and agree that one should not treat
rational agents simply as means. For everything turns on who counts as a fellow human being,
as a rational agent in the only relevant sense--the sense in which rational agency is
synonymous with membership in our moral community. ''s5 The second problem for the PGC
pointed out by Rorty is that it is overly academic and insufficiently pragmatic. In other words, its
fifteen steps might be logically compelling to those in a philosophy department, but not to those
who are actually making these decisions on inclusion and exclusion. "This is not," Rorty tells us,
"because they are insufficiently rational. It is, typically, because they live in a world in which it
would be just too risky-- indeed, would often be insanely dangerous--to let one's sense of moral
community stretch beyond one's family, clan, or tribe. ''86 This second point leads to the final
critique of Gewirth's argument for the PGC.

Deontology does not hold up against the threat of nuclear war

Hardin and Mearsheimer 85 [ Russell Hardin and John Mearsheimer are both
Professors of Political Science at the University of Chicago, ol. 95, No. 3,
Special Issue: Symposium on Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence JSTOR ]
Discussion among philosophers often stops at the point of fundamental disagreement over moral
principles, just as discussion among strategists often stops at the point of disagreement over
hypothetical assertions about deterrence. But most moral theorists -- and all utilitarians -- also
require
consideration
of
hypothetical
assertions to reach their conclusions, although they are typically even less adept at objective,
causal
argument
than are strategists, who are themselves often quite casual with their social scientific claims.

Even
if
one
wishes to argue principally from deontological principles, one must have some confidence in one's
social scientific expectations to decide whether consequences might not in this instance be
overriding. Only a deontologist who held the extraordinary position that consequences never matter
could easily reach a conclusion on nuclear weapons without considering the quality of various
outcomes. Alas, on this dreadful issue good causal arguments are desperately needed.

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Deontology is a terrible system for policy- policies must use means to an end
framework and are judged by their effectiveness
Institute For Public Policy 97 [ Institute For Public Policy New Mexico June,
1997 A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics
http://apsapolicysection.org/vol7_2/72.pdf]
deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis
for
public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas
in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create
a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or
actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no
means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to
believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of
At the same time,

policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail
utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is
evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental
laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level
enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental
policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross
purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of
regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for
example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and
Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be
troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman,

The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must
be employed and above all, thescope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate
against reasoning soconclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is
seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interes t (1958, p. 12). It
therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible
link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably
assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the meansend language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety
are an insufficient,though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.
.

Deontology is irrelevant in policy making - intentions are impossible to

know, only the outcome matters
Hinman98
(Lawrence Hinman is a professor of Ethics Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, p. 186)

When, for example, we want to assess the moral correctness of proposed governmental
legislation, we may well wish to set aside any question of the intentions of the legislators. After all
good laws may be passed for the most venal of political motives, and bad legislation may be the
outcome of quite good intentions. Instead, we can concentrate solely on the question of what
effects the legislation may have on the people. When we make this shift, we are not necessarily
denying that individual intentions are important on some level, but rather confining our attention to
a level on which those intentions become largely irrelevant. This is particularly appropriate in the
case of policy decisions by governments, corporations, or other groups. In such cases there may

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be a diversity of different intentions that one may want to treat as essentially private matters hwen
assessing the moral worth of the proposed law, policy, or action. Therefore, rule utilitarianism's
neglect of intentions intuitively makes the most sense when we are assessing the moral worth of
some large-scale policy proposed by an entity consisting of more than one individual.
Deontology in policy making fails to uphold democracy and legitimizes
oppression.
Institute For Public Policy 97 [ Institute For Public Policy New Mexico June,
1997 A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics
http://apsapolicysection.org/vol7_2/72.pdf]
Regarding the policymaking role of deontological philosophy in a democracy, I am
concerned about the
same issue that concerned scholars such as Herman Finer and Victor Thompson--the specter of
policymakers (whether elected or unelected) imposing their own perceptions of higher-order moral
principles on an unwilling or uninformed society. History has shown that the imposition of higherorder moral principles from above all too often degenerates into instrumental oppression . Thus as
Finer has--I believe correctly--pointed out, the crucial difference between democracy and
totalitarianism is the people's power to exact obedience to the public will. In a democracy, values
are not "discovered" by policy activists; instead, yhey emerge out of the democratic process. For
this reason I find very troubling the suggestion by Joel Kassiola that environmental ethics
requires that such long-standing and powerful values as national sovereignty and property
rights will have to be ethically assessed and, perhaps, redefined or subordinated to a
more morally-weighty, environmentally-based values and policies. I cannot help but wonder
just who will
be doing the refining and subordinating of these values and how this is to be done. As

Kurt Baier reminds us, in a democracy the moral rules and convictions of any
group can and should be subjected to certain tests (1958, p. 12). That test is the
submission of those moral rules and convictions
to the sovereign public. While policymakers are expected to sort out the value
conflicts that arise in light of their duty to serve the public interest, they are
seldom entitled to act solely according to some perceived a priori moral
imperative. (Those who would act this way in the case of environmental policy are aptly
described by Bob Taylor as environmental ethicists who discover 'truth' even though this truth
can't or won't be seen by their fellow citizens.) Herein lies one of the important moral

dilemmas of democratic government. Individuals are free, within the

constraints of law, to act on perceived moral imperatives; democratic
governments are not. It is, for example, one thing for individuals to donate their property for
environmental preservation, but it is quite another thing for the government
to seize private lands (i.e., redefine property rights) for the same purpose.
Deontology fails-- no way of evaluating conflicting obligations
Rainbow 2002 [ Catherine Rainbow is a teacher at Davidson College.Descriptions of
Ethical
Theories
and
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/kabernd/Indep/carainbow/Theories.htm]

Principles

deontology contains many positive attributes, it also contains its fair number
of flaws. One weakness of this theory is that there is no rationale or logical
Although

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basis for deciding an individual's duties. For instance, businessman may

decide that it is his duty to always be on time to meetings. Although this
appears to be a noble duty we do not know why the person chose to make this
his duty. Perhaps the reason that he has to be at the meeting on time is that he always has to
sit in the same chair. A similar scenario unearths two other faults of deontology including the
fact that sometimes a person's duties conflict, and that deontology is not concerned with
the welfare of others. For instance, if the deontologist who must be on time to

meetings is running late, how is he supposed to drive? Is the deontologist

supposed to speed, breaking his duty to society to uphold the law, or is the
deontologist supposed to arrive at his meeting late, breaking his duty to be on
time? This scenario of conflicting obligations does not lead us to a
clear ethically correct resolution nor does it protect the welfare of others
from the deontologist's decision. Since deontology is not based on the context
of each situation, it does not provide any guidance when one enters a complex
situation in which there are conflicting obligations (1,2).
The need for exceptions means deontology fails as a theory.
Treasury Board 2006 [Canadian Treasury Board Professional Ethics and
Standards for the Evaluation Community in the Government of Canada
http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/eval/dev/career/pesecgc-enpcegc/pesecgcenpcegc_e.asp]
Among the criticisms of deontological theory is

that it is difficult to get universal

agreement on
what principles should be considered fundamental. It is also difficult to
prioritize and to apply
such abstract principles as truth telling and the sanctity of life to specific cases
that arise in ones
day-to-day work. In addition, the application of certain principles, without reference to
consequences, can have extremely negative resultsfor example, when telling the truth results
in penalties for well-intentioned actions. Moreover, it is often the case that one principle
will
come into conflict with another. A celebrated example is truth telling versus the
sanctity of life
when one is considering whether to lie to a prospective murderer about the
location of the
intended victim. It is also argued that if exceptions are made in the application of a
principle, it
cannot be considered a fundamental one . Many deontologists, however,
would approve of
exceptions when a greater moral principle is at stake. At a less dramatic level than
life and death,
one can envisage an evaluator having to choose between the publics right to know and a
clients
right to privacy.

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The subjectivity of what rights are important means deontology fails.

Rainbow 2002 [ Catherine Rainbow is a teacher at Davidson College.Descriptions of
Ethical
Theories
and
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/kabernd/Indep/carainbow/Theories.htm]

Principles

In the rights ethical theory the rights set forth by a society are protected and given the
highest priority. Rights are considered to be ethically correct and valid since a large or
ruling population endorses them. Individuals may also bestow rights upon others if
they have the ability and resources to do so (1). For example, a person may say that
her friend may borrow the car for the afternoon. The friend who was given the ability
to borrow the car now has a right to the car in the afternoon. A major complication of
this theory on a larger scale, however, is that one must decipher what the
characteristics of a right are in a society. The society has to determine what rights it
wants to uphold and give to its citizens. In order for a society to determine what rights
it wants to enact, it must decide what the society's goals and ethical priorities are.
Therefore, in order for the rights theory to be useful, it must be used in conjunction
with another ethical theory that will consistently explain the goals of the society (1).
For example in America people have the right to choose their religion because this
right is upheld in the Constitution. One of the goals of the founding fathers' of America
was to uphold this right to freedom of religion. However, under Hitler's reign in
Germany, the Jews were persecuted for their religion because Hitler decided that Jews
were detrimental to Germany's future success. The American government upholds
freedom of religion while the Nazi government did not uphold it and, instead, chose to
eradicate the Jewish religion and those who practiced it.
Deontologys absolutism prioritizes morality as a concept over moral results.
Nielsen 93 [Kai Nielsen is a Philosophy Professor at University of Calgary
Absolutism and It Consequentialist CriticsEdited by Joram Haber, p. 170-2]
Blowing up the fat man is indeed monstrous. But letting him remain stuck while the whole group drowns
is still more monstrous. The consequentialist is on strong moral ground here, and, if his reflective moral
convictions do not square either with certain unrehearsed or with certain reflective particular moral
convictions of human beings, so much the worse for such commonsense moral convictions. One could
even usefully and relevantly adapt here-though for a quite different purpose-an argument of Donagan's.
Consequentialism of the kind I have been arguing for provides so persuasive "a theoretical basis for
common morality that when it contradicts some moral intuition, it is natural to suspect that intuition,
not theory, is corrupt." Given the comprehensiveness, plausibility, and overall rationality of
consequentialism, it is not unreasonable to override even a deeply felt moral conviction if it does not
square with such a
theory, though, if it made no sense or overrode the bulk of or even a great many of our considered
moral convictions that would be another matter indeed Anticonsequentialists often point to the

inhumanity of people who will sanction such killing of the innocent but cannot the
compliment be returned by speaking of the even greater inhumanity, conjoined with
evasiveness, of those who will allow even more death and far greater misery and then
excuse themselves on the ground that they did not intend the death and misery but
merely forbore to prevent it? In such a context, such reasoning and such forbearing to prevent
seems to me to constitute a moral evasion. I say it is evasive because rather than steeling himself to do
what in normal circumstances would be a horrible and vile act but in this circumstance is a harsh moral
necessity he
allows. when he has the power to prevent it, a situation which is still many times worse. He tries to keep
his 'moral purity' and [to] avoid 'dirty hands' at the price of utter moral failure and what Kierkegaard

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called 'double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in this morally evasive way but
this does not make it right.

Deontologys absolutism means it will inevitably fail.

Pritchett No Date [ Adrian Pritchett is a University of Georgia graduate and an attorney.
Paper written post 1998. Kai Nielsens Support of Consequentialism and Rejection of
Deontology http://pritchea.myweb.uga.edu/phil3200paper1.htm]

Throughout the article, Nielsen concurrently argues that deontology should be rejected but that
consequentialism is viable. We may reconstruct his argument as follows: Deontology, as a
morally absolute theory, makes mistakes. Likewise, an absolutist form of consequentialism also
makes mistakes. So absolutism is wrong. Unfortunately, deontology can only be formulated as

some type of moral absolutism, while consequentialism can be flexible. Therefore, deontology
should be rejected, and by rejecting deontology we are left with consequentialism as a viable
theory.Nielsen relied heavily on examples to support his first premise that deontology makes
mistakes. He discussed warfare to show how it is not the case that one is necessarily morally
corrupt if he or she knowingly kills the innocent while making moves to kill combatants, but this
point would not have been salient without having seen the movie he referred to, The Battle of
Algiers. Nielsen did present an effective example, though, with the case of the innocent fat
man. In this thought experiment, a fat man is leading a group of people out of a cave when he

gets hopelessly stuck in the opening. There is a rising tide that will cause everyone inside the cave
to drown unless they can get out. The only option for removing the fat man is to blast him out with
dynamite that someone happens to have. Nielsen explains that the deontologist would hold that the
fat man must not be blasted and killed because this would violate the prohibition against killing and
it is only nature responsible for everyone else drowning. Nielsen challenges this principle by
declaring that anyone in such a situation, including the fat man, should understand that the right
thing to do is blast the fat man out in order to save the many live s in the cave. Furthermore, the
deontologist exhibits moral evasion whenever he stands idly by and allows a greater tragedy than
is necessary to occur. Nielsen explains that this is the kind of example that highlights the corrupt
nature of deontology.
Utilitarianism is the only way to access morality. Sacrifice in the name of
preserving rights destroys any hope of future generations attaining other
values.
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; Nuclear
Ethics pg. 45-46)

Is there any end that could justify a nuclear war that threatens the survival of the
species? Is not all-out nuclear war just as self contradictory in the real world as pacifism is accused of being? Some people
argue that "we are required to undergo gross injustice that will break many souls sooner than ourselves be the authors of
mass murder."73 Still others say that "when a person makes survival the highest value, he has declared that there is nothing he
will not betray. But for a civilization to sacrifice itself makes no sense since there are not survivors to give meaning to the
sacrifical [sic] act. In that case, survival may be worth betrayal." Is it possible to avoid the "moral calamity of a policy like
unilateral disarmament that forces us to choose between being dead or red (while increasing the chances of both)"? 74
How one judges the issue of ends can be affected by how one poses the questions. If one asks " what is worth a billion lives (or
the survival of the species)," it is natural to resist contemplating a positive answer. But suppose one asks, " is it possible to
imagine any threat to our civilization and values that would justify raising the threat to a billion lives from one in ten
thousand to one in a thousand for a specific period ?" Then there are several plausible answers, including a democratic way of

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When we pursue several values simultaneously,

we face the fact that they often conflict and that we face difficult tradeoffs. If we make one value absolute in priority, we
are likely to get that value and little else . Survival is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of other values, but that
does not make it sufficient. Logical priority does not make it an absolute value. Few people act as though survival were an
absolute value in their personal lives, or they would never enter an automobile. We can give survival of the species a very
high priority without giving it the paralyzing status of an absolute value. Some degree of risk is unavoidable if individuals
or societies are to avoid paralysis and enhance the quality of life beyond mere survival. The degree of that risk is a
justifiable topic of both prudential and moral reasoning.
life and cherished freedoms that give meaning to life beyond mere survival.

Destruction of social institutions that limit rights literally cause social chaos
and make it impossible to project right-based economies elsewhere.
Harris 94 (Owen Spring 1994; Editor of National Interest Journal of
International affairs and diplomacy; Power of Civilizations Via Questia)

Had the United States been as demanding on human rights and democracy towards
Taiwan and South Korea in the 1960s as it is now towards China, those countries
would never have experienced their economic miracles, and they and the region would be in much
worse shape as a result. But perhaps the most cutting riposte that these Singaporeans make is that the internal condition of the
United States itself today--the

evident consequence of pressing its own principles to extremes--deprives it of any authority

to preach to others, to insist that all must follow its ways . Listen to this, from Kishore Mahbubani, a recent Singaporean
ambassador to the United Nations and visiting fellow at Harvard: But freedom does not only solve problems; it can also cause
them. The United States has undertaken a massive social experiment, tearing down social institution after social
institution that restrained the individual. The results have been disastrous. Since 1960 the U.S. population has increased
41 percent while violent crime has risen by 560 percent, single-mother births by 419 percent, divorce rates by 300
percent and the percentage of children living in single-parent homes by 300 percent. This is massive social decay . Many
a society shudders at the prospects of this happening on its shores. But instead of traveling overseas with humility, Americans
confidently preach the virtues of unfettered individual freedom, blithely ignoring the visible social consequences .(3) How
is one to respond to all that? One might I suppose simply say, thank God they didn't bring up Slavery and the Opium Trade,
and leave it at that. But in this issue Eric Jones takes the Singaporean case seriously, analyzes its arguments, and then
speculates fascinatingly on China's possible futures. As he says, in one sense the debate is one between those who assert the
primacy of history and those who assert the primacy of economics. But as Irwin Stelzer shows, there is room for interesting
differences of opinion even among those who agree on the latter.

There is no Utopia in which we can get rid of difficult moral decisions.

Political inaction in times of risks can only be for the worst
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; Nuclear
Ethics pg. 25-26)

One way is to treat rules as prima facie moral

duties and to appeal to a consequentialist critical level of moral reasoning to judge competing moral claims . For example,
How do we reconcile rules and consideration of consequences in practice?

in judging the moral acceptability of social institutions and policies (including nuclear deterrence), a broad consequentialist might
demand that the benefit they produce be not only large but also not achievable by an alternative that would respect rules. 40

In

addition, to protect against the basic difficulties of comparing different people's interests when making utilitarian
calculations, a broad consequentialist would require very substantial majorities; otherwise he would base his decisions
on rules and rights-based grounds. A consequentialist argument can also be provided for giving some weight to motives
as well as means. For example William Safire argues that "the protection of acting in good faith, with no malicious intent, is

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what make decision-making possible. It applies to all of us. . . . The doctor who undertakes a risky operation, the lawyer who
gambles on an unorthodox defense to save his client, the businessman who bets the company on a new product."42 While such
an argument can be abused if good motives are treated as an automatic one-dimensional exculpation, it can be used by
broad consequentialists as a grounds for including evaluation of motives in the overall judgment of an act . Whether one
accepts the broad consequentialist approach or chooses some other, more eclectic way to include and reconcile the three
dimensions of complex moral issues,43 there will often be a sense of uneasiness about the answers, not just because of the

problems "but simply that there is no satisfactory solution to these issues-at least none that appears to
avoid in practice what most men would still regard as an intolerable sacrifice of value."44 When value is sacrificed, there
is often the problem of "dirty hands." Not all ethical decisions are pure ones. The absolutist may avoid the problem of
dirty hands, but often at the cost of having no hands at all. Moral theory cannot be "rounded off and made complete and
tidy." That is part of the modern human condition. But that does not exempt us from making difficult moral choices.
complexity of the

Political inaction to prevent further death is the greatest inhumanity one can
commit.
Nielsen 93 Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary (Kai, Absolutism
and Its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber Pg 171-72)

Anticonsequentialists often point to the inhumanity of people who will sanction such
killing of the innocent, but cannot the compliment be returned by speaking of the even
greater inhumanity, conjoined with evasiveness, of those who will allow even more death and far greater misery
and then excuse themselves on the ground that they did not intend the death and misery but merely forbore to prevent it?
In such a context, such reasoning and such forbearing to prevent seems to me to constitute a moral evasion . I say it is
evasive because rather than steeling himself to do what in normal circumstances would be a horrible and vile act but in this
circumstance is a harsh moral necessity, he allows, when he has the power to prevent it, a situation which is still many times

He tries to keep his 'moral purity' and avoid 'dirty hands' at the price of utter moral failure and what Kierkegaard
called 'double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in this morally evasive way but this does not
make it right My consequentialist reasoning about such cases as the case of the innocent fat man is very often resisted on the
grounds that it starts a very dangerous precedent. People rationalize wildly and irrationally in their own favor in such
situations. To avoid such rationalization, we must stubbornly stick to our deontological principles and recognize as well
that very frequently, if people will put their wits to work or just endure, such admittedly monstrous actions done to
prevent still greater evils will turn out to be unnecessary.
worse.

Attempts to totalize systems of morals is impossible

Green 02 (Joshua David; Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard
University. November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth
About Morality and What To Do About It", pg 288)

moral theorizing fails because our intuitions do not reflect a

coherent set of moral truths and were not designed by natural selection or anything
else to behave as if they were. And note that this is the case for a single persons intuitions. Troubles only
multiply when one must reconcile the conflicting intuitions of many different people .
Thus, while antirealism does not rule out the possibility of reinventing normative
ethics as an attempt to organize our moral intuitions and values, its not likely to work.
If you want to make sense of your moral sense, turn to biology, psychology, and
sociologynot normative ethics.
I maintain, once again, that this sort of

Construction of moral lines is counter-productive to decision making.

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Green 02 (Joshua David; Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard

University. November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth
About Morality And What To Do About It", pg 310)
Moral realists, and those anti-realists who would emulate them, have the option of dogmatism, of blindly acting by moral norms
that one takes to be authoritative. Revisionists, in contrast, have no choice but to acknowledge that all moral judgment is an

imprecise process of weighing values. The nature of moral action requires the drawing of lines : One
either jumps in and saves the drowning child, or one does not. One either votes to allow abortion or one does not. Of course, one

To
any particular course of action one must say either yes or no. Thus, while the inputs to moral
will sometimes make compromises by adopting middle-ofthe- road courses of action, but, at some level, all action is discrete.
judgment are fuzzy, fluid, and continuous considerations, the practical outputs of moral judgment are discrete actions.

Deontology is intuitively appealing because it offers answers as clear and forceful as

our intuitions, drawing theoretical lines that translate into practical lines, the kinds of
lines that we, like it or not, are forced to draw by the nature of action. But, contrary to
appearances, nature contains no true moral lines. We begin with only a mush of 298
morally relevant considerations, things we care about, and any lines that get drawn
must be drawn by us. Therefore, any attempt to settle a moral question with
deontological appeals to rights, obligations, etc. always begs the question. Such
appeals are merely attempts to settle moral issues by insisting that they have, in
effect, already been settled by Mother Moral Nature and the lines she has drawn.
Exceptions to all concrete lines of morals prove there exists no true
deontological framework.
Green 02 (Joshua David; Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard
University. November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth
About Morality And What To Do About It", pg 312)

In the context of an
openly anti-realist dialogue, what would it mean to say that a fetus has a right to life
or that a woman has a right to choose? If all one means in saying these things is that one is against abortion,
What goes for private debates about marital infidelity goes for public moral debates as well.

or in favor of allowing it, then why not just say that?17 Packaging ones opinion as a claim about rights is just pointless

Perhaps, one might argue, that an appeal to a right can be understood as an

appeal to a default assumption. To appeal to the moral right to free speech, for example, might be to appeal to
the generally accepted principle that people should be able to say what they want in almost all cases. The problem is
that in any real controversy in which rights are invoked, the question is inevitably
about the limits of those rights. Therefore, it is pointless18 for civil libertarians to
defend flag-burning by appeal to the right to free speech, regardless of how natural
this feels. Everyone is generally in favor of free speech. The debate is about whether to make an
exception for this sort of speech. Pointing out that this case would be an exception
does nothing to change the minds of those who want it to be an exception. In this
case, as in others, appeals to rights are, once again, just question-begging
propaganda, useless in the face of anti-realists who know the meta-ethical truth and
arent willing to play along.
propaganda.

Alternatives to cost-benefit analyses would result in political paralyses and

crush decision-making
Green 02 Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University
(Joshua, November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth
About Morality And What To Do About It", pg 313)

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In contrast, one can appeal to good and bad consequences without

propagandizing.

A pro-life conservative might say, for example, that restricting abortion rights is good (or good in certain respects) because it teaches people important lessons in personal responsibility. This claim is not

empty. A young woman who gets pregnant as a result of irresponsible choices and is forced to carry a baby to term and give it up for adoption is likely to learn some valuable life lessons that she might not learn if given the option to end her pregnancy with a

He can agree that there is an up side to anti-choice legislation,

but then go on to argue that these advantages are outweighed by the disadvantages, bad things that an honest
conservative can acknowledge as bad, such as harm caused by illegal abortions. Of course, this kind of dialogue may not
pill. This sort of claim contributes to a meaningful dialogue because its something a pro-choice liberal can acknowledge.

resolve the issue. There may remain untestable factual assumptions on either side concerning, for example, the existence of God
and the nature of His will. Likewise, there may remain brute evaluative differences, for example, over the various weights to

But getting rid of questionbegging talk of rights and establishing some common ground about advantages and disadvantages may help focus the
issue. If, for example, the pro-choice camp could get the pro-life camp to acknowledge that its opposition to abortion is
ultimately grounded in untestable religious beliefs and nothing else, that would be a very worthwhile achievement.
attach to the mutually acknowledged good and bad consequences of (dis)allowing abortion.

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*****UTIL BAD / DEON GOOD*****

**Util Bad**
People are not a means to a result, the results of an action are never as
important as the action itself.
Schapiro 2001 [Tamar Schapiro is professor of philosophy at Stanford.
Three Conceptions of Action in Moral Theory Ous, Mar 2001, Vol. 35 Issue
1, p93, 25p Ebsco]
Kamms view of action, though less explicit and developed, shares this propositional
orientation. An action in accordance with moral constraints, Kamm claims, states that
another person has or lacks value as a matter of fact. And since there is such a fact of
the matter, actions can succeed or fail to express the truth. 18 And yet on both Wollastons
and Kamms accounts, the world to which action relates us descriptively is not the utilitarians

world of natural causes and effects. The claim that youre really something is a not a claim
about a persons empirical or psychological state; rather it is a claim about his status.19
Similarly, the examples Wollaston invokes to illustrate his theory of action all involve
claims about the status of an agent in relation to others. Thus Wollastons view, echoed
by Kamm, seems to be that action tracks certain practical factsfacts about where we
stand in relation to one another as members of a social world. Wollastons conception of
action seems to presuppose a moral psychology which is different from Cumberlands.

While Wollaston would not deny that every action involves an exercise of efficient causality, his
view suggests that our ultimate practical concern is not for the effects we can produce. Indeed
his conception implies that in addition to a causal element, action contains a reflexive
element. The exercise of human agency, according to Wollaston, involves a reflective
awareness of ourselves in relation to others. 20 Action expresses a conception of where we
stand in relation to the other constituents of the world, conceived as a realm of status relations.
Moreover, this awareness determines an ultimate end of action which is not an effect to be
brought about. That end is the faithful representation of the interpersonal order of which we are
members.
Normality bias causes us to underestimate the impact of discriminatory
outcomes. This justifies a feedback loop where we accept the established
order and treat disadvantaged populations as suitable victims necessary for
our safety.
Lu-in Wang, Professor of Law @ University of Pittsburgh School of Law, 2006 Discrimination by
Default: How Racism Becomes Routine Pg 90-97
The Normalcy and Normalization of Discrimination Because counterfactual thinking influences our
reactions to and explanations of negative events, biases in counterfactual thinking have the
potential to distort our assessments of discriminatory outcomes at several levels. First, they can
mute our reactions to discrimination generally, leading us to tolerate and even to accept unequal
outcomes. Our acceptance of discrimination is not due solely to a general indifference or hardness
toward groups that are vulnerable to discrimination, but results in part from the specific ways in
which our preference for the normal or customary affects how we process and evaluate events
and behavior. That is, the normality bias leads us to react less strongly to (and perhaps to not
even notice) misfortunes that we take for granted or that follow an expected pattern. This bias
also promotes the entrenchment of those patterns because it leads us to accept the established

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order but to End jarring, and therefore to resist, challenges to those accepted ways. Furthermore,
it makes it easier for us to justify the established patterns by viewing them as rational and even
fair. Second, when a case of alleged discrimination does come under scrutiny, biases in
counterfactual thinking can distort our causal explanations of the events in question and our
evaluations of the parties. Because determining whether discrimination has occurred is
fundamentally an exercise in causal attribution,"7 the relative normality or mutability of the
parties' conduct can influence our judgments of their roles in producing the outcome in a way that
leads us to reduce the perpetrators responsibility and ascribe undue responsibility to the victim.
More broadly, our judgments of blame and sympathy create a feedback loop that reinforces the
norms, expectations, and practices that contributed to our biased judgments and perpetuate
discriminatory reactions and behavior. Immutable Wrongs and Suitable Victims The more easily
we can imagine the victim of a tragic fate avoiding it, the more badly we will feel that be has
suffered, so that the level of sympathy we feel and the amount of compensation we dole out may
turn on trivial differences in the circumstances of a tragedy. In the burglary study discussed
earlier, for example, subjects expressed greater sympathy for victims if their homes were
burglarized the night before they returned from vacation than if the burglary occurred several
weeks before their return. Similarly, subjects in another study recommended significantly higher
compensatory awards for a convenience store customer who was shot during a robbery at a store
he rarely patronized than for a customer who was shot at his regular store. They also awarded
significantly higher amounts to a plane crash victim who managed to walk miles through a remote
area only to die one-quarter of a mile from the nearest town than to one who traveled just as far
but died seventy-five miles from the nearest town. In none of the studies did the victims losses
or suffering differ based on the circumstances of their misfortunes. Nevertheless, the fate of the
more highly compensated victims seemed more poignant and the victims themselves more
deserving of sympathy, because subjects could more easily imagine positive outcomes for them.
A positive counterfactual also may come more easily to mind, as Delgados examples suggest,
when it is not normal for a person to suffer a particular fate. Recall the bursting of the dot-com E
bubble, when unemployment figures began to reflect not just the usual losses of blue-collar and
lower-skilled service jobs but also substantial losses of high-paying, white-collar jobs. Numerous
news articles highlighted and analyzed the trend, labeling the ` downturn a "white-collar
recession and sympathetically profiling the newly idle (and mostly White) college educated
professionals for whom unemployment was both a hardship and a shock. Although white collar
professionals during that period did A indeed suffer higher rates of unemployment than were
typical for that group, they were not, as many assumed, the hardest hit: the groups that usually
get clobbered by unemploymentblue- collar workers, lower-skilled workers, people of color
continued to bear disproportionately higher job losses. The misfortunes of unemployed
professionals drew more attention and greater sympathy in part because, as one economist put it,
They are not the people who come right to mind when you think about the jobless.* Similarly,
our attention and sympathy for crime victims varies according to how accustomed we are to
seeing themor, to be more precise, people like themsuffer crime and violence. Even the same,
equally appalling forms of victimization can elicit different degrees of concern depending on race
and class. A couple of high-profile cases from recent years illustrate this point. Many readers will
likely recall the highly publicized 1989 case of the Central Park joggera case so famous that this
reference to its victim generally suffices to identify it. As Kimberle Crenshaw has noted, this case,
which was believed at the time to have involved the gang rape and brutal beating of a White
investment banker by as many as twelve Black youths, drew massive, sensationalized media
Coverage, provoked widespread public outrage, and even prompted Donald Trump to take out a
full page ad in four New York newspapers demanding that New York Bring Back the Death
Penalty, Bring Back Our Police." While she does not suggest that the Central Park joggers ease
did not merit great concern, Crenshaw does point out the dramatic disparity between the level of
concern that case evoked and the virtual silence of the media with regard to the twenty-eight
other cases of first-degree rape or attempted rape" that were reported in New York that same
weekmany of which were as horrific as the rape in Central Park," but most of which included
victims who were women of color. Similarly, the great attention paid to a more recent and perhaps
equally famous casethe June 2002 abduction of Elizabeth Smart, a White teenager from an
affluent Utah familycontrasted sharply with the relative lack of coverage given a similar case
that same spring: the disappearance of Alexis Patterson, a seven-year-old African American girl, in
April 2002. By one account, the Smart story received ten times the media coverage given Patter-

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sons case: one thousand newspaper articles and television reports on Smart versus one hundred
on Patterson.34 Reporters, editors, and producers denied that the victims race played any role in
the amount of attention their cases received, pointing out that a number of factors distinguished
them: Smart was abducted from her own bedroom in the middle of the night while Patterson
disappeared during her walk to school, the police departments may have worked differently in
sharing information with the media, and the Smart parents, with their "perfect" family, may have
been perceived more sympathetically than the Pattersons. Aside from these circumstantial
differences, however, a number of journalists and commentators noted that race probably did
make a differencenot because the media consciously resist reporting stories with Black victims,
but because of their sense of "what makes a compelling national story."3 What makes a
compelling story, however, often correlates with race and class. As one veteran Black journalist
put it bluntly, "whatever happens in a black neighborhood doesnt really surprise anybody. The
public is conditioned to expect that. "37 In other words, the explanation may be simply that crime
and violence are an accepted part of Black peoples "rough road in life."38 Their suffering is
normal and therefore unremarkable. Furthermore, we take for granted not just who suffers but
also how their suffering plays out. That is, we become inured to misfortunes that a story line with
which we are familiar, because the victims experiences are hard to imagine otherwise. The more
muted reactions to deaths from enemy versus friendly illustrate this point. Familiarity accustoms
us to racial and other group-based discrimination as well, because that kind of misfortune often
follows standard scripts. In their analysis of reactions to the bombing of a synagogue in France
that injured several people, social psychologists Dale T Miller and William Turnbull pointed out
that one need not embrace a discriminatory viewpoint in order to assimilate the expectation that
certain harms are normal for some people but not for others: Frances then Prime Minister publicly
denounced the attack and expressed his sympathy for both the jews who were inside the
synagogue and the "innocent passersby." The Prime Ministers differentiation of the victims and
innocent passersby provoked considerabl[e] outrage because many interpreted it as implying that
he did not consider the jews to be as innocent as the passersby. Certainly the term innocent has a
strong moral connotation, but should we assume that the Prime Ministers remarks reflect antiSemitism? Not necessarily. His failure to apply the term innocent to the jews inside the synagogue
may reflect the fact that his mental representation of a synagogue enabled him to mentally
remove passersby from the vicinity more easily than the attending jews. That the passersby were
not the intended victims of the attack also makes their injuries less taken-for-granted and thus
easier to undo mentally (although no more or less deserved) than those of the jews. What need
not have been, ought not to have been.3 As this incident suggests, the more readily we
recognize the patterns that discrimination follows, the harder it is for us to undo mentally the
routine discrimination we expect and witness, the more congruous and less remarkable we find its
victims losses, and the more acceptable they become. As a result, even extreme acts of
discrimination such as bias-motivated violence can play a role in normalizing discrimination to the
extent that they define the expected targets for aggression and ill treatment. Observers of bias,
crimes understand immediately and viscerally why the victim was singled out because they
recognize the pattern that such crime follows. As Iris Marion Young has explained, the social
environment surrounding acts of violence, harassment, intimidation, and ridicule of particular
groups makes those acts "possible and even acceptable. This pattern of acceptance also
characterizes the less dramatic, more mundane types of discrimination that members of some
groups experience routinely. Dorothy E. Roberts has pointed out, for example, that habitual racial
profiling in law enforcement con- tributes to an environment in which both the imposition of
physical suffering on members of certain groups and the infringement of their constitutional rights
are expected and minimized. First, discriminatory targeting by law enforcement officers reinforces
the perception that some groups are "second-class citizens" for whom police surveillance and
even arrest are "perfectly natural." In turn, this belief promotes the view that those groups are
entitled to fewer liberties and that their rights are "mere amenities that may be sacrificed to
protect law-a biding people." Acceptance of this view results in an environment in which a pattern
of discriminatory targeting seems benign, for "when social understandings are so uncontested
that they become invisible, the social meanings that arise from them appear natural. Similarly,
Deseriee A. Kennedy has explained that consumer discriminationthe commercial version of
racial profiling in which retail establishments single out Black and Brown shoppers for heightened
surveillance and other ill treatmentalso insinuates itself into our expectations of how people of
color should be treated: "Everyday racism perpetuates itselfit becomes integrated into everyday

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situations and becomes part of the expected, of the unquestionable, and of what is seen as
normal by the dominant group.""2 And as we shall see, a history of inferior care has led to the
view that minorities inevitably will suffer worse health outcomes because those people" generally
dont do well.43 In addition to being familiar and therefore normal, our scripts, schemas, and
prototypes for discrimination incorporate other factors that make discriminatory outcomes seem
inevitable and lead us to take them for granted. The standard discrimination schema includes a
perpetrator who intentionally targets a member of a disfavored group for ill treatment and whose
intentional wrong- doing is triggered by his "taste for discrimination"a force both irrational and
outside his control. Both the assumptions that discrimination is intended and that its perpetrators
are driven to it tend to make discrimination seem ineluctable, with all the implications that the
appearance of immutability carries. As Miller and Turnbull suggested with reference to the
synagogue bombing, when a victim is seen as an intended target, the victims fate is harder to
undo mentally. As they also have explained, victims losses are more easily taken for granted
when the harm they suffer was required in order for the perpetrator to achieve his goals"even
when [those] goals [are] reprehensible.4 This tendency was confirmed in yet another victim
compensation study, in which subjects showed less sympathy toward and recommended less
compensation for a victim whose dog was killed by a burglar when the dogs barking "threatened
the burglars mission" than when the dog was killed when no one was nearby to hear the barking.
It is also harder to imagine a different outcome if an actors behavior is viewed as out of his
control than when it is controllable. For example, to the extent that people accept the stereotype
of a rapist as being "sex-starved, insane, or both," they have a hard time imagining him behaving
differently and refraining from his attack on the victim."6 Taken as a whole--and as unrealistic and
inaccurate as they may sometimes beour scripts, schemas, and prototypes of discrimination
lead us to take for granted and thus to accept in- equitable outcomes. And by incorporating the
assumptions implicit in these conceptions of discrimination, the legal model of intentional
discrimination reinforces and institutionalizes this effect. We come, in other words, to view
members of certain groups as appropriate or acceptable targets for the kinds of mistreatment that
we are used to seeing them suffer. Even those of us who are vulnerable to common forms of
discrimination may adopt this perspective to some degree, as we shall see below. Those who do
not see themselves as likely targets of discrimination, on the other handthat is, members of
typically dominant groupsmay even find comfort in these patterns. One of the less noble
tendencies of human beings is to gauge our own vulnerability to negative events by comparison
to othersand to prefer to compare "down- ward, to less fortunate others. Downward social
comparison gives us a favorable, self-enhancing view of ourselves, thereby reducing anxiety and
improving our sense of well-being.47 Accordingly, individuals who can distinguish themselves
from potential targets are able to reap psychological benefits from drawing that distinction. To the
extent that racially discriminatory patterns of mistreatment provide nontarget individuals with
more vulnerable, less fortunate groups with which to compare themselves, these patterns also
provide nontarget persons with a means of enhancing their positive views of themselves and the
worldto see the world as safe and just and themselves as invulnerable and worthy. To the extent
that viewing some groups as expected, even accepted, targets for mistreatment provides a
nontarget individual with a way of differentiating herself from that victim, she may feel even more
insulated from or immune to such treatment because her group identity protects her. The comfort
that comes from seeing others as more vulnerable than ourselves in turn serves to reinforce the
designation of those others as suitable victims.48

Extend Wang, 02 utilitarianism perpetuates the exclusion of the

marginalized. This reinforces systematic bias based on race, class, and
gender for the benefit of a privileged class. The normality of discrimination
produces a feedback loop where our reaction to suffering is muted and our
biased judgments reinforce the norms that contributed to discrimination in
the first place. These biases distort perceptions of cause and effect and our
evaluation of the events in question. Once we are accustomed to the
systematic harm of disadvantaged individuals it makes it possible to ignore
their suffering while overestimating the impact of events that threaten to
change the social order.

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Risk assessment is distorted by poverty trading on capital reserves exclude

the poor
Tim Hope, Professor of Criminology @ Keele University, 2000, Crime, disorder, and community
safety Pg 193-194
We live in both a risk society (Beck 1992) and an exclusive society (Young 1999). At the same
time as we orient to ourselves around the risks and dangers which we see surrounding us in our
everyday lives, so also do our social and political arrangements lend themselves to the
magnification of inequalities in access to those goods which reassure, protect or expose ourselves
to risk. As our perception of the bads increases, so do we seek to gamer the goods which would
keep them at bay, trading on our capital reserves and capacities across the various spheres of
economy, community and culture. The ontological insecurity which the condition of late
modernity inspires in us (Giddens 1990; Young 1999) fuses with the apprehension of mundane
insecurities, pressuring us to invest in the means of risk avoidance (Hope and Sparks 2000). As we
feel increasingly that the public sphere alone can no longer guarantee sufficiently the public
goods of everyday safety (see Garland 1996), so we are thrown upon our own individual and
collective resources and strategies to acquire the private goods which would remedy our
perceived security deficit. And our incapacity to protect ourselves from risk leads to frustration
with government - still seen as the primary g provider of safety in modem society and with
ourselves, as a reflection of our own powerlessness in the face of the risks and harms that
surround us. Yet, access to capital in one sphere - for instance. through income and of such a
process is at work in contemporary society we might expect to see consequences in observed
structure of outcomes both of risk and of risk avoidance. Even if we have little access to the
decision making processes of individuals, and little chance of observing their pursuit of strategies
of risk avoidance in their everyday lives, we may still be able to infer their operation from the
observed structural patterns of risk. In this vein, this chapter essays an actuarial analysis of the
distribution of the risk to private citizens of household property crime victimization in England and
Wales, as measured by the British Crime Survey.

Judge must recognize their complicity in reinforcing beliefs which justify a

continuation of racism.
Wendy Brown Scott 99, professor of @ Tulane Law School in New Orleans Transformative
desegregation: liberating hearts and minds, 315
Judges and college and university faculty members, the majority of whom are white and male,
must be willing to cross borders and divest their hearts and minds of the belief in the superiority
of Western culture. As Arthur Schlesinger put it, judges must "face the shameful fact: historically
America has been a racist nation."" Judges must see that they are steeped in the very traditions
and values inculcated by Eurocentric curriculum, and that the incantation of neutrality is not
sufficient to overcome their inherent biases." Then they can weigh their own traditions and
values, which have historically denigrated or denounced difference, against traditionally
subordinated concepts (such as multiculturalism and Afrocentrism) in order to determine
whether the failure to include these perspectives in curricula violates the Constitution. In this
same vein, bell hooks argues that not only must the black life experience be "decolonized," but
that whites must be "decolonized" themselves.216 hooks describes the problem which requires
decolonization: During that time of my life when racial apartheid forbid possibilities of intimacy
and closeness with whites, I was most able to forget about the pain of racism----Close to white
folks, I am forced to witness firsthand their willful ignorance about the impact of race and racism.
The harsh absolutism of their denial. Their refusal to acknowledge accountability for racist
conditions past and present217 She defines decolonization as the process of whites "unlearning
white supremacy by divesting of white privilege" and blacks divesting of the "vestiges of
internalized racism."211 Those vestiges include: the belief among white Americans, which
perpetuates the exercise of white privilege, that they are not responsible for racism; their belief
that black people should be feared and dreaded; the belief among black and white people that

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racism is intractable and permanent, and that no meaningful bonds of intimacy can be formed
between blacks and whites and therefore, white supremacy should not be resisted; and the
economic necessity of the repression of black rage directed toward whites.219 She states that
"[t]he political process of decolonization is. . . a way for us to learn to see [one another more]
clearly. It is the way to freedom for both colonized and colonizer."220

Apocalyptic predictions are constructed by alarmists to advance personal

interests
Kurasawa, Associate Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Social and Political Thought at
York University in Toronto, 2004 (Fuyuki Karasawa, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention
and The Work of Foresight, NM, http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Kurasawa%20Articles/Constellations
%20Article.pdf)
Up to this point, I have tried to demonstrate that transnational socio-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.

Predictions out of debate may be good, but in debate they should be held to
a very low standard. The probability of one small political change from the
status quo causing nuclear war or extinction is not only infinitesimal, its
also ridiculous.
Moral conscience precedes rational decision making decisions are based off
a moral backdrop
Bauman, Emeritus Prof of Sociology at the University of Leeds, 1993
(Zygmunt, Postmodern Ethics, 246-250)

the moral crisis of the postmodern habitat requires first and foremost that politics - whether the politics of
the politicians or the policentric, scattered politics which matters all the more for being so elusive and
beyond control _ be an extension and institutionalization of moral responsibility. Genuine moral issues of the highBut

tech world are by and large beyond the reach of individuals (who, at best, may singly or severally purchase the right not to worry
about them, or buy a temporary reprieve from suffering the effects of neglect). The effects of technology are long-distance, and
so must be the preventive and remedial action. Hans Jonas's 'long-range ethics' makes sense, if at all, only as a political

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programme - though given the nature of the postmodern habitat, there is little hope that any political party competing for state
power would be willing, suicidally, to endorse this truth and act upon it. Commenting on Edgar Allan Poe's story of three
fishermen caught in the maelstrom, of whom two died paralysed with fear and doing nothing, but the third survived, having
noticed that round objects are sucked into the abyss less quickly, and promptly jumping into a barrel - Norbert Elias sketched the
way in which the exit from a nonexit situation may be plotted. The survivor, Elias suggests, began to think more coolly; and by
standing back, by controlling his own fear, by seeing himself as it were from a distance, like a chessman forming a pattern with
others -on a board, he managed to turn his thoughts away from himself to the situation in which he found himself... Symbolically
representing in his mind the structure and direction of the flow of events, he discovered a way of escape. In that situation, the
level of self-control and the level of process-control were ... interdependent and complemen tary.'s Let us note that Poe's cool
and clever fisherman escaped alone. We do not know how many barrels there were left in the boat. And barrels, after all, have
been known since Diogenes to be the ultimate individual retreats. The question is - and to this question private cunning offers no
answer -- to what extent the techniques of individual survival (techniques by the way, amply provided for all present and future,
genuine and putative maelstroms, by eager-tooblige-and-profit merchants of goods and counsels) can be stretched to-embrace
the-collective survival.--The-maelstrom-of the kind we are in - all of us together, and most of us individually - is so frightening
because of its tendency to break down the issue of common survival into a sackful of individual survival issues, and then to take
the issue so pulverized off the political agenda. Can the process be retraced? Can that which has been broken be made whole
again? And where to find an adhesive strong enough to keep it whole? If the successive chapters of this book suggest anything, it
is that moral issues cannot be 'resolved', nor the moral life of humanity guaranteed, by the calculating and legislative efforts of

Morality is not safe in the hands of reason, though this is exactly what spokesmen of reason promise.
Reason cannot help the moral self without depriving the self of what makes the self moral: that unfounded,
non-rational, un-arguable, no-excuses-given and noncalculable urge to stretch towards the other, to caress, to
be for, to live for, happen what may. Reason is about making correct decisions, while moral responsibility precedes
all thinking about decisions as it does not, and cannot care about any logic which would allow the approval
of an action as correct. Thus, morality can be `rationalized' only at the cost of self-denial and self attrition.
reason.

From that reason assisted self-denial, the self emerges morally disarmed, unable (and unwilling) to face up to the multitude of
moral challenges and cacophony of ethical prescriptions. At the far end of the long march of reason, moral nihilism waits: that
moral nihilism which in its deepest essence means not the denial of binding ethical code, and not the blunders of relativistic
theory - but the loss of ability to be moral. As far as the doubts in the ability of reason to legislate the morality of human
cohabitation are concerned, the blame cannot be laid at the doorstep of the postmodern tendency to dismiss the orthodox
philosophical programme. The most pronounced manifestations of programmatic or resigned - moral relativism can be found in
the writings of thinkers who reject and resent postmodern verdicts and voice doubts as to the very existence of a postmodern
perspective, let alone the validity of judgements allegedly passed from its vantage point. Apart from value-signs added (often as
an afterthought), there is little to choose between ostensibly 'anti-postmodern, scientific recordings of the ways and means of
`embedded selves', and the enough space and enough time. There is little disagreement between them as to the assumption authenticated by the long managerial efforts of modern times and the realities of the social habitat these efforts managed to
produce - that in order to act morally the person must first be disowned of autonomy, whether by coercive or purchasable
expertise; and as to another assumption (which also reflects the realities of the contemporary modee of life), that the roots of
action are likely to be assessed as moral, and the criteria to assess the morality of acts, must be extrinsic to the actor. There is
little difference between two ostensibly opposite standpoints in the way they disallow or neglect the possibility that it may be
precisely the expropriation of moral prerogatives and the usurpation of moral competence by agencies extrinsic to the moral self
(multiple agencies, contestant and combative, yet equally vociferous in their claims to ethical infallibility) which stand behind the
stubborn unassailability of ethical relativism and moral nihilism. There is little reason to trust the assurances of the expropriating/
usurping agencies that the fate of morality is safe with them; there is little evidence that this has been the case thus far, and little
encouragment can be derived from the scrutiny of their present work for the hope that this will be more of the case in the future.
At the end of the ambitious modern project of universal moral certainty, of legislating the morality of and for human selves, of
replacing the erratic and unreliable moral impulses with a socially underwritten ethical code - the bewildered and disoriented self
finds itself alone in the face of moral dilemmas without good (let alone obvious) choices, unresolved moral conflicts and the

Fortunately for humanity (though not always for the moral self) .and despite
all the expert efforts to the contrary, the moral conscience - that ultimate prompt of moral impulse and root
of moral responsibility ---has.only been anaesthesized not amputated, It is still there, dormant perhaps, often
stunned, sometimes shamed into silence - but capable of being awoken, of that Levinas's feat of sobering up from
excruciating difficulty of being moral.

inebriated torpor. The moral conscience commands obedience without proof that the command should be obeyed; conscience can
neither convince nor coerce. Conscience wields none of the weapons recognized by the modern world as insignia of authority. By
the standards which support the modern world, conscience is weak. The proposition that conscience of the moral self is
humanity's only warrant and hope may strike the modern mind as preposterous; if not presposterous, then portentous: what
chance_ for a morality having conscience (already dismissed by the authority-conscious mind as fickle, `merely subjective', a
freak) for its sole foundation? And yet.. . Summing up the moral lessons of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt demanded
that

human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own
judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the
unanimous opinion of all these around them... These few who were still able to tell right from wrong went
really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by... because no
rules existed for the unprecedented." What we know for sure is that curing ostensible feebleness of moral conscience left
the moral self, as a rule, disarmed in the face of the `unanimous opinion of all these around them', and their elected or selfappointed spokesmen; while the power which that unanimous opinion wielded was in no way a guarantee of its ethical value.
Knowing this, we have little choice but to place our bet on that conscience which, however wan, alone can instil the responsibility

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there is no
contradiction between the rejection of (or scepticism towards) the ethics of socially conventionalized and
rationally `founded' norms, and the insistence that it does matter, and matter morally, what we do and from
what we desist. Far from excluding each other, the two can be accepted or rejected only together. If in doubt
- consult your conscience.
for disobeying the command to do evil. Contrary to one of the most uncritically accepted philosophical axioms,

The quest for survival destroys all human values

Callahan, director of The Hastings Institute, 73

Daniel Callahan, Co-founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in philosophy from
Harvard University, The Tyranny of Survival 1973, p 91-93
There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for
the sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy,
of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked.
Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland,
to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is
directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an
intensity which would ignore, suppress, or destroy other fundamental human rights and values.
The potential tyranny of survival as a value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping
out all other values, Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive
singlemindedness that will stop at nothing . We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma.
If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is
the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense
without the premise of a right to life- then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the
need for survival, without in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes
them worthy of survival? To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation,
then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be
the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if,
because human beings could not properly manage their need to survive, they succeeded in not
doing so.

Utilitarianism inherently only favors a privileged few

Liu PHD University of Pennsylvania 2000 (Dr. Liu, PHD @ University of Pennsylvania,
writes 2000 [Environmental Justice Analysis: theories, methods and practice, 2000 ISBN:1566704030,
p.20-21])

Its quantifications techniques are far

from being simple, straightforward, and objective . Indeed, they are often too
However, its strengths are also its weaknesses.

complicated to be practical. They are also to flexible and subject to manipulation. They are
impersonal and lack compassion. More importantly, they fail to deal the issue of equity
and distributive justice. Seemingly, you cannot get fairer than this. In calculating benefits
and costs, each person is counted as one and only one. IN other words, people are treated
equally. For Mill, justice arises from the principle of utility. Utilitarianism in concerted

only the aggregate effect, no matter how the aggregate is distributed. For
almost all policies, there is an uneven distribution of benefits and costs. Some
people win, while others lose. The Pareto optimality would is almost nonexistent. A
policys outcome is Pareto optimal if nobody loses and at least one person gains.

Calculation reduces life to zero

Dillon 99 (Michael, Professor of IR @ Lancaster, Another Justice Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2.
April, pp. 165)

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Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability.3s Thus no valuation without

mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of
account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation.
Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration
without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies
of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of
value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable.
Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of
championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always with
whatever exceeds measure."

Utilitarianism causes species extinction

Weber 93 [Darren Weber, post-doctoral fellow at UCSF, Environmental Ethics
and Species "To be or not to be?" November 1993 http://dnl.ucsf.edu/users
/dweber/essays/env_tp2.pdf

A problem with utilitarian ethics is that the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number could
entail that some species are disadvantaged or actively exterminated . Firstly, the utilitarian calculus of the
greatest good for the greatest number is very difficult when it is restricted to humanit y. The present satisfaction of a
portion of humanity, let alone all of humanity, is very difficult to evaluate and the different degrees of
satisfaction to be had by various people from various sources of satisfaction is very difficult to predict, so
the determination of the greatest good for the greatest number after the distribution of limited resources is very, very difficult to evaluate. As

it is virtually impossible to evaluate, since it is very difficult to know the feelings of sentient animals
utilitarianism can lead to significant inequalities in the distribution of limited

applied to all sentient species,

other than people. Secondly,

resources. For example, among a group of people with 50 units of satisfaction there could be a small group with about 80 units of satisfaction

and another larger group with about 40 units of satisfaction, since the small group have exclusive control of some equipment. According to
utilitarianism, another 10 units of satisfaction should be distributed to the small group when it can use its equipment to transform 10 units of simple

Assuming that it is possible to know the feelings of sentient

animals, a sentient species (e.g., a predator) that inflicts pain on another sentient species should be
disadvantaged or extinguished when the satisfaction of that species is less than the satisfaction of the
species that suffer pain. Thus, although the utilitarian principle may apply to all sentient species, the
difficulties of utilitarianism are insurmountable or the inequalities implied by utilitarianism are likely to
promote the extinction of species.
satisfaction into 20 units of added value satisfaction.

Utilitarianism is unsustainableadvocates ultimately revert back to morals

to make decisions
Economic Analysis, Common-Sense Morality and Utilitarianism Author(s): J. Moreh Source: Erkenntnis
(1975-), Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jul., 1992), pp. 115-143 Published by: Springer Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20012427 Accessed: 22/07/2009 13:24
Not only does Utilitarianism lack a device for reducing the infringement of its rules, but because
its rules are very demanding, many utilitarian writers go in the opposite direction and accord
moral agents some freedom in the implementation of its rules. According to Harsanyi (1985, p. 46)
supererogation may be accommodated into Rule Utilitarianism by permitting the moral agent free
choice between two acts A and B. The moral agent may carry out the act with the lower total
utility as long as the difference between the ensuing utilities does not exceed a given amount (Cf.
Scheffler's idea referred to below).10 Some utilitarian writers have advocated permissiveness
following Williams's incisive criticism of Utilitarianism. According to Williams (1973) Utilitarianism
is too demanding in that it fails to give adequate recognition to a person's own projects which give
meaning to his life, and impose upon him responsibility for maximizing the good. Because of the
need to make Utilitarianism more permissive, it would be contradictory to require that at the
same time it be made more severe.

Prediction destroys human agency

Bleiker 2K

(Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland. Popular Dissent, Human
Agency and Global Politics. 2000. Pub. Cambridge University Press)

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The very notion of prediction does, by its own logic, annihilate human agency. To assert that
international relations is a domain of political dynamics whose future should be predictable through a
convincing set of theoretical propositions is to assume that the source of global politics is to a certain
extent predetermined. From such a vantage-point, there is no more room for interference and human
agency, no more possibility for politics to overtake theory. A predictive app roach thus runs the risk of
ending up in a form of inquiry that imposes a static image upon a far more complex set of transversal
political practices. The point of a theoretical inquiry, however, is not to ignore the constantly changing
domain of internationals relations. Rather, the main objective must consists of facilitating and hindering
of transversal struggles that can grapple with those moment when people walk through walls precisely
when nobody expects them to do so. Prediction is a problematic assessment tool even if a theory is able
to anticipate future events. Important theories, such as realist interpretations of international politics,
may well predict certain events only because their theoretical premises have become so objectivised
that they have started to shape decision makers and political dynamics. Dissent, in this case, is the
process that reshapes these entrenched perceptions and the ensuing political practices. Describing,
explaining and prescribing may be less unproblematic processes of evaluation, but only at first sight. If
one abandons the notion of Truth, the idea that an event can be apprehended as part of a natural order,
authentically and scientifically, as something that exists independently of the meaning we have given it
if one abandons this separation of object and subject, then the process of judging a particular
approach to describing and explaining an event becomes a very muddles affair. There is no longer an
objective measuring device that can set the standard to evaluate whether or not a particular insight into
an event, such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, is true or false. The very nature of a past event
becomes indeterminate insofar as its identification is dependent upon ever-changing forms of linguistic
expression that imbue the event with meaning. 56

Utilitarianism = Killing
Saving lives isnt enough of a justification for actionsUtilitarianism justifies
the killing of the minority in order to save the majority
Normative Ethics by Shelley Kagan, Westview Press 1997, Page 61, http://books.google.com/books?
id=YllnYJ9R0q0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=deontology+vs.+consequentialism&client=firefoxa&source=gbs_similarbooks_s&cad=1

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The calculation of utilitarianism is the foundation of totalitarianism

George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 11

I do not mean to take seriously the idea that utilitarianism is a satisfactory replacement for the
theory of rights. The well-being (or mere preferences) of the majority cannot override the rightful
claims of individuals. In a time when the theory of rights is global it is noteworthy that some moral
philosophers disparage the theory of rights. The political experience of this century should be enough
to make them hesitate: it is not clear that, say, some version of utilitarianism could not justify
totalitarian evil. It also could be fairly easy for some utilitarians to justify any war and any
dictatorship, and very easy to justify any kind of ruthless-ness even in societies that pay some
attention to rights. There is no end to the immoral permissions that one or another type of
utilitarianism grants. Everything is permitted, if the calculation is right. No, an advocate of rights
cannot take utilitarianism seriously as a competing general theory of political morality, nor any other
competing general theory. Rather, particular principles or considerations must be given a place. A
theory of rights may simply leave many decisions undetermined or have to admit that rights may
have to be overridden (but never for the sake of Social well-being or mere policy preference). Also,
kinds of rights may sometimes conflict, and it is not always possible to end that conflict either by an
elaboration of the theory of rights or by an appeal to some other
Every alternative to rights leads to tyranny
George Kateb, Professor of Politics, Princeton, THE INNER OCEAN, 1992, p. 5
At the same time, there are other theories that seem to affirm human dignity yet give rights only a
lesser or probationary or instrumental role. Examples are utilitarianism, recent communitarianism,
recent republicanism, and radical egalitarianism. The first and last 1 will return to shortly; my response
to the others appears here and there in this volume. (All I wish to say now is that unless rights come
first they are not rights. They will tend to be sacrificed to some purpose deemed higher than the equal
dignity of every individual. There will be little if any concept of the integrity or inviolability of each
individual. The group or the majority or the good or the sacred or the vague future will be preferred. The
beneficiaries will be victimized along with the victims because no one is being treated as a person who
is irreplaceable and beyond value. To make rights anything but primary, even though in the name of
human dignity, is to injure human dignity.
Government coercion must be morally rejected
Dr. Edward Younkins, business professor, Wheeling Jesuit, CIVIL SOCIETY: THE REALM OF FREEDOM,
June 10, 2000, p. http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000610-11.htm
Recently (and ironically), government projects and programs have been started to restore civil
society through state subsidization or coercive mandates. Such coercion cannot create true
voluntary associations. Statists who support such projects believe only in the power of political
society they don't realize that the subsidized or mandated activity can be performed voluntarily
through the private interaction of individuals and associations. They also don't understand that to
propose that an activity not be performed coercively, is not to oppose the activity, but simply its
coercion. If civil society is to be revived, we must substitute voluntary cooperation for coercion and
replace mandates with the rule of law. According to the Cato Handbook for Congress, Congress
should: before trying to institute a government program to solve a problem, investigate whether
there is some other government program that is causing the problem ... and, if such a program is
identified, begin to reform or eliminate it; ask by what legal authority in the Constitution Congress
undertakes an action ...; recognize that when government undertakes a program, it displaces the
voluntary efforts of others and makes voluntary association in civil society appear redundant, with
significant negative effects; and begin systematically to abolish or phase out those government
programs that do what could be accomplished by voluntary associations in civil society ...
recognizing that accomplishment through free association is morally superior to coercive mandates,
and almost always generates more efficient outcomes. Every time taxes are raised, another
regulation is passed, or another government program is adopted, we are acknowledging the inability
of individuals to govern themselves. It follows that there is a moral imperative for us to reclaim our

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right to live in a civil society, rather than to have bureaucrats and politicians solve our problems
and run our lives.

Consequentialism, by very nature, will fail in public policy to improve the

well-being of others
Scheffler, prof philosophy, Princeton, 94

(Samuel Scheffler, prof philosophy, Princeton, 11/24/94, The Rejection of Consequentialism, p. 14-16,
http://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=M95w6e9pzZsC&oi=fnd&pg=PA14&dq=reject+consequentialism&ots=hbQFBohbTL&sig
=VgDh7pP6sAhJ1IKGaBA3BW7hi1Y)
I will maintain shortly that a hybrid theory which departed from consequentialism only to the
extent of incorporating an agent-centred prerogative could accommodate the objection dealing
with personal integrity. But first it is necessary to give fuller characterization of a plausible
prerogative of this kind. To avoid confusion, it is important to make a sharp distinction at the
outset between an agent-centred prerogative and a consequentialist dispensation to

devote more attention to ones own happiness and well-being than to the
happiness and well-being of others . Consequentialists often argue that a
differential attention to ones own concerns will in most actual circumstances
have the best overall results, and that such differential treatment of oneself is
therefore required on consequentialist grounds. Two sorts of considerations are typically
appealed to in support of this view. First, it is said that one is in a better position to promote
ones own welfare and the welfare of those one is closest to than to promote the welfare of
other people. So an agent produces maximum good per unit of activity by
focusing his efforts on those he is closest to, including himself. Second, it is said
that human nature being what it is, people cannot function effectively at all unless they devote
somewhat more energy to promoting their own well-being than to promoting the well-being of
other people. Here the appeal is no longer to the immediate consequantialist advantages of
promoting ones own well-being, but rather to the long-term advantages of having
psychologically healthy agents who are efficient producers of the good. We find an example of
the first type of argument in Sidgwicks remark that each man is better able to provide for his
own happiness than for that of other persons, from his more intimate knowledge of his own
desires and needs, and his greater opportunities of gratifying them. Mill, in the same vein,
writes that the occasions on which any person (except one in a thousand) has it in his power
to be a public benefactor are but exceptional; and on these occasions alone is he called on to
consider public utility; in every other case, private utility, the interest or happiness of some few
persons, is all he has to attend to. Sidgwick suggests an argument of the second type when
he says that because it is under the stimulus of self-interest that the active energies of most
men are most easily and thoroughly drawn out, it would not under actual circumstances
promote the universal happiness if each man were to concern himself with the happiness of
others as much as with his own.

Consequentialism is based on the greater good, not on self-interests

Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, 84
(Philosophy and Public Affairs, Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer,
1984), pp. 239-254 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2265413.pdf)
Consequentialism claims that an act is morally permissible if and only if it has better
consequences than those of any available alternative act. This means that agents are morally
required to make their largest possible contribution to the overall good- no matter what the
sacrifice to them- selves might involve (remembering only that their own well-being counts
too). There is no limit to the sacrifices that morality can require; and agents are never permitted to

favor their own interests at the expense of the greater good.

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There is a limit to what morality can require for us, which consequentialism
fails to incorporate
Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, 84
(Philosophy and Public Affairs, Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer,
1984), pp. 239-254 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2265413.pdf)
Our ordinary moral intuitions rebel at this picture. We want to claim that there is a limit to what

morality can require of us. Some sacrifices for the sake of others are meritorious, but not required;
they are super- erogatory. Common morality grants the agent some room to pursue his own
projects, even though other actions might have better consequences: we are permitted to
promote the good, but we are not required to do so. The objection that consequentialism
demands too much is accepted uncritically by almost all of us; most moral philosophers
introduce per- mission to perform nonoptimal acts without even a word in its defense. But the
mere fact that our intuitions support some moral feature hardly constitutes in itself adequate
philosophical justification. If we are to go beyond mere intuition mongering, we must search for

deeper foundations. We must display the reasons for limiting the requirement to pursue the good.

Consequentialism can result in sacrifices on some for the sake of others

Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, 84
(Philosophy and Public Affairs, Kagan, prof social thoughts and ethics, Yale, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer,
1984), pp. 239-254 http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2265413.pdf)
Furthermore, discussions of the claim that consequentialism demands too much are often
undermined by failure to distinguish this claim from the widely discussed objection that

consequentialism permits too much- improperly permitting sacrifices to be

imposed on some for the sake of others. Some theories include deontological
restrictions, forbidding certain kinds of acts even when the consequences
would be good. I will not consider here the merits of such restrictions. It is important to note,
however, that even a theory which included such restrictions might still lack more general
permission to act nonoptimally-requiring agents to promote the good within the pennissible
means. It is only the grounds for rejecting such a general requirement to promote the overall
good that we will examine here.

Utilitarianism cant address the issues of equity and distributive justice

Liu PHD University of Pennsylvania 2000 (Dr. Liu, PHD @ University of
Pennsylvania, writes 2000 [Environmental Justice Analysis: theories,
methods and practice, 2000 ISBN:1566704030, p.20-21])
Its quantifications techniques are far
from being simple, straightforward, and objective . Indeed, they are often too
However, its strengths are also its weaknesses.

complicated to be practical. They are also to flexible and subject to manipulation. They are
impersonal and lack compassion. More importantly, they fail to deal the issue of equity
and distributive justice. Seemingly, you cannot get fairer than this. In calculating benefits
and costs, each person is counted as one and only one. IN other words, people are treated
equally. For Mill, justice arises from the principle of utility. Utilitarianism in concerted

only the aggregate effect, no matter how the aggregate is distributed. For
almost all policies, there is an uneven distribution of benefits and costs. Some
people win, while others lose. The Pareto optimality would is almost nonexistent. A
policys outcome is Pareto optimal if nobody loses and at least one person gains.

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Utilitarianism policies result in inequality

Liu PHD University of Pennsylvania 2000 (Dr. Liu, PHD @ University of
Pennsylvania, writes 2000 [Environmental Justice Analysis: theories,
methods and practice, 2000 ISBN:1566704030, p.20-21])
Besides these ridiculous policy implications in the United States and in the world, the logic
underlying Summers proposal represents cultural imperialism, the capitalist mode of
production and consumption, and a particular kind of political-economic power and its
discriminatory practices (Harvey 1996:368). Except for its beautiful guise of economic logic,
the proposal is nothing new to those familiar with the history. The capitalistic powerhouses in
Europe practiced material and cultural imperialism against countries in Africa, America, and
Asia for years. They did it by raising the banner of trade and welfare enhancement. They did it
through guns and powder. Of course, they had their logic for exporting opium to Canton
(Guangzhou) in China through force. Now, we see a new logic. This time, it is economic logic
and globalization. This time, the end is the same, but the means is not through guns and
powder. Instead, it is political-economic power. This example illustrates clearly the danger of
using the utilitarian perspective as the only means for policy analysis. Fundamentally, the

utilitarian disregards the distributive justice issue altogether and espouses the
current mode of production and consumption and the political-economic
structure, without any attention to the inequity and inequality in the current
system. Even worse and more subtly, it delivers the philosophy of it exists,
therefore its good. However, just because it sells, doesnt mean we have to worship it
(Peirce 1991).

Utilitarian thinking results in mass murder

Cleveland Professor of Business Administration and Economics 2002 (Cleveland
2002 Paul A., Professor of Business Administration and Economics at Birmingham-Southern College, The
Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy, The Journal of Private Enterprise,
http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1602)
A final problem with utilitarianism that ought to be mentioned is that it is subject to being
criticized because of a potential fallacy of composition. The common good is not necessarily the
sum of the interests of individuals. In their book, A History of Economic Theory and Method,
Ekelund and Hebert provide a well-conceived example to demonstrate this problem. They
write: It is presumably in the general interest of American society to have every automobile in
the United States equipped with all possible safety devices. However, a majority of individual
car buyers may not be willing to pay the cost of such equipment in the form of higher auto
prices. In this case, the collective interest does not coincide with the sum of the

individual interests. The result is a legislative and economic dilemma. Indeed,

individuals prone to political action, and held under the sway of utilitarian
ethics, will likely be willing to decide in favor of the supposed collective interest
over and against that of the individual. But then, what happens to individual
human rights? Are they not sacrificed and set aside as unimportant? In fact,
this is precisely what has happened. In democratic countries the destruction of human
liberty that has taken place in the past hundred years has occurred primarily for this reason. In
addition, such thinking largely served as the justification for the mass murders of

millions of innocent people in communist countries where the leaders sought to

establish the workers paradise. To put the matter simply, utilitarianism
offers no cohesive way to discern between the various factions competing
against one another in political debates and thus fails to provide an adequate
guide for ethical human action . The failure of utilitarianism at this point is extremely
important for a whole host of policy issues. Among them, the issue of the governments
provision of public goods is worth our consideration.

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Utilitarianism is used to justify mass murder by governments

Cleveland, Professor of Business Administration and Economics 2002 (Cleveland
2002 Paul A., Professor of Business Administration and Economics at Birmingham-Southern College, The
Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy, The Journal of Private Enterprise,
http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1602)
Indeed, the widespread confusion over this point is one of the primary reasons why western market economies have
continued to drift towards the ready acceptance of socialist policies. Edmund Opitz has rightly observed that
utilitarianism with its greatest happiness principle completely neglects the spiritual dimension of human life. Rather,
it simply asserts that men are bound together in societies solely on the basis of a rational calculation of the private
advantage to be gained by social cooperation under the division of labor. [2] But, as Opitz shows, this perspective gives

the utilitarian principle will tend to lead to

the collective use of government power so as to redistribute income in order to gain the greatest
happiness in society. Regrettably, the rent seeking behavior that is spawned as a result of this mind
set will prove detrimental to the economy. Nevertheless, this kind of action will be justified as
that which is most socially expedient in order to reach the assumed ethical end. Utilitarianism,
in short, has no logical stopping place short of collectivism.[3] If morality is ultimately had by
making the individuals happiness subservient to the organic whole of society , which is what
Benthams utilitarianism asserts, then the human rights of the individual may be violated . That
rise to a serious problem. Since theft is the first labor saving device ,

means property rights may be violated if it is assumed to promote the utilitarian end. However,
property rights are essential in securing a free market order. As a result , utilitarianism can then

be used to justify some heinous government actions. For instance, the murder of millions of human
beings can be justified in the minds of reformers if it is thought to move us closer to paradise on
earth. This is precisely the view that was taken by communist revolutionaries as they implemented
their grand schemes of remaking society. All of this is not to say that matters of utility are
unimportant in policy decisions, but merely to assert that utilitarian ethics will have the
tendency of promoting collectivist policies.

Medical utilitarian calculus ensures human dehumanization and annihilation

Smith 2002 (Michael G Smith 2002, Leadership University, The Public Policy
of Casey V. Planned Parenthood
http://www.leaderu.com/humanities/casey/ch3.html)
Furthermore, abandoning the principle of human equality could lead to eugenics
because eugenics is founded on the same philosophy that some people are of lesser value than
others. Eugenics is founded on the utilitarian philosophy of German philosopher Hegel.
Utilitarianism, also known as pragmatism, holds that "the end justifies the means." If a

means provides a solution to a practical problem, it is morally justifiable.{86} The

Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany saw a problem in the existence of Jews, Gypsies,
and mentally and physically handicapped people, was founded on Hegels
pragmatic philosophy.{87} C.G. Campbell,{88} President of the American Eugenics Society
Inc. in 1931{89} has written:
"Adolf Hitler ... guided by the nation's anthropologists, eugenicists
and social philosophers, has been able to construct a comprehensive racial policy of population
development and improvement ... it sets a pattern ... these ideas have met stout opposition in the
Rousseauian social philosophy ... which bases ... its whole social and political theory upon the
patent fallacy of human equality ... racial consanguinity occurs only through endogamous mating or
interbreeding within racial stock ... conditions under which racial groups of distinctly superior
hereditary qualities ... have emerged." (Emphasis added).{90} Mr. Campbell, a leader in the

eugenics movement,{91} has clearly rejected the idea of human equality. This
rejection helped pave the way toward intellectual acceptance of Nazi Germanys

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"Final Solution." and has helped pave the way toward Americas final solution to problem
pregnancy. "Nazi Germany used the findings of eugenicists as the basis for the killing of people of
inferior genetic stock."{92} Another leader in the eugenics movement, Madison Grant,{93}
connected the purported inequality of the unborn to the goals of the eugenics movement.
"...Indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often results in serious injury
to the race ... Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and sentimental belief in the
sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization
of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community" (Emphasis added).{94} As
recently as six years ago, two medical ethicists, Kuhse and Singer, have argued that no human
being has any right to life.{95} Using a utilitarian approach, they have concluded that

"mentally defective" people, unborn people, and even children before their first
birthday, have no right to life because these people are not in full possession of
their faculties.{96} These utilitarian authors are fully consistent with other
utilitarians in that they first reject the principle that are humans have equal moral
status, then, using subjective criteria that appeals to themselves personally, they
identify certain humans they find expendable. While Kuhse and Singer may be personally
comfortable with their conclusions, this approach leaves all of us less than secure from being
dehumanized. If newborn infants can be found to lack equal moral status, then surely there are
other innocent and vulnerable member of society who can be similarly found to lack equal moral
status. The Nazis left few people in Germany safe from the gas chambers, and any other society
that uses utilitarianism in medical ethics also leaves great portions of society at risk of death at the
convenience of society at large. Clearly, the equal moral status of all humans must be recognized
by the law.

Utilitarianism takes away all value to live

Cleveland Professor of Business Administration and Economics 2002 (Cleveland
2002 Paul A., Professor of Business Administration and Economics at Birmingham-Southern College, The
Failure of Utilitarian Ethics in Political Economy, The Journal of Private Enterprise,
http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1602)

utilitarianism is that it has a very narrow conception of what it

means to be a human being. Within Benthams view, human beings are essentially
understood to be passive creatures who respond to the environment in a purely
mechanical fashion. As such, there are no bad motives, only bad calculations. In these
terms, no person is responsible for his or her own behavior. In effect, the idea
being promoted is that human action is essentially the same as that of a
machine in operation. This notion reduces a human thought to nothing more than a series
of bio-chemical reactions. Yet, if this is true, then there is no meaning to human
thought or human action and all human reason is reduced to the point of being
meaningless.[6]
Another problem with

Rights incompatible with utilitarianism.

Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992
Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press.
Pg 196.
The first thing to notice is that utilitarianism is a general normative theory either about what is
desirable, or about what conduct is morally right, but in the first instance not a theory of
rights at all, except by implication. A philosopher can be a utilitarian without offering any
definition of "a right" and indeed without having thought about the matter. It is true that some
definitions of "a right" are so manifestly incompatible with the normative theses of
utilitarianism that it is clear that a utilitarian could not admit that there are rights in that sense.
For instance, if someone says that to have a right (life, liberty) is for some sort of thing to be

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secured to one absolutely, though the heavens fall, and that this is a self-evident truth, then it
is pretty clear that a utilitarian will have no place for rights in his sense. Again, if one follows
Hobbes and says, "Neither by the word right is anything else signified, than that liberty which
every man hath to make use of his natural faculties according to right reason," one is not going
to be able to accept a utilitarian normative theory , for a utilitarian is not going to underwrite a
man's absolute liberty to pursue his own good according to his own judgment.

Util ignores fundamental rights and creates a slippery slope until rights lose
all significance

Bentley 2k [ Kristina A. Bentley graduate of the Department of government at the University of

Manchester. Suggesting A Separate Approach To Utility and Rights: Deontological Specification and
Teleogical Enforcement of Human Rights, September.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/pir/postgrad/vol1_issue3/issue3_article1.pdf]
Utilitarian theories usually present the view that they are capable of accommodating the idea
of legal rights, as well as providing a normative theory about such rights, which Lyons calls
the legal rights inclusion thesis (Lyons, 1994: 150). On the other hand however, utilitarian
theorists are sceptical of the idea of moral rights unsupported by legal institutions, as such
rights would then in certain circumstances preclude the pursuit of the most utile course of
action owing to their moral force, or normative force (Lyons, 1994: 150). Conversely, legal
rights are seen as being compatible with utilitarian goals as they are normatively neutral, being
morally defensible (which entails the idea of a moral presumption in favour of respecting
them) only in so a far as they contribute to overall utility (Lyons, 1994: 150). The problem
then, as conceived by Lyons, is whether or not utilitarians can account for the moral force of
legal rights (which people are commonly regarded as having by rights theorists and utilitarians
alike), as: although there are often utilitarian reasons for respecting justified legal rights, these
reasons are not equivalent to the moral force of such rights, because they do not exclude direct
utilitarian arguments against exercising such rights or for interfering with them (Lyons, 1994:
150). This being the case, the utilitarian finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having to
explain why rights ought to be bothered with at all, as if they may be violated on an ad hoc
basis to satisfy the demands of maximal utility, then they seem as confusing on this scheme as
natural or moral rights are claimed to be. This then raises the question as to whether or not
utilitarianism can accommodate any rights at all, even legal rights as its exponents claim it is
able to do, in its rule formulation at least. However, leaving this debate aside as it exceeds the
scope of this paper, an alternative approach, that of government house utilitarianism (see
Goodin, 1995: 27) is worth considering as a possible means to a solution.

Morality is complex Blanket claims that we need to save people in poverty

prevent us from making rational choices
Stubbs, 81
(Anne, @ the U of Combridge, "The Pros and Cons of Consequentialism," Oct, Philosophy, Vol. 56, No.
218 (Oct., 1981), pp. 497-516, jstor, AD: 6/30/09) jl
There is a common criticism of absolutism which, if sound, could be taken to demonstrate its
irrationality. It is that the absolutist refuses to consider the details of particular cases and insists
instead on the automatic application of a blanket rule; he thus fails, it is said, to 'take each case
on its merits'. Now there may be absolutist positions which are vulnerable to this kind of objection;
for example, the position that one is never justified in taking a human life, whatever the
circumstances. Someone might reasonably object that there are moral distinctions to be made
over which this view simply rides rough-shod. Someone may kill a fellow human being in many
different circumstances and for many different reasons; for personal gain of some kind; to put a

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loved one out of his misery; in self-defence; in just war or revolution; as retribution; and so on.
Surely it would be irrational, if not absurd, to insist on making the same moral judgment about all
these cases. However, even if this is correct, it is a count against only some absolutist positions,
not against all. It is commonly assumed that the absolutist must operate with some highly
general, exceptionless rules; but this is not an accurate picture of the kind of absolutism of which I
have been speaking throughout this paper. I have spoken, not so much of moral rules, but of
specific moral notions, concepts, or categories-murder, courage, cowardice, honesty, loyalty, etc.;
and I have maintained that these operate as fundamental in moral assessment, in the sense that
their applicability to a particular action will often be morally decisive, and, for some of them, will
always be so.14 Let us consider the example of murder, which is a notion the applicability of
which to an action is always morally decisive. My absolutist claims, not that killing can never be
justified, but that murder can never be justified; and he will not classify all cases of killing as cases
of murder. Thus it is simply not true that he does not have to investigate the details of a particular
case; indeed it is only through such an investigation that he can be in a position to decide whether
or not the action in question is properly classifiable as 'murder'. Further-more, he will take into
account many features of the situation not con-sidered relevant by the consequentialist, for
example, the agent's motive for the killing. Indeed, it could be maintained that the
consequentialist's claim to consider each case 'on its merits' is vitiated by his extremely restricted
conception of where these merits must lie. I maintain that it is he, with his exclusive concentration
upon consequences, who abstracts from morally relevant features of particular cases. Again, this
is a point to which I will return. Thus, if readiness to pay attention to the details of individual cases
be a test of rationality, my absolutist passes it with his colours flying rather more conspicuously
than those of the supporters of consequentialism; they, after all, have theformula.

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The utilitarian viewpoint is flawed. It is impossible for society to be viewed

as a single
entity without sacrificing the human dignity of the individual.
Will Kymlicka, 1988 (Prof. of Philosophy at Queens U, Press, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No.
3.,
pp. 172-190, Rawls on Technology and Deontology JSTOR)
According to Rawls, then, the debate over distribution is essentially a debate over whether we should or should not define the right
as maximizing the good. But is this an accurate characterization of the debate? Utilitarians do, of course, believe that the right act
maximizes happiness, under some description of that good. And that requirement does have potentially abhorrent consequences.
But do utilitarians believe that it is right because it maximizes happiness? Do they hold that the maximization of the good defines
the right, as teleological theories are said to do? Let us see why Rawls believes they do. Rawls says that utilitarianism is
teleological (that is, defines the right as the maximization of the good) because it generalizes from what is rational in the oneperson case to what is rational in many-person cases. Since it is rational for me to sacrifice my present happiness to increase my
later happiness if doing so will maximize my happiness overall, it is rational for society to sacrifice my current happiness to
increase someone else's happiness if doing so maximizes social welfare overall. For utilitarians, utility-maximizing acts are right
because they are maximizing. It is because they are maximizing that they are rational. Rawls objects to this generalization from the
one-person to the many person case because he believes that it ignores the separateness of persons.? Although it is right

and proper that I sacrifice my present happiness for my later happiness if doing so will
increase my overall happiness, it is wrong to demand that I sacrifice my present happiness to
increase someone else's happiness. In the first case, the trade-off occurs within one person's
life, and the later happiness compensates for my current sacrifice. In the second case, the
trade-off occurs across lives, and I am not compensated for my sacrifice by the fact that
someone else benefits. My good has simply been sacrificed, and I have been used as a means
to someone else's 2. John Rawls, A Theory ofJz~stice(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, rg71), p. 31
3. Ibid., p. 27. Philosophy G Public Affairs happiness. Trade-offs that make sense within a life are wrong
and unfair across lives. Utilitarians obscure this point by ignoring the fact that separate people are
involved. They treat society as though it were an individual, as a single organism, with its own
interests, so that trade-offs between one person and another appear as legitimate trade-offs
within the social organism.

Utilitarians view society as a single entity, which devalues the rights and
human dignity of
the individual.
Will Kymlicka, 1988 (Prof. of Philosophy at Queens U, Press, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No.
3.,
pp. 172-190, Rawls on Technology and Deontology JSTOR)
Scott Gordon echoes this interpretation of utilitarianism when he says that utilitarians adopt the view
"that 'society' is an organic entity and contend that its utility is the proper objective of social policy." This
view, he says, "permits flirtation with the grossest form of anti-individualistic social philosophy."4 This,
then, is Rawls's major example of a "teleological" theory which gives priority to the good over the right.
His rejection of the priority of the good, in this context, is just the corollary of his affirmation of the
separateness of persons: promoting the well-being of the social organism cannot be the goal from which
people's rightful claims are derived, since there is no socialorganism. Since individuals are distinct, they
are ends in themselves, not merely agents or representatives of the well-being of the social organism.
This is why Rawls believes that utilitarianism is teleological, and why he believes that we should reject it
in favor of a deontological doctrine.

Utilitarianism views people as locations of utilities, whose purpose is to

bring good to the
whole, even if that entails the lower standard or life for the individual.
Will Kymlicka, 1988 (Prof. of Philosophy at Queens U, Press, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 17, No.
3.,
pp. 172-190, Rawls on Technology and Deontology JSTOR)
There is, however, another interpretation of utilitarianism, one that seems more in line with Rawls's
characterization of the debate. On this second interpretation, maximizing the good is primary, and we

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count individuals equally only because that maximizes value. Our primary duty is not to treat
people as equals, but to bring about valuable states of affairs. Rawls on Teleology and
Deontology As Bernard Williams puts it, people are viewed merely as locations of utilities, or as
causal levers for the "utility network": "the basic bearer of value for Utilitarianism is the
state of affairs. . . . as a Utilitarian agent, I am just the representative of the satisfaction system who happens to be near
certain causal levers at a certain time."Io Utilitarianism, on this view, is primarily concerned not with persons, but with states of
affairs. This second interpretation is not merely a matter of emphasizing a different facet of the same theoretical structure. Its
distinctiveness becomes clear if we look at some utilitarian discussions of population policy, like those of Jonathan Glover and
Derek Parfit. They ask whether we morally ought to double the population, even if it means reducing each person's welfare by
almost half (since that will still increase overall utility). They think that a policy of doubling the population is a genuine, if somewhat
repugnant, conclusion of utilitarianism. But it need not be if we view utilitarianism as a theory of treating people as equals.
Nonexistent people have no claims-we have no moral duty to them to bring them into the world. As John Broome says, "one cannot
owe anyone a duty to bring her into existence, because failing in such a duty would not be failing anyone."" So what is the

duty here, on the second interpretation? The duty is to maximize value, to bring about valuable
states of affairs, even if the effect is to make all existing persons worse off than they
otherwise would have been. To put the difference another way, if I fail to bring about the best state of affairs, by failing

to consider the interests of some group of people, for example, then I can be criticized, on both interpretations, for failing to live up
to my moral duty as a utilitarian. But, on the second interpretation, those whose interests are neglected have no special grievance
against me.

Adapting the consequentialist viewpoint justifies the deaths of millions of

innocents in

order to bring about an ends.

Thomas Donaldson, 1995 (Prof. of Business Ethics at Georgetown U, Ethics and International Affairs,
International Deontology Defended: A Response to Russell Hardin, pg. 147-154)
The supposed unrealism of deontology also seems to lie behind Hardins concerns over nuclear deterrence. After noting that
Kantians typically have condemned the indiscriminate destruction implicit in a policy of deterrence, he adds that it therefore
seemed [to Kantians] profoundly immoral to destroy cities full of children merely for the sake of the theory of deterrence. The
word seemed is surprising. Shouldnt most people, not only Kantians, be appalled by the prospect of destroying cities full of
children? To not be appalled, I submit, is the result of either having been swept away by the morality of consequences or having
studied too much political science. It is noteworthy that the reason we are appalled relies on a Kantian-style explanation . If we

were to adopt an exclusive consequentialist view, if the ends were always capable of
justifying the means, then the death of millions of innocents should be trivialmere fluff in
the face of moral truth. The idea that there are some things that should not be done is precisely a
deontological notion. The idea that, no matter how powerful a deterrent it may be, the
strapping of babies to the front of tanks is nonetheless wrong, cannot be understood entirely
in consequentialist terms. It does not follow that the policy of nuclear deterrence is wrong from the viewpoint of
deontology. Some deontologists accept nuclear deterrence while others do not. But deontologists insist correctly that not only the
assessment of the consequences, but an assessment of the means used to achieve consequences, must be factored into the moral
evaluation of nuclear deterrence.

Utilitarianism taken alone allows unjustified war; full weight must be given
to
deontological analysis in order to achieve the best policy option.
Eric Heinze in 99 (assistant prof. of polisci @ University of Oklahoma, Human Rights & Human Welfare,
Waging War for Human Rights: Towards a Moral-Legal Theory of Humanitarian Intervention,
http://www.du.edu/gsis/hrhw/volumes/2003/heinze-2003.pdf, p. 5)
By itself, this utilitarianism of rights test has serious problems when employed as a threshold level of
human suffering that triggers a humanitarian intervention. This is because it suggests that aggregate
human suffering is the only moral concern that should be addressed (Montaldi 1985: 135). If we
are to accept the general presumption against war as enshrined in Article 2 of the UN Charter, we do so
because of wars inherent destructiveness and its detrimental effect on international security. The use of
force, including humanitarian intervention, will always result in at least some loss of life. The principle of
utility ameliorates this effect of intervention, but once an intervention is employed to halt such
widespread suffering, a pure utilitarian ethos would sanction the pursuit of this primary end
(achieving the military and/or humanitarian objective) without exception, so long as fewer people are
killed than are rescued in an intervention. Not only does this reduce the moral relevance of the
individual, it opens up the door for aggression disguised as humanitarian intervention, as

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long as there are individuals who are suffering and dying within a stateeven if their
suffering is entirely accidental. Taken as part and parcel of the utilitarian framework, therefore,
military intervention must only be sanctioned when it is in response to violations that are intentionally
perpetrated Thus, as Fernando Tesn eloquently explains in his chapter, The Liberal Case for
Humanitarian Intervention, the best case for humanitarian intervention contains a
deontological elementthat is, a principled concern for the respectful treatment of individuals (not
intentionally or maliciously mistreating them)as well as a consequentialist onethe utilitarian
requirement that interventions cause more good than harm (Holzgrefe and Keohane: 114). Consider
NATOs intervention in Kosovo, where a significant number of Serbian civilians were killed by
NATO bombs in the process of coercing the Milosevic regime to stop its ethnic cleansing of Kosovars.
Regardless of whether more lives were saved than lost, in accidentally killing
noncombatants, NATO was in essence accepting the notion that human rights are not
absolute. This is despite the fact that such killing was done in order to save the lives of other
innocent civilians.

Policy decisions directed at maintaining human survival through whatever

means will encourage genocide, war, and the destruction of moral values
Callahan 73 Co-Founder and former director of The Hastings Institute, PhD in
philosophy from Harvard University (Daniel, The Tyranny of Survival, p 9193)

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
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In

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

The main rationale B. F. Skinner

offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for surviva l. For Jacques Monod,
not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value.

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-

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 . It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and
control policies. For all these reasons it

manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it
from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for
survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human

potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other
values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive single-mindedness that will stop at nothing. We
rights and values. The

come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and
if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of
a right to lifethen how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying
everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human
degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to
end all Pyrrhic victories. Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if, because human beings could not properly manage their need
to survive, they succeeded in not doing so.

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Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and perpetuates societal

inequality by evaluating utility as a whole
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina
(Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy
and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

The inclusion of all sentient beings in the calculation of interests severely undermines
the force of any claim that utilitarianism is an "egalitarian" doctrine, based in some
notion of equal concern and respect for persons. But let us assume Kymlicka can restore his thesis by
insisting that it concerns, not utilitarianism as a general moral doctrine, but as a more limited thesis about political morality. (Here
I pass over the fact that none of the utilitarians he relies on to support his egalitarian interpretation construe the doctrine as

utilitarianism is not seen as a

political doctrine, to be appealed to by legislators and citizens, but a nonpublic
criterion of right that is indirectly applied [by whom is a separate issue] to assess the
nonutilitarian public political conception of justice.) Still, let us assume it is as a doctrine of political
morality that utilitarianism treats persons, and only persons, as equals. Even in this form it cannot be that
maximizing utility is "not a goal" but a "by-product," "entirely derived from the prior
requirement to treat people with equal consideration" (CPP, p. 31) Kymlicka says, "If utilitarianism is
purely political. The drift of modern utilitarian theory is just the other way:

best seen as an egalitarian doctrine, then there is no independent commitment to the idea of maximizing welfare" (CPP, p. 35,
emphases added). But how can this be? (i) What is there about the formal principle of equal consideration (or for that matter
occupying a universal point of view) which would imply that we maximize the aggregate of individuals' welfare? Why not assume,
for example, that equal consideration requires maximizing the division of welfare (strict equality, or however equal division is to
be construed); or, at least maximize the multiple (which would result in more equitable distributions than the aggregate)? Or, why
not suppose equal consideration requires equal proportionate satisfaction of each person's interests (by for example, determining
our resources and then satisfying some set percentage of each person's desires) . Or finally we might rely on some Paretian
principle: equal consideration means adopting measures making no one worse off. For reasons I shall soon discuss, each of these

the utilitarian aggregative

method, which in effect collapses distinctions among persons. (2) Moreover, rather than construing
rules is a better explication of equal consideration of each person's interests than is

individuals' "interests" as their actual (or rational) desires, and then putting them all on a par and measuring according to
intensity, why not construe their interests lexically, in terms of a hierarchy of wants, where certain interests are, to use Scanlon's
terms, more "urgent" than others, insofar as they are more basic needs? Equal consideration would then rule out satisfying less
urgent interests of the majority of people until all means have been taken to satisfy everyone's more basic needs. (3) Finally,
what is there about equal consideration, by itself, that requires maximizing anything? Why does it not require, as in David
Gauthier's view, optimizing constraints on individual utility maximization? Or why does it not require sharing a distribution? The

to say we ought to give equal consideration to everyone's interests does

not, by itself, imply much of anything about how we ought to proceed or what we
ought to do. It is a purely formal principle , which requires certain added, independent assumptions, to yield
any substantive conclusions. That (i) utilitarian procedures maximize is not a "by-product" of equal
consideration. It stems from a particular conception of rationality that is explicitly incorporated into the procedure. That (2)
individuals' interests are construed in terms of their (rational) desires or preferences,
all of which are put on a par, stems from a conception of individual welfare or the
human good: a person's good is defined subjectively, as what he wants or would want after due
reflection. Finally (3), aggregation stems from the fact that, on the classical view, a single individual takes
up everyone's desires as if they were his own, sympathetically identifies with them,
and chooses to maximize his "individual" utility. Hare, for one, explicitly makes this move. Just as Rawls
point is just that,

says of the classical view, Hare "extend[s] to society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work,
conflat[es] all persons into one through the imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator" (TJ, p. 27). If these are

maximizing
aggregate utility cannot be a "by-product" of a procedure that gives equal
consideration to everyone's interests. Instead, it defines what that procedure is. If
anything is a by-product here, it is the appeal to equal consideration . Utilitarians appeal to
independent premises incorporated into the justification of utilitarianism and its decision procedure, then

impartiality in order to extend a method of individual practical rationality so that it may be applied to society as a whole (cf. TJ,

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pp. 26-27). Impartiality, combined with sympathetic identification, allows a hypothetical observer to experience the desires of
others as if they were his own, and compare alternative courses of action according to their conduciveness to a single maximand,

The significant fact is that, in this procedure, appeals to

equal consideration have nothing to do with impartiality between persons. What is
really being given equal consideration are desires or experiences of the same
magnitude. That these are the desires or experiences of separate persons (or, for that
matter, of some other sentient being) is simply an incidental fact that has no substantive effect on
utilitarian calculations. This becomes apparent from the fact that we can more accurately describe the utilitarian
made possible by equal consideration and sympathy.

principle in terms of giving, not equal consideration to each person's interests, but instead equal consideration to equally intense
interests, no matter where they occur. Nothing is lost in this redescription, and a great deal of clarity is gained. It is in this sense

persons enter into utilitarian calculations only incidentally. Any mention of them
can be dropped without loss of the crucial information one needs to learn how to apply
utilitarian procedures. This indicates what is wrong with the common claim that
utilitarians emphasize procedural equality and fairness among persons, not
substantive equality and fairness in results. On the contrary, utilitarianism, rightly construed, emphasizes
that

neither procedural nor substantive equality among persons. Desires and experiences, not persons, are the proper objects of equal
concern in utilitarian procedures. Having in effect read persons out of the picture at the procedural end, before decisions on

it is little wonder that utilitarianism can result in such

substantive inequalities. What follows is that utilitarian appeals to democracy and the
democratic value of equality are misleading. In no sense do utilitarians seek to give persons equal concern
distributions even get underway,

and respect.

Although utilitarianism claims to result in equality, its nature to only regard

people as one entity rather than a group of individuals inherently
contradicts the principle of equality
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina
(Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy
and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

To sum up, though utilitarianism incorporates equality as a property of the justification

of the principle of utility, and of the decision process through which that principle gets applied, it does not leave any
place for equality in the content of that principle . On its face, this standard of right conduct directs that we maximize an
aggregate. As a result neither equality or any other distributive value is assigned independent significance in resulting
distributions of goods. Kymlicka claims that, because Rawls sees utilitarianism as teleological, he misdescribes the debate over

the distribution debate Rawls is concerned

with is a (level 2) debate over how what is deemed good (welfare, rights, resources, etc.) within a moral theory is to be
divided among individuals. It is not a (level 3) debate over the distribution of consideration in a procedure which decides the
distribution by ignoring that utilitarians allow for equality of distribution too. But

distribution of these goods. Nor is it a (level 1) debate over the principles of practical reasoning that are invoked to justify the
fundamental standard of distribution.

Owning oneself is a moral imperative utilitarianism imposes interpersonal

obligations to society, which destroys morality
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina
(Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy
and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

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According to Rawls's teleological

interpretation, the "fundamental goal" (LCC, p. 33) of utilitarianism is not persons, but the goodness of states of affairs .
Kymlicka distinguishes two interpretations of utilitarianism: teleological and egalitarian.

Duty is defined by what best brings about these states of affairs. " [M] aximizing the good is primary, and we count individuals

Our primary duty isn't to treat people as equals, but to bring about valuable
states of affairs" (LCC, p. 27). It is difficult to see, Kymlicka says, how this reading of utilitarianism can be viewed as a moral
theory. Morality, in our everyday view at least, is a matter of interpersonal obligations-the obligations we owe to each
other. But to whom do we owe the duty of maximizing utility? Surely not to the impersonal ideal spectator . . . for he
doesn't exist. Nor to the maximally valuable state of affairs itself, for states of affairs don't have moral claims." (LCC, p. 28-29)
equally only because that maximizes value.

Kymlicka says, "This form of utilitarianism does not merit serious consideration as a political morality" (LCC, p. 29). Suppose we
see utilitarianism differently, as a theory whose "fundamental principle" is "to treat people as equals" (LCC, p. 29). On this
egalitarian reading, utilitarianism is a procedure for aggregating individual interests and desires, a procedure for making social
choices, specifying which trade-offs are acceptable. It's a moral theory which purports to treat people as equals, with equal
concern and respect. It does so by counting everyone for one, and no one for more than one. (LCC, p. 25)

Aims to maximize overall utility despite competing interests in the public is

utilitarianism destroys individualism
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke,
Rights Against Risks, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

any proposal to compare or

balance competing interests can be criticized as leading ineluctably back to some form of utilitarianism (perhaps
At first glance, this structure may seem vulnerable to two different objections. First,

a "utilitarianism of rights").72 If the adverse consequences of a right must be weighed in some manner against the

There will always be some

concatenation of consequences that those bent on overcoming the right will assert outweighs the claim of the
individual. Does not this kind of relativism ultimately degenerate into some reconstituted version of utilitarianism,
benefits of the right, how can any barriers against loss of autonomy survive?

effectively leveling the moral landscape into continual balancing exercises?

Utility maximization destroys individualism

Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke,
Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

autonomous individual
require protection from consideration of utility maximization. The rights in the system constrain the behavior of
others that might harm these aspects of the individua l. One might begin with the idea of preservation. Securing
the moral significance of the individual should at least center on preserving that individual's life. Preservation ought then
In defining those rights, it seems natural to begin by stating clearly which aspects of an

to be extended to include the broader concept of physical or bodily integrity, because many physical assaults short of death
can so damage or injure an individual as to reduce dramatically the quality of that individual's life.

Rights should at least

prevent substantial invasions of bodily integrity.

Utilitarianism forces individuals to sacrifice their own goals in order to
increase utility
Odell 04 Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois (Jack,
On Consequentialist Ethics, Wadsworth, Thomson Learning, Inc., pp. 98-103)

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This objection can, as Samuel Scheffler has pointed out, be integrated with objection . Remember that Rawls claimed that

utilitarianism fails to ''take seriously the distinction between persons." One person can be forced by utilitarianism to give
up far too much, including the life plan that he or she has formulated for himself or herself. Rational agents who are fully aware
of what they would be putting on the line if they were to agree to a utilitarian society would never adopt utilitarianism. They
would perceive that such a society could require them to sacrifice their individual projects , their freedom, and even their
lives for the sake of the aggregate or total satisfaction of the group. To agree to such a collective approach would be to degrade
their autonomy, and this is a matter of integrity. As Scheffler observes regarding the integration of (H) and (J), "the two objections
focus on two different ways of making the same supposed mistake: two different ways of failing to take sufficient account of the
separateness and nature of persons."

Risks taken by the government to increase overall utility will severely

compromise the individual which will result in fatality
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke,
Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

Equity has provided a limited answer to the question of acceptable risk. The traditional
doctrine of injunctions against tortious behavior holds that courts may enjoin behavior that is virtually certain to harm an
identifiable individual in the near future .'2 This body of law, however, focuses more on avoidance of harm to specific persons
than on regulation of risk.'3 It is thus inapposite to the questions of modern technological risk, risk that is quite unlikely to injure
any identifiable individual in the short-term, but that carries severe consequences that are certain to occur to someone in
the medium to distant future. Consider the paradigm of the Acme Chemical Company: Acme Chemical Company is discovered to
be storing chemical wastes on its land in such a way that seepage containing traces of those wastes are entering an underground
water system that serves as the sole drinking water supply for a town several miles away. One of the chemicals has been
classified as a carcinogen in laboratory experiments on mice. Although extrapolating from these results to predictions of human
carcinogencity is somewhat controversial, federal agencies routinely do so. Under one of a number of plausible sets of
assumptions, a concentration of ten parts per billion (ppb) in drinking water is estimated to increase a human's chance of
contracting cancer by one in one hundred thousand if the human is assumed to consume a normal intake over the course of
twenty years. Analyses show that the current concentration in the underground aquifer near Acme's plant is ten ppb. This case

The probability of risk to any individual is

relatively small while its severity is substantial, perhaps fatal. Risk is being imposed on individuals who have not
consented to it in any meaningful sense . Finally, risk is unintentional in the sense that imposing risk on others is not an
exhibits the typical features of risky actions associated with modern technology.

objective of Acme's plan.'4 We may assume its executives in fact would be tremendously relieved if they could avoid the risk.

Government coercion threatens individual freedom and renders morality

meaningless
Gauthier 2K (Candace, PhD Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy
and Religion at the University of North Carolina, Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Journal)

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
Instances of coercion and constraint also may exempt agents from judgments of moral responsibility.

great as to totally bypass choice, leading directly to action, while others may control choice to the extent that a particular action

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
is virtually ensured.

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

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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.

Utilitarianism promotes inequity and inherently discriminates against

minority like slavery
Odell, 04 University of Illinois is an Associate Professor of Philosophy (Jack,
Ph.D., On Consequentialist Ethics, Wadsworth, Thomson Learning, Inc., pp.
98-103)

A classic objection to both act and rule utilitarianism has to do with inequity, and is related
to the kind of objection raised by Rawls, which I will consider shortly. Suppose we have two fathers-Andy and Bob. Suppose
further that they are alike in all relevant respects, both have three children, make the same salary, have the same living
expenses, put aside the same amount in savings, and have left over each week fifteen dollars. Suppose that every week Andy and
Bob ask themselves what they are going to do with this extra money, and Andy decides anew each week (AU) to divide it equally
among his three children, or he makes a decision to always follow the rule (RU) that each child should receive an equal
percentage of the total allowance money. Suppose further that each of his children receive five degrees of pleasure from this and
no pain. Suppose on the other hand, that Bob, who strongly favors his oldest son, Bobby, decides anew each week (AU) to give all
of the allowance money to Bobby, and nothing to the other two, and that he instructs Bobby not to tell the others, or he makes a
decision to follow the rule (RU) to always give the total sum to Bobby. Suppose also that Bobby gets IS units of pleasure from his
allowance and that his unsuspecting siblings feel no pain. The end result of the actions of both fathers is the same-IS units of
pleasure. Most, if not all, of us would agree that although Andy's conduct is exemplary, Bob's is culpable. Nevertheless, according
to both AU and RU the fathers in question are morally equal. Neither father is more or less exemplary or culpable than the other. I

Both act and rule utilitarianism violate the

principle of just distribution. What Rawls does is to elaborate objection (H). Utilitarianism, according to Rawls, fails to
appreciate the importance of distributive justice, and that by doing so it makes a mockery of the concept of "justice." As I
pointed out when I discussed Russell's views regarding partial goods, satisfying the interests of a majority of a given
population while at the same time thwarting the interests of the minority segment of that same population (as occurs in
societies that allow slavery) can maximize the general good, and do so even though the minority group may have to
suffer great cruelties. Rawls argues that the utilitarian commitment to maximize the good in the world is due to its failure to
''take seriously the distinction between persons." One person can be forced to give up far too much to insure the
maximization of the good, or the total aggregate satisfaction, as was the case for those young Aztec women chosen by their
will refer to the objection implicit in this kind of example as (H) and state it as: ' (H)

society each year to be sacrificed to the Gods for the welfare of the group.

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Utilitarianism destroys value to life by forcing the individual to take risks on

a cost-benefit basis in an effort to increase overall utility of an entity, while
demoralizing the individuals own system of values
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke,
Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

From the individual's point of view, the balancing of costs and benefits that
utilitarianism endorses renders the status of any individual risk bearer
profoundly insecure. A risk bearer cannot determine from the kind of risk being
imposed on him whether it is impermissible or not. The identical risk may be justified if
necessary to avoid a calamity and unjustified if the product of an act of profitless carelessness, but the nature and
extent of the underlying benefits of the risky action are fre quently unknown to the risk bearer so that he
cannot know whether or not he is being wronged. Furthermore, even when the gain that lies behind the risk is
well-known, the status of a risk bearer is insecure because individuals can justifiably be inflicted with ever
greater levels of risk in conjunction with increasing gains . Certainly, individual risk bearers may be entitled to more
protection if the risky action exposes many others to the same risk, since the likelihood that technological risks will
cause greater harm increases as more and more people experience that risk. This makes the risky action less likely to

that insight seems scant comfort to an individual, for it reinforces the

realization that, standing alone, he does not count for much . A strategy of weighing gains against risks thus
be justifiable. Once again, however,

renders the status of any specific risk victim substantially contingent upon the claims of others, both those who may
share his victim status and those who stand to gain from the risky activity. The anxiety to preserve some fundamental
place for the individual that cannot be overrun by larger social considerations underlies what H.L.A. Hart has aptly

despite its famous slogan, "everyone

[is] to count for one,"59 utilitarianism ultimately denies each individual a primary place in its system of values .
termed the "distinctively modern criticism of utilitarianism,"58 the criticism that,

Various versions of utilitarian ism evaluate actions by the consequences of those actions to maximize happiness, the net
of pleasure over pain, or the satisfaction of desires.60 Whatever the specific formulation, the

goal of maximizing

some mea sure of utility obscures and diminishes the status of each individual .

It reduces the individual to a

conduit, a reference point that registers the appropriate "utiles," but does not count for anything independent of his

It also produces moral requirements that can trample an individual, if necessary, to

maximize utility, since once the net effects of a proposal on the maximand have been taken into account, the
individual is expendable. Counting pleasure and pain equally across individuals is a laudable proposal, but counting
monitoring function.61

only plea sure and pain permits the grossest inequities among individuals and the trampling of the few in furtherance of
the utility of the many. In sum, utilitarianism makes the status of any individual radically contingent . The
individual's status will be preserved only so long as that status con tributes to increasing total utility. Otherwise, the
individual can be discarded.

The only way to preserve individualism is to allow all persons to have the
right to own themselves regardless of any negative consequentialist impacts
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke,
Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
2. Liberal Theories in the "Rights" Tradition. A

second group of theories avoids the modern criticism of utilitarianism by

making the individual central. Contemporary theorists as diverse as John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Richard Epstein, Charles Fried,
and Ronald Dworkin continue a tradition variously described as the Kantian, natural rights, or "rights" tradition.62 They all define
the requirements of justice in terms of recognizing and preserving the essential characteristics of individuals as free and
autonomous moral agents.63 In this approach, the individual is defined prior to articulating the terms under which that
individual can be acted upon or interacted with, and those terms are consequently specified so as to protect and

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preserve what is essential to the individual . In this context, rights have been called "trumps" since they constrain what
society can do to the individual.64 These theories all aspire to make the individual more secure than he is under
utilitarianism. In the rights tradition, the crucial criteria for assessing risks derive from the impact of those risks on risk victims,
and the criteria are defined independently of the benefits flowing from risk creation. To be plausible, such a program cannot
totally prohibit risk creation, but the ostensible advantage of this program over utilitarianism is that risk creation is circumscribed
by criteria exclusively derived from considerations of the integrity of the individual, not from any balancing or weighing
process.65 The root idea is that nonconsensual risks are violations of "individual entitlements to personal security and
autonomy."66 This idea seems highly congruent with the ideology of environmentalism expressed in our national legislation
regulating technological risk. Indeed, two scholars have recently suggested a modern rendering of Kant's categorical imperative:
"All

rational persons have a right not to be used without their consent even for the benefit of others ."67 If imposing risk
to secure the status of the individual.

amounts to using another, this tradition seems to be the place to look

Utilitarianism allows larger powers like the government to control the

individual as long a greater utility is achieved. It is immoral to violate the
sanctity of human life.
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke,
Rights Against Risks, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

In modern society, the overwhelming power of centralized authority, whether of the

state or of other large institutions, looms over every individual. Utilitarianism is a
philosophy that legitimizes that power and countenances the anxiety that comes with
it so long as total utility is increased. In the process of that legitimization, utilitarianism fails to
accommodate society's deeply held moral ideals concerning the special sanctity of
human life. "[W]e prefer to think of [lives] as beyond price. . . . To the extent that our lives and institutions depend on the
notion that life is beyond price . . . a refusal to save lives is horribly costly."68 Cost-benefit analysis flaunts the
legitimacy of placing a price on life. The depth of hostile reactions to the utilitarian tradition that has been
displayed in the environmental era cannot fully be comprehended until the antipathy to this aspect of that tradition is understood.

Utilitarianism suppresses individual choice-making freedom gives value to

life
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Rights Against Risks,
April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)
Under this concept of rules,

rules may intervene to preclude or limit the consideration of

consequences, and thus such consideration will not inevitably collapse all issues of moral choice into a case-by-case costbenefit analysis. Any theory intent on maintaining individual integrity and autonomy will likely generate some rules that protect

moral space within

which an individual can make choices even if those choices do not maximize utility.
individuals from the radical contingency associated with utilitarianism. Autonomy implies some

"Rights" in theories emphasizing individual autonomy function as rules providing individuals with moral space. They eliminate
from consideration of the justness of an action some arguments and factual aspects that might otherwise bear on that judgment.
Notice that this idea of rights is consistent with taking consequences into account. Consequences can be taken into account at the
rule formulation stage. If a rule then makes certain consequences irrelevant to its subsequent application, these "rights regardless
of consequences" ignore consequences only because the consequences of granting those rights had been taken into account

Within a nonutilitarian theory, then, there is a valid distinction

between weighing the consequences of a risky action and weighing the consequences
of a rule regulating risky actions. One point this section makes is that this distinction cannot plausibly result in a
when the rights were formulated.

rule that risks should be regulated regardless of consequences, but that fact alone does not demonstrate that either the structure
of the arguments supporting this conclusion or the norms of behavior derived from them are simply reformulations of
utilitarianism.76 Even if the proposal to take consequences into account does not reproduce a form of utilitarianism, a second
objection may be voiced. It might be thought that the proposal embodies the same fundamental mistake that has resulted in
criticism of utilitarianism. Once again an individual's security will become contingent upon the consequential value to others of

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actions affecting that individual's vital interests. Although the problem of contingency is real, the criticism of utilitarianism
outlined above cannot be leveled against the manner in which contingency has been reintroduced. This is because,
notwithstanding the current fashion of equating "consequentialism" with "utilitarianism,"77 utilitarianism is a unique subset of
consequentialism, and arguments aimed at it cannot simply be appropriated to indict all theories that consider consequences to

Utilitarianism's special use of consequences isolates a single consequential

aspect of actions contribution to the maximand-and assesses the propriety of action
exclusively by that measure. It is this feature of utilitarianism, not the simple
ingredient of considering consequences, that makes it vulnerable to the charge of
ignoring individuals.78 It is perfectly feasible to construct moral theories that employ
consequences in their evaluation of the rightness of actions without thereby endorsing
utilitarian reductionism.79 In specific cases, one individual might be given his "rights" by a second individual only at
be relevant.

the second individual's great discomfort, inconvenience, and perhaps even risk of life.

Governments have a responsibility to maintain human rights and

individualism utilitarianism undermines human rights
Kateb 92 Professor of Politics at Princeton University (George, The Inner
Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture, p. 5)

To tie dignity to rights is therefore to say that governments have the absolute duty to
treat people (by actions and abstentions) in certain ways, and in certain ways only. The states characteristic
domination and insolence are to be curbed for the sake of rights. Public and formal respect for rights registers and strengthens

every person is a creature capable of feeling pain,

and is a free agent capable of having a free being, of living a life that is ones own and
not somebody elses idea of how a life should be lived, and is a moral agent capable of
acknowledging that what one claims for oneself as a right one can claim only as an equal to
everyone else (and relatedly that what one wants done to oneself one should do to others). Respect for rights recognizes
awareness of three constitutive facts of being human:

these capacities and thus honors human dignity. I know that adequate recognition of these human capabilities does not entail
respect for rights as the sole and necessary conclusion. This respect is not a matter of logical inference. Rather, given initial
sentiments say, fellow feeling or special sensitivity to pain or dislike of power recognition can lead to or add up to a theoretical

every individual is equally a world,

an infinity, a being who is irreplaceable. At the same time, there are other theories that seem
to affirm human dignity yet give rights only a lesser or probationary or instrumental
role. Examples are utilitarianism, recent communitarianism, recent republicanism, and radical egalitarianism. The
first and last I will return to shortly; my response to the others appears her and there in this volume. All I wish to say
now is that unless rights come first, they are not rights. They will tend to be sacrificed to some
affirmation of rights. The most important sentiment by far is for the idea that

purpose deemed higher than the equal dignity of every individual. The group or the majority or the good or the sacred or the
vague future will be preferred. The beneficiaries will be victimized along with the victims because no one is being treated as a
person who is irreplaceable and beyond value. To make rights anything but primary, even though in the name of human dignity,
is to injure human dignity.

Theories of right preserve value to life government politics with the

intention of increasing overall utility through environmentalism destroy
morality and deceives the individual
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Prof of Law at Duke,
Rights Against Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

Theories in the rights tradition resonate with ideals regarding life and its sanctity.
These theories, however, can provide a reliable guide to risk regulation only if they can fit
their analysis of rights against risk with other legitimate values to comprise a coherent
theory of government. It is the thesis of this Article that the notion of a right against risk that trumps all considerations of
countervailing values cannot be so validated by any theory in the rights tradition. Despite the appealing absolutist language of

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the countervailing benefits of risky actions persistently return and

demand consideration. This is so at the level of practical politics, where the years after
passage of our major environmental statutes have witnessed creative maneuvers by
courts, agencies, and Congress to avoid actually implementing absolute rights against
risk whenever the substantial costs of achieving extremely low levels of risk become
undeniable.69 It is also true at the level of theory. Once one looks beyond the glitter of catchphrases to examine their
accounts, seemingly absolutist nonutilitarian theories do not support absolute rights against
risk. Any defensible theory of risk regulation must acknowledge the relevance of countervailing interests and values. Given the
nonutilitarian theories,

modern attack on utilitarianism,70 a proposed theory must also avoid comparing benefits and risks in a way that collapses the
theory into utilitarianism. Unfortunately, "absolutist" rhetoric applied to risk regulation

is so obsessed with
avoiding the error of utilitarianism that it commits an opposite mistake by obscuring
the interests of risk creators. Environmentalists, as well as others concerned about risk regulation,
ought to divorce themselves from much of the popular language of rights as absolutes
because the terminology evokes a misleading expectation of a theoretical justification for risk rules
that cannot in fact be supplied. An attempted justification fails if it ignores the legitimate interests of risk creators and others who

nonabsolutist understanding of risk must preserve the

essential moral insight of the rights tradition that individuals matter as autonomous
moral agents worthy of respect. This Article moves in the direction of such an understanding by examining the
benefit from the creation of risk. Still, a

nature of the conflict between the interests of risk creator and risk bearer, and how modern rights theories deal with that conflict.
lth Care

Utilitarianism inevitable even in deontological frameworks

Green, 02 Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University
(Joshua, November 2002 "The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth
About Morality And What To Do About It", 314)
Some people who talk of balancing rights may think there is an algorithm for deciding which rights take priority over which. If

Attempting to solve moral problems

using a complex deontological algorithm is dogmatism at its most esoteric, but dogmatism all the same. However, its
likely that when some people talk about balancing competing rights and obligations they are already thinking like
consequentialists in spite of their use of deontological language . Once again, what deontological language does best is
thats what we mean by 302 balancing rights, then we are wise to shun this sort of talk.

express the thoughts of people struck by strong, emotional moral intuitions: It doesnt matter that you can save five people by

That is why angry protesters say things like,

Animals Have Rights, Too! rather than, Animal Testing: The Harms Outweigh the Benefits! Once again, rights talk
captures the apparent clarity of the issue and absoluteness of the answer . But sometimes rights talk persists long after the
pushing him to his death. To do this would be a violation of his rights!19

sense of clarity and absoluteness has faded. One thinks, for example, of the thousands of children whose lives are saved by drugs

One finds oneself balancing the rights on both sides by

asking how many rabbit lives one is willing to sacrifice in order to save one human life, and so on, and at the end of the
day ones underlying thought is as thoroughly consequentialist as can be, despite the deontological gloss. And whats
that were tested on animals and the rights of those children.

wrong with that? Nothing, except for the fact that the deontological gloss adds nothing and furthers the myth that there really are

Best to drop it. When deontological talk gets sophisticated, the thought it represents is either dogmatic in an
esoteric sort of way or covertly consequentialist.
rights, etc.

Compromising moral values and trading off for other injustices proves
deontology is impossible
Spragens 2K Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Harvard University
(Thomas A., Political Theory and Partisan Politics- "Rationality in Liberal
Politics" pg 81-2)

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My thesis that all three layers/forms of political association are important in a well-ordered liberal democracy also implies the
untenability of Rawls's argument that agreement regarding norms of social justice is a possible and sufficient way to overcome

the fundamental
unfairness of life and the presence of gratuitous elements in the moral universe make it impossible to settle rationally
upon a single set of distributive principles as demonstrably fair (See also, Spragens 1993). Simply put, the problem is that the
contingencies of the world ineluctably allocate assets and sufferings quite unfairly. We can cope with and try to compensate
for these "natural injustices," but only at the price of introducing other elements of unfairness or compromising other
moral values. The other major problem in this context is that real world human beings are not deontologists: their moral
intuitions about distributive justice are permeated and influenced by their moral intuitions about the' good . The empirical
consequence of these two difficulties is the falsification of Rawls's hermeneutic claims about an overlapping consensus. Rational
people of good will with a liberal democratic persuasion will be able to agree that some possible distributive criteria are
morally unacceptable. But, as both experience and the literature attest, hopes for a convergence of opinion on definitive
principles of distributive justice are chimerical .
the deficiencies of the modus vivendi approach. In the first place, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere,

Age of nuclear deterrence makes preventative measures necessary. Its too

late to consider otherwise.
Nye, 86 (Joseph S. 1986; Phd Political Science Harvard. University; Served as
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; Nuclear
Ethics pg. 62-63)

Antinuclear consequentialists often object to the whole approach to deterrence in

terms of probability. For example, the sociologist Todd Gitlin argues that "since deterrence works only if it works
forever, it is an all-or-nothing proposition, so applying the language of probability to it is misleading. "112 But his argument is
not compelling. Gitlin seems to assume that failures of deterrence or inevitable accidents must lead to all-out nuclear
war, but that is far from self-evident. Indeed, a case can be made that an accident or partial failure of deterrence may be the
prelude to substantial changes that reduce risks or reliance on nuclear deterrence in the long term. But even if he were right
about catastrophe, it is odd for Gitlin to discount "microscopic probability" by asking, " Do

we feel secure playing Russian

roulette if the revolver has a hundred chambers?" Perhaps not, but if we had to play, I doubt that we really would not
care if a revolver had one hundred chambers rather than six! And if he readmits probabilistic reasoning, then it can also be
applied to the question of relative risks between unilateral disarmament ("refusing to play") and trying to increase the
number of chambers in a world where the game of nuclear deterrence already exists .

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**Deon Good**
Consequences can only be evaluated AFTER morals Rights come first
Kamm 2003 Deontology by Stephen Darwall, page 164, 2003, Published By Wiley-Blackwell ,
Harming Some to Save Others, Frances Myrna Kamm, http://books.google.com/books?
id=tzrrwH5HzwQC&pg=PA116&dq=deontology+vs.+consequentialism&client=firefox-a

Deontology InevitableIt is grounded in human behavior

Economic Analysis, Common-Sense Morality and Utilitarianism Author(s): J. Moreh Source: Erkenntnis
(1975-), Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jul., 1992), pp. 115-143 Published by: Springer Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20012427 Accessed: 22/07/2009 13:24
Common-sense morality is grounded in the consciousness of ordinary human beings and the
stringency of moral rules is a device based on psychological grounds meant to prevent the erosion
of moral rules. In other words, the tendency for self-deception in order to reduce cognitive
dissonance gives rise to high information costs and causes Conscience to set up a fence around
moral rules. By contrast, Utilitarianism has been thought out by moral philosophers as an ethical
system which people are advised to adopt. Because of the intellectual character of Utilitarianism,
it has evolved no processes for hedging around its rules. One therefore understands Harsanyi
(1985, p. 49) when he describes utilitarian rules as 'conditional imperatives', that is, people should
fol? low them because in this way they will maximize expected social utility. Of course, he expects
all rational people to have an interest in promot? ing the common good and therefore to be
utilitarians. (By contrast, many people regard moral rules as unconditionally binding or 'categori
cal imperatives').

Deontology precludes util- the values of deontology come first

Mcnaughton and Rawling 98 [David McNaughton and Piers Rawling are professors of
philosophy at Keele University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Ratio, On Defending
Deontology, issue 11, p. 48-49 Ebsco]

Nagel effectively accepts the consequentialist view that a system of moral

rules can only be defended by showing that their adoption brings about some
good that could not otherwise be realized, and then seeks to show that

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deontology is such a system. The claim is not, of course, that agent-relative reasons rest
directly on considerations of value in a manner obviously susceptible to the CVC; rather, the
grounding is indirect the notion is that worlds in which there are agent-relative reasons are
better than worlds in which there are not. Nagel argues that an agent relative morality,
qua moral system, is intrinsically valuable. Thus we concur with Hooker (1994), then,
pace Howard-Snyder (1993), that rule consequentialism is not a 'rubber duck'. Thus rights

(the obverse of constraints) have value, and are, therefore, part of the basic
structure of moral theory. A right is an agent-relative, not an agent-neutral, value, says
Nagel (1995, p.88). This is precisely because it is supposed to resist the CVC (one
is forbidden to violate a right even to minimize the total number of such
violations). So Nagel faces the Scheffler problem: How could it be wrong to
harm one person to prevent greater harm to others? How are we to understand the
value that rights assign to certain kinds of human inviolability, which makes this consequence
morally intelligible? (p.89, our emphasis note the presumption inherent in the question). The

answer focuses on the status conferred on all human beings by the design of a
morality which includes agent-relative constraints (p.89). That status is one of
being inviolable (which is not, of course, to say that one will not be violated, but that
one may not be violated even to minimize the total number of such
violations). A system of morality that includes inviolability encapsulates a good
that its rivals cannot capture. For, not only is it an evil for a person to be
harmed in certain ways, but for it to be permissible to harm the person in those
ways is an additional and independent evil (p.91). So there is a sense in which we are
better off if there are rights (they are a kind of generally disseminated intrinsic good (p.93)).
Hence there are rights. In short, we are inviolable because

Deontology comes first, the means must justify themselves utilitarianism

justifies the Holocaust.
Anderson, 2004 (Kerby Anderson is the National Director of Probe Ministries
International, , Probe Ministries Utilitarianism:
The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number http://www.probe.org/theologyand-philosophy/worldview--philosophy/utilitarianism-the-greatest-good-forthegreatest-number.html)
One problem with utilitarianism is that it leads to an "end justifies the means"
mentality. If any worthwhile end can justify the means to attain it, a true ethical
foundation is lost. But we all know that the end does not justify the means. If that were so,
then Hitler could justify the Holocaust because the end was to purify the human
race. Stalin could justify his slaughter of millions because he was trying to
achieve a communist utopia. The end never justifies the means. The means
must justify themselves. A particular act cannot be judged as good simply because it may
lead to a good consequence. The means must be judged by some objective and
consistent standard of morality. Second, utilitarianism cannot protect the rights
of minorities if the goal is the greatest good for the greatest number.
Americans in the eighteenth century could justify slavery on the basis that it
provided a good consequence for a majority of Americans. Certainly the majority
benefited from cheap slave labor even though the lives of black slaves were much worse. A
third problem with utilitarianism is predicting the consequences. If morality is based on

results, then we would have to have omniscience in order to accurately predict

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the consequence of any action. But at best we can only guess at the future,
and often these educated guesses are wrong. A fourth problem with
utilitarianism is that consequences themselves must be judged. When results
occur, we must still ask whether they are good or bad results. Utilitarianism
provides no objective and consistent foundation to judge results because
results are the mechanism used to judge the action itself.inviolability is intrinsically
valuable.

Deontology precludes util- the values of deontology come first

Mcnaughton and Rawling 98 [David McNaughton and Piers Rawling are professors of
philosophy at Keele University and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Ratio, On Defending
Deontology, issue 11, p. 48-49 Ebsco]

Nagel effectively accepts the consequentialist view that a system of moral

rules can only be defended by showing that their adoption brings about some
good that could not otherwise be realized, and then seeks to show that
deontology is such a system. The claim is not, of course, that agent-relative reasons rest
directly on considerations of value in a manner obviously susceptible to the CVC; rather, the
grounding is indirect the notion is that worlds in which there are agent-relative reasons are
better than worlds in which there are not. Nagel argues that an agent relative morality,
qua moral system, is intrinsically valuable. Thus we concur with Hooker (1994), then,
pace Howard-Snyder (1993), that rule consequentialism is not a 'rubber duck'. Thus rights

(the obverse of constraints) have value, and are, therefore, part of the basic
structure of moral theory. A right is an agent-relative, not an agent-neutral, value, says
Nagel (1995, p.88). This is precisely because it is supposed to resist the CVC (one
is forbidden to violate a right even to minimize the total number of such
violations). So Nagel faces the Scheffler problem: How could it be wrong to
harm one person to prevent greater harm to others? How are we to understand the
value that rights assign to certain kinds of human inviolability, which makes this consequence
morally intelligible? (p.89, our emphasis note the presumption inherent in the question). The

answer focuses on the status conferred on all human beings by the design of a
morality which includes agent-relative constraints (p.89). That status is one of
being inviolable (which is not, of course, to say that one will not be violated, but that
one may not be violated even to minimize the total number of such
violations). A system of morality that includes inviolability encapsulates a good
that its rivals cannot capture. For, not only is it an evil for a person to be
harmed in certain ways, but for it to be permissible to harm the person in those
ways is an additional and independent evil (p.91). So there is a sense in which we are
better off if there are rights (they are a kind of generally disseminated intrinsic good (p.93)).
Hence there are rights. In short, we are inviolable because

Deontology comes before util- utilitarianism can be a last resort to preserve

fundamental rights
Kateb 1992 [George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics,
Emeritus, at Princeton University The Inner Ocean
http://books.google.com/books?id=MtGJdmzqLZoC&dq=kateb+
%22what+does+a+theory%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s]

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What does a theory of rights leave undecided? Many issues of public policy do not affect
individual rights, despite frequent ingeniuous efforts to claim that they do. Such issues pertain
to the promotion of a better life, whether for the disadvantaged or for everyone, or involve the
clash of interests. So long as rights are not in play, advocates of rights can rightly allow a loose
utilitarianism as the proper guide to public policy, though they should always be eager to keep
the states energy under suspicion. One can even think, against utilitarianism, that any substantive

outcome acheived by morally proper procedure is morally right and hence acceptable (so long as
rights are not in play). The main point, however, is that utilitarianism has a necessary place in any
democratic countrys normal political deliberations. But its advocates must know its place, which
ordinarily is only to help to decide what theory of rights leave alone . When may rights be
overridden by the government? I have two sorts of cases in mind: overriding a particular right
of some persons for the sake of preserving the same right of others, and overriding the same
right of everyone for the sake of what I will clumsily call civilization values. An advocate of
rights could countenance, perhaps must countenance, the states overriding of rights for these
two reasons. The subject is painful and liable to dispute every step of the way. For the state to

override-that is, sacrifice- a right of some so theat others may keep it, the situations must be
desperate. I havein mind, say, circumstances in which the choice is between sacrificing a right of
some and letting a right of all be lost . The state (or some other agent) may kill some or allow them
to be killed), if the only alternative is letting everyone die. It is the right to life which most
prominently figures in thinking about desperate situations. I cannot see any resolution but to
heed the precept that numbers count. Just as one may prefer saving ones own life to saving
that of another when both cannot be saved, so a third party-let us say, the state- can (perhaps
must) choose to save the greater number of lives and at the cost of the lesser number, when
there is otherwise no hope for either group. That choice does not mean that those to be
sacrificed are immoral if they resist being sacrificed. It follows, of course, that if a third party is

right to risk or sacrifice the lives of the lesser for the lives of the greater number when the lesser
would otherwise live, the lesser are also not wrong if they resist being sacrificed. To accept
utilitarianism (in some loose sense) as a necessary supplement. It thus should function innocently,
or when all hope of innocence is gone. I emphasize, above all, however, that every care must be
taken to ensure that the precept that numbers of lives count does not become a license for vaguely
conjectural decisions about inflicting death and saving life and that desperation be as strictly and
narrowly understood as possible. (But total numbers killed do not count if members of one group
have to kill members of another group to save themselves from threatened massacre of enslavement
or utter degradation or misery; they may kill their attackers in an attempt to end the threat.)
Deontology preserves fundamental rights and still accesses the ultimate
good, accessing the same things as util

Bentley No Date [ Kristina A. Bentley graduate of the Department of government at the University of
Manchester. Suggesting A Separate Approach To Utility and Rights: Deontological Specification and
Teleogical Enforcement of Human Rights
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/pir/postgrad/vol1_issue3/issue3_article1.pdf]

The second area of departure between utilitarianism and rights-based theories is that
utilitarians advocate a simple maximising strategy as the aim is to maximise social utility
and a society is justified in doing whatever enhances its aggregate utility (Jones, 1994: 52).
Conversely, the opponents of this view hold that rights constitute an area which is beyond the
reach of such calculations, as it would be pointless if rights could be set aside in a mere
calculus of competing preferences (Jones, 1994: 53). This is because rights are regarded as
being considerations which are special in the sense that they protect individuals from the
potential excesses of such calculations. Consequently, to refer back to Gewirths example,
according to the rights-based account, it would always be morally wrong to torture an
innocent person, even if this would result in a large increase in aggregate utility in such a
society, while a utilitarian approach would weigh up the evidence, such that if thousands of

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lives would be saved by the torture, then it ought to be done. This roughly reflects Dworkins
notion of Rights as Trumps which override, or supersede ordinary notions of well-being. The
difference however is that Dworkins theory occupies some middle ground, as it does not rule
out rights being overridden by such considerations when other fundamental rights are
threatened (Jones, 1994: 53). So while Dworkin would probably argue that to torture someone
to give others in society pleasure at the sight would be trumped by the right not to be
tortured, he would perhaps concede that to torture an individual to prevent the detonation of
a nuclear bomb, as is the case in Gewirths example, may be justified, as the right to life of all
others in society may, in this instance, trump the right of an individual not to be tortured.
Dworkins formulation again places the domain of rights beyond the reach of ordinary
considerations of utility, but he does make provision for rights to be balanced against one
another (to trump one another) in cases of extreme gravity for rights themselves.
Consequently, theories of rights quite simply consider respect for rights to be the primary
consideration in the course of social deliberation, while utilitarians consider the ultimate
good or utility on the balance to be the correct goal to pursue, even if this potentially
infringes on individual rights. However, assertions that these conceptions of justice are
incompatible are not always acknowledged by exponents of consequentialism. As Richard B.
Brandt states: There is a fundamental incompatibility between utilitarianism and human
rights. Most utilitarians of course have not thought there is such an incompatibility (Brandt,
1992: 196).

Evaluating the deontological aspects of a policy is critical to policy making

Pinstrup-Andersen, 2005. [Ethics and economic policy for the food system. General
Sessions, 01DEC-05, American Journal of Agricultural Economics Ebsco Host.]
Economists seldom address ethical questions as they infringe on economic theory or economic
behavior. They (and I) find this subject complex and elusive in comparison with the relative
precision and
objectivity of economic analysis. However, if ethics is influencing our analyses but ignored, is
the precision and objectivity just an illusion? Are we in fact being normative when we claim to
be positive or are we, as suggested by Gilbert
(p. xvi), ignoring social ethics and, as a consequence, contributing to a situation in which we
know "the
price of everything and the value of nothing?" The economists' focus on efficiency and

the Pareto
Principle has made us less relevant to policy makers, whose main concerns are
who gains, who
loses, by how much, and can or should the losers be compensated. By focusing
on the
distribution of gains and losses and replacing the Pareto Principle with
estimates of whether a big
enough economic surplus could be generated so that gainers could
compensate losers, the socalled
new welfare economics (which is no longer new) was a step toward more
relevancy for policy
makers (Just, Hueth, and Schmitz). Another major step toward relevancy was made by the
more recent
emphasis on political economy and institutional economics. But are we trading off scientific
validity for
relevancy? Robbins (p. 9) seems to think so, when he states that "claims of welfare economics
to be

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scientific are highly dubious." But if Aristotle saw economics as a branch of ethics and Adam
Smith was a moral philosopher, when did we, as implied by Stigler, replace ethics with
precision and objectivity? Or, when did we as economists move away from philosophy toward
statistics and engineering and are we on our way back to a more
comprehensive political economy approach, in which both quantitative and qualitative
variables are taken
into account? I believe we are. Does that make us less scientific, as argued by Robbins?

I am not questioning whether the quantification of economic relationships is

important. It is. In the case of food policy analysis, it is critically important that
the causal relationship between policy options and expected impact on the
population groups of interest is quantitatively estimated . But not at the expense
of reality, context, and ethical considerations, much of which can be described
only in qualitative terms. Economic analyses that ignore everything that cannot
be quantified and included in our models are not likely to advance our
understanding of economic and policy relationships . Neither
will they be relevant for solving real world problems. The predictive ability is likely to be low and,
if the results are used by policy makers, the outcome may be different from what was expecte.
Deontology key to giving human life value
Kamm 92 [ FM Kamm is Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy, Kennedy School
Non-consequentialism, the person as an end-in-itself, and the significance of status.,
Philosophy and Public Affairs, p. 390 JSTOR]

If we are inviolable in a certain way, we are more important creatures than

violable ones; such a
higher status is itself a benefit to us . Indeed, we are creatures whose interests
as recipients of such
ordinary benefits as welfare are more worth serving. The world is, in a sense, a
better place, as it has more important creatures in it .3' In this sense the inviolable
status (against being harmed in a certain way) of any potential victim can be taken to be an
agent-neutral value. This is a nonconsequential value. It does not follow (causally

or noncausally) upon any act, but is already present in the status that persons
have. Ensuring it provides the background against which we may then seek
their welfare or pursue other values. It is not our duty to bring about the agentneutral value, but only to respect the constraints that express its presence .
Kagan claims that the only sense in which we can show disrespect for
people is by using them in an unjustified way. Hence, if it is justified to
kill one to save five, we will not be showing disrespect for the one if we so use
him. But there is another sense of disrespect tied to the fact that we owe people more respect
than animals, even though we also should not treat animals in an unjustified way. And this
other sense of disrespect is, I believe, tied to the failure to heed the greater inviolability of
persons.

Deontology does not dismiss consequences, categorical imperative means

deont still maximizes happiness
Donaldson 95 (Thomas Donaldson is Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown U, Ethics and
International Affairs,International Deontology Defended: A Response to Russell Hardin, pg. 147-154)
When discussing nuclear deterrence or intervention it is common to exaggerate the
nonconsequential nature

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It is a false but all-too common myth that Kant believed that

consequences were
irrelevant to the evaluation of moral action . In his practical writings Kant explicitly
of Kantianism.

states that each of us

has a duty to maximize the happiness of other individuals, a statement that echoes Mills
famous principle of
utility. But Kants duty to promote beneficial consequences is understood to be derived from an

even
higher order principle, namely, the categorical imperative that requires all of us to act in a way that
respects the intrinsic value of other rational beings. Kant does not dismiss consequences. He simply
wants them in their proper place.
Callahan embraces reason and says it must be used in combination with a
moral obligation to make decisions
Callahan, fmr. Director of the Hastings Institute, 75
DANIEL CALLAHAN, Fmr. Director of the Hastings Institute, author of The
Tyranny of Survival & Senior Fellow at Yale, February 1975,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3560956
correspondent, after praising the position I took in opposition to Garrett Hardin's
"Life-boat Ethic" ("Doing Good by Doing Well," Dec. 1974), ended her letter with a complaint. I
had, she implied, fallen into a fatal trap by trying to argue with Hardins thesis on "rationalistic
rounds. The issue at stake is "humanitarianism" and the future of altruism, neither of which will
be saved if they must be defended on the narrow base of reason and logic. Indeed, she
seemed to be saying, there is an inherent conflict between humanitarianism and
rationalism. As an unreconstructed rationalist, I balk at admitting such a dualism, just as
I rebel at the general black-balling of reason and logic which seems to many to offer the only
A RECENT

antidote to the generally insane, depressing state of the world. One can well understand how rationality has come to
have a bad name. We have in the twentieth century been subjected to endless wars, ills and disasters carried out in the
name of somebody or other's impeccable logic and assertedly rational deliberations. One can also understand the
sense of distaste any feel in the face of articulate proponents of "triage" in our dealings with poor countries and a
"lifeboat ethic" in deter-mining our own moral responsibilities toward the starving, particularly when such positions are
advanced in the name of no-nonsense rational calculation. For all that , I am far more fearful of a

deliberate abandonment of reason than of the evils which can be done in its name.
The fault with the latter form of attacking "reason" is that it takes those arguing in
its name too much at their own word. Poke around a bit under the facade of
carefully-honed rationality and precise logical moves and what does one usually
discover? Pure mush. Those vast, intricate edifices rest on a bowl of porridge, made
up of irrational self-interest, the worst forms of sentimentality (or pure cruelty),
utterly unanalyzed assumptions about politics, or ethics, or human nature, tribalism,
and god knows what else. None of that has much if anything to do with reason. A
recent article by Robert L. Heilbroner, author of the much-acclaimed book, An Inquiry Into
the Human Prospect, is indicative of the muddle created when one calls for an
abandonment of rationality in favor of something more Illuminating. In "What has Posterity
Ever Done for Me?" (New York Times Magazine, January 19, 1975), Prof. Heilbroner tries to make the case that
contemporary human beings will never learn to take responsibility for the future of mankind until they give up trying to
find a compelling reason why they should. Only some fundamental revelatory experience-to wit, famine, war and the
like-will bring people back to what is an essentially "religious" insight, that of "the transcendent importance of posterity
for them." It is intriguing to see the way Heilbroner develops his case. "Why," he asks, "should I lift a finger to affect
events that will have no more meaning for me 75 years after my death than those that happened 75 years before I was
born? There is no rational answer to that terrible question. No argument based on reason will lead me to care for
posterity or to lift a finger in its behalf. Indeed, by every rational consideration, precisely the opposite answer is thrust
upon us with irresistible force." Going on, Heilbroner quotes an anonymous "Distinguished Younger Economist" who has
concluded that he really doesn't "care" whether mankind survives or not. "Is this," Heilbroner queries, "an outrageous
position? I must confess it outrages me. But this is not because the economist's arguments are 'wrong'-indeed, within
their rational framework they are indisputably right. It is because their position reveals the limitations-worse, the
suicidal dangers-of what we call 'rational argument' when we con-front questions that can only be decided by an
appeal to an entirely different faculty from that of cool reason. " I find Heilbroner's despair at finding a
rational basis to care about posterity, or the distant past, simply startling. Surely, to begin
with the past, he can hardly believe (to stick to his own field of economics) that Adam Smith and the other "worldly

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philosophers" have no significance whatever any more, despite the fact that they had a critical place in shaping the
world in which we live today. And surely, as an American, he must find some slight trace of present and personal
meaning in the historical fact that some distant people once upon a time signed a "declaration of independence." My
beginning with the past is no accident. If a case is to be made for caring about the fate of posterity, it will arise out of
the highly rational recognition that (for better or worse) we are where we are because it seemed to our ancestors only
sensible to worry about the fate of their descendants, just as (also for better or worse) still earlier generations had
worried about their descendants. More deeply, unless one has decided that human life is, regardless of its condition,
meaningless and terrible-in which case, what the hell-one will also recognize the moral interdependence of generations
as one of the conditions for extracting whatever possibilities there are for human happiness. To love and believe in life
at all is not just to love one's own life; it is to love both the fact and idea of life itself, including the life of those yet to be
born. My point here, however, is not to make the rational case for obligations toward posterity. It is only to indicate
there are rational ways of going about it (and if you don't like the reasons I've given, I can think of still others), just as

there are rational ways of establishing a variety of other moral duties. The truly
hazardous part of despairing of reason, and longing for a return to something more
primitive, can readily be seen in the texture of some of Heilbroner's other arguments. He is
looking for what he calls the "survivalist" principle, by which he seems to mean some deep sense of
obligation toward the future, powerful enough to give us the courage and the toughness to take those immediate steps
necessary to discharge our obligation. "Of course," he writes, "there are moral dilemmas to be faced even if one takes
one's stand on the 'survivalist' principle.... [But] this essential commitment to life's continuance gives us the moral
authority to take measures, per-haps very harsh measures, whose justification cannot be found in the precepts of
rationality, but must be sought in the unbearable anguish we feel if we imagine ourselves as the executioner of
mankind." Of course we may have to act harshly. But, to bring the circle full turn, how are we to act harshly, to whom
and under what circumstances? Are we also meant to abandon reason in trying to answer that question? Are we

supposed to solve the evident "moral dilemmas" to which Heilbroner refers by a

dependence, not on reason, but on a sense of "unbearable anguish "?I see no reason to hope
that even a fully shared sense of anguish would tell us how to resolve moral dilemmas. Moreover, Heilbroner himself
cites at least one person who does not share his feelings, and unless we are to suppose that person to represent a
class of one, the pillar to the center of the earth Heilbroner offers us begins to look like a piece of balsa wood. The
amusing side of all this is that the two principal "survivalists" of our day, Garrett Hardin and Robert Heilbroner, seem to
come out at opposite poles in the place they give to reason. Hardin appears the very paradigm of that cool rationality
which Heilbroner believes to be our greatest threat to survival. And Heilbroner's quest for some deeper affective,
"religious" motivation for survival seems the very model of that soft-hearted and woolly-headed humanitarianism which
Hardin identifies as the villain. Neither is likely to carry the day, and for very healthy reasons. Heilbroner is

correct when he discerns that the appeal to reason has its limitations. It takes more
than mere logic to move people deeply, especially to move them to act. More than that,
the frequently indignant reaction which greeted Hardin's "lifeboat ethic" indicates that many are not about to adopt a
policy of calculating callousness, "logical" though that may seem. Hardin is correct when he says that we must think
very hard about the question of survival, however much such thought may end by posing hard, even revolting, choices.
But he seems not to have realized that, unless the drive for survival has a moral basis and a saving reference to something deeper than rational calculation, some and perhaps many people will decide that survival at any price is not a
moral good. Nothing I have said here solves the vexing problem of the right relationship

between reason and feeling in the moral life. But it seems to me at least clear that
the worst possible solution is to choose one at the expense of the other, or to think
that we can make a flat choice between them. There is enough evidence from recent
psychological research to indicate that our feelings and emotions are vigorously
tutored by our perceptions and cognition; reason has its say even in the way we feel. A no less important insight is that
there is all the difference in the world between being "rational and being "logical."Almost anyone can work through a
simple syllogism, presuming he is spared the ordeal of worrying about whether the premises are correct. It is a far
more difficult matter to be rational, particularly where ethics is concerned

Policy makers cannot depend solely on economics, but need to apply ethics
to make efficient policies

Pinstrup-Andersen, Per. 2005. (Ethics and economic policy for the food system. General Sessions, 01DEC-05, American Journal of Agricultural Economics.)
Economists seldom address ethical questions as they infringe on economic theory or
economic behavior. They (and I) find this subject complex and elusive in comparison with the relative
precision and objectivity of economic analysis. However, if ethics is influencing our analyses but
ignored, is the precision and objectivity just an illusion? Are we in fact being normative when we
claim to be positive or are we, as suggested by Gilbert (p. xvi), ignoring social ethics and, as a
consequence, contributing to a situation in which we know "the price of everything and the value of
nothing?" The economists' focus on efficiency and the Pareto Principle has made us less
relevant to policy makers, whose main concerns are who gains, who loses, by how much,
and can or should the losers be compensated. By focusing on the distribution of gains and
losses and replacing the Pareto Principle with estimates of whether a big enough economic

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surplus could be generated so that gainers could compensate losers, the socalled new
welfare economics (which is no longer new) was a step toward more relevancy for policy
makers (Just, Hueth, and Schmitz). Another major step toward relevancy was made by the more recent emphasis on political
economy and institutional economics. But are we trading off scientific validity for relevancy? Robbins (p. 9) seems to think so,
when he states that "claims of welfare economics to be scientific are highly dubious." But if Aristotle saw economics as a branch
of ethics and Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, when did we, as implied by Stigler, replace ethics with precision and
objectivity? Or, when did we as economists move away from philosophy toward statistics and engineering and are we on our way
back to a more comprehensive political economy approach, in which both quantitative and qualitative variables are taken into
account? I believe we are. Does that make us less scientific, as argued by Robbins? I am not questioning whether the
quantification of economic relationships is important. It is. In the case of food policy analysis, it is critically

important that the causal relationship between policy options and expected impact on the
population groups of interest is quantitatively estimated. But not at the expense of reality,
context, and ethical considerations, much of which can be described only in qualitative terms.
Economic analyses that ignore everything that cannot be quantified and included in our
models are not likely to advance our understanding of economic and policy relationships.
Neither will they be relevant for solving real world problems. The predictive ability is likely
to be low and, if the results are used by policy makers, the outcome may be different from
what was expected.

Deontology is essential for the maintenance of international human rights

because it restricts the practice of justifying the actions of the government
by the ends achieved, creating what is essentially a humane international
order.
Thomas Donaldson, 1995 (Prof. of Business Ethics at Georgetown U, Ethics and International Affairs,
International Deontology Defended: A Response to Russell Hardin, pg. 147-154)
It may appear that I am defending Kantian deontology as a comprehensive moral language to use in
interpreting international events. But I mean not to assert that Kantian deontology is sufficient, only
that it is necessary. Such a perspective contributes fundamental, often neglected, insights. First it
provides a moral grounding for any rights-based approach to international affairs. This
includes not only the general interpretation of international policy through broad notions of human
rights, but also the application of specific rights such as those found in the UN Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. Indeed, most contemporary rights-based theories are deontological theories.
Rights are principles that assign claims or entitlements to someone against someone and are usually interpreted as trumping or
taking precedence over consequential claims made in the name of collective welfare.4 Hence, both in their similarity of form (as a
principle universally applicable to relevantly similar situations) and in their similarity of function (as taking precedence over
collective, consequential considerations), rights satisfy two key Kantian-deontological criteria. Second , Kantianism entails

clear restrictions on the general behavior of states. Of greatest importance is the fact that
these restrictions alert us to the danger of letting the ends justify the means. Whatever the
flaws of the Kantian deontological tradition, and no matter what verdict we finally reach on
the comprehensiveness of deontological moral logic, the insistence on principle over mere
calculation of future consequences stands as deontologys practical raison detre.
Deontology may not be sufficient, but it is necessary for a humane international order.

Certain premises have an intrinsic moral value that comes before

consequences of actions. Evaluating consequences first puts our fate and
the fate of the masses in the hands of
belligerent others.
Igor Primoratz in 05 (Principal Research Fellow @ Center for Applied Philosophy amd Public Ethics, The
Philosophical Forum, Volume 36, No. 1, Civilian Immunity in War, Spring, p. 44-46)
Consequentialist thinkers usually present their view on civilian immunity against the background of
a critique of attempts of philosophers and legal thinkers to account for civilian immunity in
deontological terms. Having satisfied themselves that those attempts have been unsuccessful, they put
forward the claim that civilian immunity has nothing to do with civilians acts or omissions,
guilt or innocence, responsibility or lack of it, but is merely a useful convention. It is useful
since it rules out targeting a large group of human beings, and thus helps reduce greatly the overall
killing, mayhem, and destruction in war. The consequentialist view of civilian immunity is
exposed to two objections: the protection it offers to civilians is too weak, and the ground
provided for it indicates a misunderstanding of the moral issue involved. The protection is too

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weak because civilian immunity is understood as but a useful convention. This makes it doubly weak.
First, if it is merely a useful convention, if all its moral force is due to its utility, then it will
have no such force in cases where it has no utility. This is a familiar flaw of consequentialism. It
denies that moral rules have any intrinsic moral significance, and explains their binding force solely in
terms of the good consequences of acting in accordance with them. Therefore it cannot give us any
good consequentialist reason to adhere to a moral rule in cases where adhering to it will not
have the good consequences it usually has, and where better consequences will be attained
by going against the rule.6 This means that we should respect civilian immunity when, and only when, doing so will
have the good consequences adduced as its ground: when it will indeed reduce the overall killing, maiming, and destruction. On
the other hand, whenever we have good reasons to believe that, by targeting civilians, we shall make a significant contribution to
our war effort, thus shortening the war and reducing the overall killing and mayhem, that is what we may and indeed ought to do.

Civilian immunity is thus made hostage to the vagaries of war, instead of providing civilians
with iron-clad protection against them. This is not a purely theoretical concern. As Kai Nielsen
has pointed out, systematic attacks on civilians in the course of a war of national liberation can make an
indispensable contribution to the successful prosecution of such a war. That was indeed the case in
Algeria and South Vietnam, and may well have been the case in Angola and Mozambique as well. Then
again, if civilian immunity is merely a useful convention, that weakens it by making it
hostage to the stance taken by enemy political and military leadership. They may or may
not choose to respect the immunity of our civilians. If they do not, on the consequentialist
view of this immunity, we are not bound to respect the immunity of their civilians. Being a
convention, it binds only if, or as long as, it is accepted by both parties to the conflict. As an important statement of this view puts
it, for convention-dependent obligations, what ones opponent does, what everyone is doing, etc., are facts of great moral
importance. Such facts help to determine within what convention, if any, one is operating, and thus they help one discover what
his moral duties are.8 To be sure, even if no such convention is in place, but we have reason to believe we can help bring about
its acceptance by unilaterally acting in accordance with it and thereby encouraging the enemy to do the same, we should do that.
But if we have no good reason to believe that, or if we have tried that approach and it has failed, our military are free to kill and
maim enemy civilians whenever they feel they need to do that. Thus our moral choice is determined, be it

directly or ultimately, by the moral (or immoral) choice of enemy political and military
leaders. So is the fate of enemy civilians. The fact that they are civilians, in itself, counts for
nothing. This brings me to the second objection: The consequentialist misses what anyone else,
and in particular any civilian in wartime, would consider the crux of the matter. Faced with the
prospect of being killed or maimed by enemy fire, a civilian would not make her case in terms of
disutility of killing or maiming civilians in war in general, or of killing or maiming her then
and there. She would rather point out that she is a civilian, not a soldier; a bystander, not a
participant; an innocent, not a guilty party. She would point out that she has done nothing to
deserve, or become liable to, such a fate. She would present these personal facts as
considerations whose moral significance is intrinsic and decisive, rather than instrumental and
fortuitous, mediated by a useful convention (which, in different circumstances, might enjoin limiting
war by targeting only civilians). And her argument, couched in personal terms, would seem to be
more to the point than the impersonal calculation of good and bad consequences by means
of which the consequentialist would settle the matter.

Recognizing rights and putting them before a utilitarian calculus is the only
rational and
moral option.
H. L. A. Hart in 79 (former principal of Oxford University, Tulane Law Review, The Shell Foundation
Lectures,
1978-1979: Utilitarianism and Natural Rights, April, 53 Tul. L. Rev. 663, l/n)
Accordingly, the contemporary modern philosophers of whom I have spoken, and preeminently Rawls in
his Theory of Justice, have argued that any morally adequate political philosophy must recognise
that there must be, in any morally tolerable form of social life, certain protections for the
freedom and basic interests of individuals which constitute an essential framework of individual
rights. Though the pursuit of the general welfare is indeed a legitimate and indeed necessary
concern of governments, it is something to be pursued only within certain constraints
imposed by recognition of such rights. The modern philosophical defence put forward for the recognition of basic
human rights does not wear the same metaphysical or conceptual dress as the earlier doctrines of the seventeenth and
eighteenth-century Rights of Man, which men were said to have in a state of nature or to be endowed with by their creator.
Nonetheless, the most complete and articulate version of this modern critique of Utilitarianism has many affinities with the
theories of social contract which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accompanied the doctrine of natural rights. Thus
Rawls has argued in A Theory of Justice that though any rational person must know that in order to live

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even a minimally tolerable life he must live within a political society with an ordered
government, no rational person bargaining with others on a footing of [*679] equality could
agree to regard himself as bound to obey the laws of any government if his freedom and
basic interests, what Mill called "the groundwork of human existence," were not given protection
and treated as having priority over mere increases in aggregate welfare even if the protection
cannot be absolute.

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Deontological principles of rights should be considered first other

interpretations are assigned no moral value if conflicting with the principles
of rights because viewing the debate from a deontological perspective is the
only way to guarantee freedom
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina
(Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy
and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

The priority of right asserts then that the reasons supplied by moral motives-principles
of right and their institutional requirements-have absolute precedence over all other
considerations. As such, moral motives must occupy a separate dimension in practical reasoning. Suppose then a
supplementary stage of practical reasoning, where the interests and pursuits that figure into ordinary deliberation and which
define our conception of the good are checked against principles of right and justice. At this stage of reasoning, any ends
that directly conflict with these moral principles (e.g., racist ends or the wish to dominate others ), or whose pursuit would
undermine the efficacy of principles of right (e.g., desires for unlimited accumulation of wealth whatever the consequences for

are assigned no moral value, no matter how intensely felt or important they may otherwise be . Being without moral
value, they count for nothing in deliberation. Consequently, their pursuit is prohibited or curtailed by the priority given to
principles of right. The priority of right then describes the hierarchical subordination in practical deliberation of the desires,
others),

interests, and plans that define a person's rational good, to the substantive demands of principles of right.32 Purposes and
pursuits that are incompatible with these principles must be abandoned or revised. The same idea carries through to social and
political deliberations on the general good. In political deliberative procedures, the priority of right means that desires and
interests of individuals or groups that conflict with the institutional requirements of principles of right and justice have no
legitimate claim to satisfaction, no matter how intense peoples' feelings or how large the majority sharing these aims.
Constitutional restrictions on majority rule exhibit the priority of right. In democratic procedures, majorities cannot violate
constitutional rights and procedures to promote, say, the Christian religion, or any other aspect of their good that undermines
others' basic rights and opportunities. Similarly, the institutional requirements of Rawls's difference principle limit, for example,
property owners' desires for tax exemptions for capital gains, and the just savings principle limits current majorities' wishes to
deplete natural resources. These desires are curtailed in political contexts, no matter how intense or widely held, because of the
priority of principles of right over individual and general good.33 The priority of right enables Rawls to define a notion of
admissible conceptions of the good: of those desires, interests and plans of life that may legitimately be pursued for political

Only admissible conceptions of the good establish a basis for legitimate claims in political procedures (cf. TJ, p.
449). That certain desires and pursuits are permissible, and political claims based on them are legitimate, while others
are not, presupposes antecedently established principles of right and justice. Racist conceptions of the good are not
purposes.

politically admissible; actions done in their pursuit are either prohibited or discouraged by a just social scheme, and they provide
no basis for legitimate claims in political procedures. Excellences such as knowledge, creativity, and aesthetic contemplation are
permissible ends for individuals so long as they are pursued in accordance with the constraints of principles of right. Suppose
these perfectionist principles state intrinsic values that it is the duty of everyone to pursue. (Rawls leaves this question open. cf.

Still, they cannot supply a basis for legitimate political claims and expectations; they cannot be appealed to in
political contexts to justify limiting others' freedom, or even the coercive redistribution of income and wealth (cf. TJ, pp.
TJ, p. 328.)

331-32). This is because of the priority of right over the good. Now return to Kymlicka's argument. Kymlicka says both Rawls and
utilitarians agree on the premise of giving equal consideration to everyone's interests, and that because utilitarians afford equal
consideration, "they must recognize, rather than deny, that individuals are distinct persons with their own rightful claims. That is,
in Rawls's classification, a position that affirms the priority of the right over the good" (LCC, p. 26). Since "Rawls treats the right as
a spelling-out of the requirement that each person's good be given equal consideration," there is no debate between Rawls and
utilitarians over the priority of the right or the good (LCC, p. 40). Deontology Good Comparative

By guiding social choice, deontology ultimately achieves the same result as

utilitarianism without compromising the individual
Schroeder 86 Professor of Law at Duke (Christopher H., Rights Against
Risks,, April, Columbia Law Review, pp. 495-562,
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1122636)

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The rights tradition and utilitarianism, the two grand opponents in American jurisprudence, clash on many different issues and
fronts.235 There are, however, many ways to classify ethical theories, and in one crucial respect these two belong together. They
seek the same kind of answer to the question of conflicting values. For its part, utilitarianism aspires to clear and unique answers
for every question of public choice. If only we can determine the various utility functions of individuals affected by those

Utilitarianism employs a method for

producing that absolute answer that threatens to obliterate the individual, and hence
rights theories reject that method. In affirming the primacy of the individual , however,
those theories do not abandon utilitarianism's ultimate objective to identify absolutesclear and definite answers-to guide social choice or to determine the constraints of
justice. In this respect, such theories still live in utilitarianism's shadow.
decisions-a heroic assumption-the absolutely correct action will be known.

An action taken to maximize utility by a powerful entity like the government

is illegitimate and immoral. Deontological moral law guides the individual to
realize obligations he has to society and will ultimately solve for societys
problems
Gauthier 2K PhD Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and
Religion at the University of North Carolina, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal
(Candace P)
Mill is especially helpful in responding to the communitarian critique of respect for autonomy because he is careful to emphasize

conception of liberty is neither selfish nor indifferent to the self-regarding behavior of others. Mill (1978 [1859], pp.
74-75) identifies a number of ways in which members of the community should influence each other toward the "selfregarding virtues," which include education, conviction, persuasion, encouragement, and advice. However, he rejects the
coercion of the law and the overwhelming power of public opinion as illegitimate forms of control over self-regarding conduct
that his

(Mill 1978 [1859], p. 9). The practical application of these principles from Kant and Mill does not require a concept of the self as

Kant's concept of the person, with the capacity for rational [End Page 340]
is based on human freedom from natural forces, not our freedom from attachments and commitments to other
persons or the influence our histories, traditions, and families have on our values, choices, and actions. Kant is pointing out
unencumbered or isolated in its decision making.
agency,

that we are neither like chairs, without the capacity for choice or action, nor like nonrational animals, whose actions are
determined by instinct and the forces of nature. As persons, we are the products of our families, traditions, and communities. Yet,
because we are persons, our actions may be the result of more than these influences. They may also be the result of our rational

our choices and actions are not supposed to be based simply on our own goals
and ends. Rather, Kant believes that the moral law will lead us to recognize duties and obligations we have to others , for
example, to respect and further their ends. Such obligations could certainly be directed toward the shared goals of the
community as a whole. For Mill, even self-regarding choices and actions are properly subject to influence from others, for
example through their natural reactions to an individual's self-destructive behavior. In fact, he advocates our responsibility to
help each other ". . . distinguish the better from the worse . . ." through conviction, encouragement, persuasion, and education
capacities. Moreover, according to Kant,

(Mill 1978 [1859], pp. 74-76). Furthermore, in the category of other-regarding behavior Mill includes the risk of damage not only
to specific others, but to the society, as well (p. 80).

The utility of a society only has value when its individuals are treated with
dignity. A free society that sacrifices some of its own individuals to prevent
human extinction is morally corrupt.
Shue 89 Professor of Ethics and Public Life, Princeton University (Henry,
Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint, pp. 141-2)

Given the philosophical obstacles to resolving moral disputes, there are at least two
approaches one can take in dealing with the issue of the morality of nuclear strategy .
One approach is to stick doggedly with one of the established moral theories constructed by philosophers to rationalize or

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make sense of everyday moral intuitions, and to accept the verdict of the theory, whatever it might be, on the morality of

A more pragmatic alternative approach assumes that trade-offs in

moral values and principles are inevitable in response to constantly changing threats ,
and that the emergence of novel, unforeseen challenges may impel citizens of Western societies
to adjust the way they rank their values and principles to ensure that the moral order
survives. Nuclear weapons are putting just such a strain on our moral beliefs. Before the emergence of a nuclear-armed
nuclear weapons use.

communist state capable of threatening the existence of Western civilization, the slaughter of millions of innocent human beings

Today, however,
it may be that Western democracies, if they are to survive as guardians of individual
freedom, can no longer afford to provide innocent life the full protection demanded by
Just War morality. It might be objected that the freedoms of Western society have value only on
the assumption that human beings are treated with the full dignity and respect assumed
to preserve Western values may have appeared wholly unjustifiable under any possible circumstances.

by Just War theory. Innocent human life is not just another value to be balanced side by side with others in moral calculations. It is

A free society based on individual

rights that sanctioned mass slaughter of innocent human beings to save itself from
extinction would be morally corrupt, no better than soviet society, and not worth defending. The only
morally right and respectable policy for such a society would be to accept destruction
at the hands of tyranny, if need be. This objection is partly right in that a society based on individual rights that
the raison detre of Western political, economic, and social institutions.

casually sacrifices innocent human lives for the sake of common social goods is a contradiction in terms. On the other hand, even
Just War doctrine allows for the unintentional sacrifice of some innocent human life under certain hard-pressing circumstances. It
is essentially a consequentialist moral doctrine that ascribes extremely high but not absolute value to innocent human life. The
problem for any nonabsolute moral theory, of course, is where to draw the line.

Maintaining proper moral values is the only way to obtain a free society,
which outweighs nuclear extinction
Shue 89 (Henry, Professor of Ethics and Public Life, Princeton University,
Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint, pp. 134-5)
But is it realistic to suppose that American citizens would risk not just their own lives but their families and their nation in using
nuclear weapons to save Western Europe and other free societies from Soviet domination, especially if the United States allies
are not willing to risk nuclear destruction themselves? According to one 1984 poll, 74 percent of Americans queried believe the
U.S. should not use nuclear weapons if the Russians invade Western Europe. Nuclear Protectionists, however, would reply that

If the United
States is determined to deter a Soviet attack on Europe, it must have a moral nuclear
strategy that it is willing to implement. Without effective population defenses, such a strategy could
require that the United States accept an unequal risk of nuclear destruction to ensure
the survival of free society. In the extreme, this could mean that the United States must be willing
to sacrifice itself for values higher than its own national survival. Thus, Nuclear Protectionism
further public debate might convince more Americans that deterrence cannot be had on the moral cheap.

views both Just War morality and national self-centered as unworkable foundations for U.S. security policy.

Living without freedom transcends nuclear war

Mohan 93 Professor at LSU (Brij, Eclipse Of Freedom, p. 3-4)

The ordeal of existence transcends the thermonuclear fever because the latter does
not directly impact the day-to-day operations of the common people. The fear of
crime, accidents, loss of job, and health care on the one hand; and the scourges of
racism, sexism, and agism on the other hand have created a counterculture of denial
and disbelief that has shattered the faade of civility. Civilization loses its significance
when its social institutions have become counterproductive . It is the aspect of the mega-crisis that

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we are concerned about. The ordeal of existence, as I see it, has three relevant facets: Crisis of modernity, Contradictions of
paradigms, Complexity of social phenomenon. Reinventing civility calls for an exposition of these elements without a vituperative
intent. Each of these aspects has normative and structural dimension involving a host of theories. The politics, metaphors, and
rhetoric, however, color the shape and substance of each analytical output. Therefore ,

a value-neutral assessment
cannot be a politically correct statement on the human condition.
A deontological framing maximizes the good by emphasizing rights and
acting on an individualist basis
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina
(Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy
and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

Many moral views can admit that right acts in some sense promote the good. In Kant, for example, all have a duty to promote the
Realm of Ends; each person's doing so is, we might say, instrumental to realizing this ideal community. But here the goodness of

good is just defined as the state of affairs

in which conscientious moral agents all freely act on and from the moral law. By acting
and willing according to this principle, all treat the humanity of others as an end in
itself. Moreover, to say this good is "maximized" when everyone does his or her duty
really adds nothing; and it misleads us as to the structure and content of Kant's
principle of right. By contrast teleological views (1) define the good independent of any
moral concepts; and then (2) define the right purely in instrumental terms of principles
of expedience, i.e., as what most effectively and probably realizes the greatest amount
of good.
this end is not an independent variable that is being promoted; this

Both utilitarians and non-utilitarians respect the moral principle of equality

and freedom. However, only deontology can meet this principle because it
allows for individual decisions
Freeman 94 (Samuel, Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina,
Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public
Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, ,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)
Phillipa Foot has said that what makes consequentialism so compeling is "the rather simple thought that it can never be right to
prefer a worse state of affairs to a better."5 But deontological theories, suitably construed, can account for this "simple thought"
just as well (for reasons I discuss in Section VI). The force of consequentialism must then ie elsewhere: it embodies a powerful
conception of practical reason. If we assume that rationality consists in maximizing an aggregate, and that in ethics it involves
maximizing overall good, then we are able to say that there is a rational choice between any two alternative actions, laws, or

under all conceivable conditions, there is a uniquely rational, hence

right, thing to do. Granted, it may not be knowable by us, but the idea of maximizing the good
provides a way to assign a truth value to any statement about what persons or groups
ought to do. No other conception of rationality offers such practical completeness.
institutions. Therefore

Sidgwick, well aware of the force of the idea of maximizing an aggregate, used it quite effectively to argue that
hedonism must be true, and that rational egoism and utilitarianism were the only two "rational methods" in ethics.6 He could
not decide which of the two was more rational, but assuming that egoism is not a moral conception at all, then, given Sidgwick's
premises, utilitarianism prevails without opposition. These introductory remarks supply background I later refer to. My aim is to
elucidate the teleology/deontology distinction. I begin with the contention that teleological theories are not moral theories at all.
Will Kymlicka argues that the teleological/deontological distinction relied on by Rawls and others is misleading. Not only does the
morally right act not maximize the good; any view which defines the right in this way is not a moral conception.7 Right actions,
Kymlicka says, concern our duties, and duties must be owed to someone. But if moral duty is defined as maximizing overall good,
"Whom is it a duty to?" (LCC, p. 28). Kymlicka argues for the (Kantian) claim that morality concerns respect for persons, not the

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good impersonally construed. And the most credible moral conceptions, the only ones worth attending to, hold that "each person
matters equally," and deserves equal concern and respect (LCC, p. 40). Kymlicka's aim here is not to attack teleological views, but
to show that Rawls's teleological/deontological distinction cannot do the work Rawls wants; indeed it is "based on a serious
confusion" (LCC, p. 21). For utilitarians, Kymlicka claims, are just as committed to equality, equal respect for persons, and fair
distributions as everyone else. The difference is they interpret these abstract concepts differently. Here Kymlicka follows Ronald
Dworkin's suggestion: "that Rawls and his critics all share the same 'egalitarian plateau': they agree that 'the interests of the
members of the community matter, and matter equally"' (LCC, p. 21). Utilitarians like Hare and Harsanyi, non-utilitarians like

all accept that equal concern

and respect is the fundamental moral principle. "All these theories are deontological in
that they spell out an ideal of fairness or equality for distinct individuals " (LCC, p. 26). If so,
Rawls, Nozick, and Dworkin, and even many Perfectionists (Kymlicka mentions Marx),

Kymlicka argues, the dispute between utilitarians and their critics cannot be depicted in terms of Rawls's misleading distinction,
or in terms of the priority of the right or the good. At issue in these debates are different conceptions of the political value of

confuses
deontology-a claim about the content of principles of right-with the principles that are
invoked in justifying and applying the content of a moral view. Moreover, he confuses deontology
equality. I shall argue (in Sections II and III) that Kymlicka, not Rawls, is culpable of "serious confusion." He

with a related idea, the priority of right. The priority of right has received a great deal of attention from Rawls's communitarian
critics. This is surprising in view of the fact that Rawls has so little to say about it in Theory ofJustice.8

Deontology morality maximizes good to its fullest extent while utilitarianism

is indifferent to distribution of good
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina
(Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy
and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

It is perhaps a moral truism to say that people ought to do what they can to make the
world as good a place as possible. But construed in a certain way, this becomes a highly controversial thesis
about morality: that the right act in any circumstance is one most conducive to the best overall outcome (as ascertained, say,
from an impersonal point of view that gives equal weight to the good of everyone). This is Consequentialism.' More simply, it
holds Right conduct maximizes the Good. G. E. Moore held this thesis self-evident. Non-consequentialists argue nothing could be

So far as they do, it appears (to consequentialists at least) they are committed to the indefensible
idea that morality requires us to do less good than we are able to. John Rawls's teleological/deontological distinction is
different. Teleo logical views affirm the consequentialist thesis that the Right maximizes the Good. But they hold an
further from the truth.

additional thesis: "the good is defined independently from the right" (TJ, p. 24), or, as Rawls often says, independ ent of any
moral concepts or principles.2 To see how this view differs from consequentialism, consider a thesis once proposed by T.
M. Scanlon.3

A standard objection to consequentialist views like utilitarian ism is that they are indifferent to the
distribution of the good; this is purportedly a necessary feature of such views, since they define right and justice as
what maximizes overall, or aggregate, good . Scanlon argued there should be a way to incorporate distributive concerns into
a two-level consequentialist view. If we treat fairness or distributive equality as a good in itself, then it must be considered
along with other goods like net aggregate satisfaction in determining the value of overall outcomes that are to be maximized.
Rights could then be introduced at the level of casuistry, to promote the good of equitable states of affairs. The two-level
consequentialist view Scanlon suggests would not be teleological on Rawls's account; it would be deontological. As Rawls says:
If the distribution of goods is also counted as a good, perhaps a higher-order one, and the theory directs us to produce the
most good (including the good of distribution among others) we no longer have a teleological view in the classical sense. The
problem of distribution falls under the concept of right as one intuitively understands it, and so the theory lacks an
independent definition of the good. (TJ, 27)

Evaluating morality through rights and justice is intrinsically good while

utilitarianism denies humans of their basic rights
Freeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina
(Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy
and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)

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Rawls's thought may be this: in order to define the distributions (e.g., equal states of
affairs) that are intrinsically good, and then practically apply this definition to determine what we ought to do, we
must appeal to some process of distribution that can only be described by antecedent principles of right or justice. But once
we do that, then it is no longer the case that the right is exclusively defined in terms of what maximizes the good . For
example, suppose fairness or the equal capacity of persons to realize their good is among the intrinsic goods in a
consequentialist view: we are to act in whatever ways best promote fairness or equality of capacity for all persons. It is
difficult to see how such vague ends can be specified for practical purposes without appealing to principles or
procedures defining peoples' equal basic rights, powers, and entitlements. But once this specification is incorporated into
the maximand, the right is no longer simply a matter of maximizing the good . For the concept of the good itself, in this
instance, cannot be described without an antecedent nonmaximizing moral principle of right: that people ought to be treated
fairly, afforded certain basic rights and powers, and so on . Not only is such a view by Rawls's definition nonteleological; it is
also not consequentialist if by this is meant that to maximize the good is the sole fundamental principle of right.
Incorporating rights or other moral dictates into the maximand is incompatible with this very idea .4
Deontological morality promotes individualism, protecting humans from
utilitarian obligations to society
Stelzig 98 Masters degree in philosophy from the University of Illinois at
Chicago, obtained J.D. from University of Pennsylvania and is currently an
attorney for the FCC (Tim, Deontology, Governmental Action, and the
Distributive Exemption: How the Trolley Problem Shapes the Relationship
between Rights and Policy, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 146,
No. 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3312613)

Deontology is the theory of moral obligation, and, by connotation, encompasses moral

theories that emphasize rights and duties. Put another way, deontological theories are those moral theories
of a vaguely Kantian stripe. Kant held that one should "[a]ct in such a way that [one] always treat[s]
humanity, whether in [one's] own person or in the person of any other, never simply
as a means, but always at the same time as an end."22 It was not always so. When Jeremy Bentham,
one of utilitarianism's founders, first coined the word in 1814, "deontology" referred to the marshaling of self-interested reasons
for agents to act for the general good. Essentially, this was a utilitarian theory of obligation, and was quite distinct from modern

use. Modern-day deontologists focus much attention on rights .26 It might be thought that this focus
is merely a preference, for rights are often taken to be correlative with duties. For example, where this relation holds, if I have a
right not to be punched, you are under an obligation not to punch me, and conversely. Thus, deontology may be articulated
through either related element. More generally, in theories holding that rights and duties are correlative, one may give an account
of rights and then define duties by reference to rights; one may define rights in terms of an antecedent theoretic account of

Rights need not be completely

correlative with duties.28 For example, take the notion of privileges, understood here as a subspecies of rights. The
duties; or one may give separate theoretic accounts of rights and duties.27

lone occupant of a small and isolated island presumably possesses a privilege to sing show-tunes at the top of her voice.2 This
right, however, has no correlative obligation. It is not just that the island, being otherwise deserted, has no one in whom the
obligation inheres. Rather, it is a structural feature of the example that no obligation not to interfere can exist. Introducing
another person onto the island would destroy the privilege, for it would be immoral for the singer to subject another person to her
showmanship without the other person's consent. Likewise, there may be obligations for which correlative rights do not exist. For
example, one may be under an obligation to write letters to her grandfather without her grandfather having the right to receive
letters written by his granddaughter.30 "Omissions" may also be understood as obligations for which there are no corresponding
rights. If you may easily save somebody from great harm or death without substantial risk to yourself, a moral obligation exists to
so help them.3l Most people, however, do not think that the victim has a right to your efforts.32 Although more could be said, my

whether or not one takes rights to be correlative with duties has implications
for other aspects of moral theory. For the purposes of this Comment, there is no need to trace the contours of
point is that

deontology with precision. Thus, although it is a simplification, this Comment will focus only on rights. The ultimate goal, again, is

we may appeal to rights as a way of protecting ourselves against the

demands of society. The next Part examines the nature of rights more closely.
to discover when

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Humans should morally have a right to themselves and the right to their
property the government is immoral to deny property rights regardless of
their utilitarian intentions
Stelzig 98 Masters degree in philosophy from the University of Illinois at
Chicago, obtained J.D. from University of Pennsylvania and is currently an
attorney for the FCC (Tim, Deontology, Governmental Action, and the
Distributive Exemption: How the Trolley Problem Shapes the Relationship
between Rights and Policy, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 146,
No. 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3312613)
Rights, for Dworkin, are understood functionally through their distributional character, and are distinguished from goals.40 Take
first the distributional character of collective goals. These goals seek to achieve some particular, even if vaguely defined,
distribution within the society.4' For example, Dworkin notes that economic efficiency is within a collective goal. Importantly, with
respect to collective goals, "distributional principles are subordinate to some conception of aggregate collective good, so that
offering less of some benefit to one [person] can be justified simply by showing that this will lead to a greater benefit overall."43

Rights, however, have a

different distributional character. As Dworkin states: "If someone has a right to something, then it is wrong for the
government to deny it to him even though it would be in the general interest to do so." 44 Put another way, the right is prior
to the good. Thus, for Dworkin, "individual rights are political trumps held by individuals.
Hence, the collective goals of a community are appropriate fodder for consequentialist reasoning.

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*****MORALITY GOOD / BAD*****

**Morality Good: Obligations, Moral Laws, etc**
Moral justice vital sets us apart from animalistic tendencies
Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003.
Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian
Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31,
No. 3, Pg 12. Project MUSE.
Reasonableness, or the capacity for a sense of justice, is the ability to limit the pursuit of ones
conception of the good out of a respect for the rights and interests of other people and out of a
desire to cooperate with them on fair terms. A person who acts reasonably acts according to a
principle of reciprocity: he seeks to give justice to those who can give justice in return (p.
447). The tight connection between reasonableness and autonomy is explained by Rawls in
sec. 86 of Theory: the sense of justice . . . reveals what the person is, and to compromise it is
not to achieve for the self free reign but to give way to the contingencies and accidents of the
world (p. 503). When we act reasonably, says Rawls, we demonstrate an ability to subordinate
the pursuit of our own good, which may be unduly influenced by the contingencies and
accidents of the world, to those principles we would choose as members of the intelligible
realmour reasonableness, in other words, is emblematic of our autonomy, our independence
from natural and social contingencies. This explains our sense of shame when we fail to act
reasonably: we behave then as if we were members of a lower order of animal ,
whose actions are determined by the laws of nature rather than the moral law (p. 225).

Moral law outweighs other considerations integral to human nature.

Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003.
Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian
Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31,
No. 3, Pg 13. Project MUSE.
The Priority of Right over the Good and the Priority of Justice over Welfare and Efficiency are
both expressions of our nature as reasonable beings, i.e., beings able to act in conformity with,
and out of respect for, the moral law. In Kants terms, to sacrifice justice for the sake of welfare
or excellence of character would be to sacrifice what is of absolute value (the good will) for
what is of merely relative value (its complements). Rawls himself makes the same strong
connection between reasonableness and these two kinds of priority: But the desire to express
our nature as a free and equal rational being can be fulfilled only by acting on the principles of
right and justice as having first priority. . . . Therefore in order to realize our nature we have no
alternative but to plan to preserve our sense of justice as governing our other aims. This
sentiment cannot be fulfilled if it is compromised and balanced against other ends as but one
desire among the rest (TJ, p. 503, emphasis added). Just as reasonableness is a key facet of our
autonomy, so the priorities of right and justice are expressions of our reasonableness: we best
indicate our commitment to guide our actions by the principles of justice by refusing to
compromise those principles for the sake of our other ends.

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Moral rationality key to sustainable decisionmaking avoids animalistic

tendencies.
Taylor, professor of philosophy @ Princeton. 2003.
Robert. Rawls Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian
Reconstruction. Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 31,
No. 3, Pg 14. Project MUSE.
Rationality is our capacity for a conception of the good, which we pursue through a plan of life.
We schedule, prioritize, temper, and prune our desires in accordance with this plan; rather than
living from impulse to impulse, as other animals do, we arrange the pursuit of our interests and
ends according to a coherent scheme (secs. 6364). Now, given what was said in the previous
subsection, one may find it difficult to see the connection between rationality, so defined, and
autonomy: if our desires are largely the product of natural and social contingencies, then how
can acting in accordance with a plan to advance them be an aspect of our autonomy? In other
words, if rationality is merely the slave of the passions, 11 and these passions are the result of
such contingencies, then how can rationality possibly express our nature as free and equal
beings? According to Rawls, however, rationality is much more than a slave of the passions.
The exercise of rationality involves a clear distancing from ones immediate desires, as Rawls
indicates in the following passage: The aim of deliberation is to find that plan which best
organizes our activities and influences the formation of our subsequent wants so that our aims
and interests can be fruitfully combined into one scheme of conduct . Desires that tend to
interfere with other ends, or which undermine the capacity for other activities, are
weeded out; whereas those that are enjoyable in themselves and support other aims as well
are encouraged.12 The image of rationality here is active, not passive. Rather than being
haplessly driven on by the dominant desires, rationality exercises authority over them:
rationality elevates some desires and lays low others; it integrates retained desires into one
scheme of conduct; and it even shapes the development of future desires. Far from being a
slave of desire, rationality is its master. This conception of rationality is consistent with at least
one reading of Kants idea of practical reason as applied to the pursuit of happiness: H. J. Paton
notes that prudential reasoning in Kants moral theory involves a choice of ends as well as
means and a subsequent maximum integration of ends. 13

Utilitarianism fails to take into account prima facie rights moral resolution
of conflicts necessary.
McCloskey, professor of philosophy. 1986.
HJ. Utilitarianism and Natural Human Moral Rights. Pg 133.
The theory of prima facie human rights that is outlined here is one in terms of prima facie
rights, many of which are rights of recipience, in which the rights create obligations and claims
that collide with one another and with the moral demands created by other values. Many of
these conflicts are to be resolved without reference, or with only negative reference, to
consequences. When the consequences do enter seriously into the resolution of the conflicts,
the solution arrived at is often very different from that which would be dictated by utilitarian
considerations. The points made in the preceding section may be illustrated by reference to
conflicts of prima facie human rights such as the right to life, viewed as a right of recipience,
the right to moral autonomy and integrity- and values such as pleasure and happiness, and
the absence of pain and suffering. A consideration of the morally rightful resolution of such
conflicts brings out the inadequacy of the utilitarian calculus as a basis for determining the
morally right response to such situations and conflicts.

Failure to satisfy moral obligations leads to violent backlash.

Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992
Richard. Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press.
Pgs 188-189.

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How can we absorb this idea into the conceptual scheme developed so far? Morality, as I have
described it, is a feature of agents - their motives, dispositions to fed guilt - and of the attitudes
of the generality of other persons toward agents - approval or disapproval of them. In my
account nothing has been said about the patients, the targets of the behavior of agents. I now
suggest that we should extend our description of moral codes, to include something about
patients. First. patients may have a disposition to resent infringements of the rules we have
been talking about when these impinge on them, when they are the parties injured. or
deprived. or threatened. Of course, people tend to resent any deliberate injury . so this reaction
is not specific to rules of rights.10 Second, persons who resent it when they are injured or
deprived in one of these ways or even when they are threatened because of the nonexistence
of institutions able to protect them, may also be inclined not to feel ashamed or embarrassed
to protest on their own behalf. This feature need not occur, and in societies in which individuals
have felt it is their place to be downtrodden, ill-treated, and so on, it was not the case. Of
course there are several levels of this. The first is expression of resentment to the injuring
party. A second level is public protest, or joining in a public protest, calling attention to the
situation and inviting sympathy and support, particularly for the institution of legal devices for
prevention of what has occurred or redress or punishment when it already has occurred. A third
level is that of passive disobedience, lack of cooperation, perhaps nonviolent economic
pressure that causes inconvenience or discomfort on behalf of a cause. Finally there is violent
action, willingness to cause personal or property damage, in order to bring about a
change in those who are infringing moral obligations or to bring about legal institutions
to prevent or punish such infringements. Presumably the level of protest will normally correlate
with the strength of the obligation being infringed and the seriousness of the damage or threat.
The practice of company stores might elicit one level of protest, the practice of lynch law on
members of a racial minority quite another.

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**Morality Bad**
Ethics is structurally flawed, in that it implies a transgression
Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics
of the Real, p. 95-96)

This is why we propose to maintain the concept of the act developed by Kant,
and to link it to the thematic of overstepping of boundaries, of transgression,
to the question of evil. It is a matter of acknowledging the fact that any (ethical) act precisely
in so far as it is an act, is necessarily evil. We must specify, however, what is meant here by
evil. This is the evil that belongs to the very structure of the act, to the fact that the latter always
implies a transgression, a change in what is. It is not a matter of some empirical evil, it is the
very logic of the act which is denounced as radically evil in every ideology. The fundamental
ideological gesture consists in providing an image for this structural evil. The gap opened by an
act (i.e. the unfamiliar, out-of-place effect of an act) is immediately linked in this ideological
gesture to an image. As a rule this is an image of suffering, which is then displayed to the public
alongside this question: Is this what you want? And this question already implies the answer: It
would be impossible, inhuman, for you to want this! Here we have to insist on theoretical rigour,
and separate this (usually fascinating) image exhibited by ideology from the source of uneasiness
from the evil which is not an undesired, secondary effect of the good but belongs, on the
contrary, to its essence. We could even say that the ethical ideology struggles against evil because
this ideology is hostile to the good, to the logic of the act as such. We could go even further here:
the current saturation of the social field by ethical dilemmas (bioethics, environmental ethics,
cultural ethics, medical ethics) is strictly correlative to the repression of ethics, that is, to an
incapacity to think ethics in its dimension of the Real, an incapacity to conceive of ethics other than
simply as a set of restrictions to yet another aspect of modern society: to the depression which
seems to have became the social illness of our time and to set the tone of the resigned attitude of
the (post)modern man of the end of history. In relation to this, it would be interesting to reaffirm
Lacans thesis according to which depression isnt a state of the soul, it is simply a moral failing, as
Dante, and even Spinoza, said: a sin, which means a moral weakness. It is against this moral
weakness or cowardice [lachete morale] that we must affirm the ethical dimension proper.
The ideology of good and evil is inherently flawed
Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics
of the Real, p. 90-91)

The first difficulty with this concept of diabolical evil lies in its very definition:
that diabolical evil would occur if we elevated opposition to the moral law to
the level of a maxim (a principle or law). What is wrong with this definition? Given the
Kantian concept of the moral law which is not a law that says do this or do that, but an
enigmatic law which only commands us to do our duty, without ever naming it the following
objection arises: if the opposition to the moral law were elevated to a maxim or principle, it would
no longer be an opposition to the moral law, it would be the moral law itself. At this level no
opposition is possible. It is not possible to oppose oneself to the moral law at the level of the
(moral) law. Nothing can oppose itself to the moral law on principle that is, for non-pathological
reasons without itself becoming a moral law. To act without allowing pathological incentives to
influence our actions is to do good. In relation to this definition of the good, (diabolical) evil would

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then have to be defined as follows: it is evil to oppose oneself, without allowing pathological
incentives to influence ones actions, to actions which do not allow any pathological incentives to
influence ones actions. And this is simply absurd.
The real drive behind ethics is desire, not the will to do good
Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics
of the Real, p. 3-4)
Kants second break with the tradition, related to the first, was his rejection of the view
that ethics is concerned with the distribution of the good (the service of goods in
Lacans terms). Kant rejected an ethics based on my wanting what is good for others,
provided of course that their good reflects my own.
It is true that Lacans position concerning the status of the ethics of desire continued to
develop. Hence his position in Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis)
differs on several points from the one he adopted in Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis).
That the moral law, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state is a
judgment which, had it been pronounced in Seminar VII, would have had the value of a
compliment; clearly this is no longer the case when it is pronounced in Seminar XI. Yet even
though the later Lacan claims that the analysts desire is not a pure desire, this does not
mean that the analysts desire is pathological (in the Kantian sense of the word), nor that the
question of desire has lost its pertinence. To put the matter simply, the question of desire does
not so much lose its central place as cease to be considered the endpoint of analysis. In the
later view analysis ends in another dimension, that of the drive. Hence as the
concluding remarks of Seminar XI have it before this dimension opens up to the subject, he
must first reach and then traverse the limit within which, as desire, he is bound.

Morality is a demand for the impossible as it is based on our desires

Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics
of the Real, p. 3)
Kant is admired by Lacan above all for his break, at two crucial points, with
traditional ethics. The first is his break with the morality that spelled out
obligations in terms of the possibility of fulfilling them . According to Lacan, the
crucial point here is that morality as such, as Kant well knew, is a demand for the
impossible: the impossibility in which we recognize the topology of our desire. By

insisting on the fact that the moral imperative is not concerned with what
might or might not be done, Kant discovered the essential dimension of ethics:
the dimension of desire, which circles around the real qua impossible. This dimension was
excluded from the purview of traditional ethics, and could therefore appear to it only as an
excess. So Kants crucial first step involves taking the very thing excluded from the traditional
field of ethics, and turning it into the only legitimate territory for ethics. If critics often
criticize Kant for demanding the impossible, Lacan attributes an incontestable theoretical value
to this Kantian demand.

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Ethics is merely a tool by which personal morals are imposed on others,

which is the root of discontent in society
Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics
of the Real, p. 1)
The Freudian blow to philosophical ethics can be summarized as follows: what philosophy calls
the moral law and, more precisely, what Kant calls the categorical imperative is in fact
nothing other than the superego. This judgment provokes an effect of disenchantment
that calls into question any attempt to base ethics on foundations other than the pathological.
At the same time, it places ethics at the core of what Freud called das Unbehagen in
der Kultur. the discontent or malaise at the heart of civilization . In so far as it has its
origins in the constitution of the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a

convenient tool for any ideology which may try to pass off its own
commandments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and honourable
inclinations of the subject. This thesis, according to which the moral law is nothing but
the superego, calls, of course, for careful examination, which I shall undertake in Chapter 7
below.

It is impossible to determine whether an action is truly ethical or not

Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics
of the Real, p. 16-17)
By spelling things out in this way we can see clearly that the ethical is, in fact, essentially a
supplement. Let us, then, begin with the first level (the legal). The content of action (its

matter), as well as the form this content, are exhausted in the notion of in
conformity with duty. As long as I do my duty nothing remains to be said. The
fact that the act that fulfils my duty may have been done exclusively for the
sake of this duty would change nothing at level of analysis. Such an act would
be entirely indistinguishable from an act done simply in accord with duty, since
their results would be exactly the same. The significance of acting (exclusively) for the
sake of duty will be visible only on the second level analysis, which we will simply call the level
form. Here we come across a form which is no longer the form of anything, of some content of
other, yet it is not so much an empty form as form outside content, a form that provides form
only for itself. In other words, we confronted here with a supply which at the same time seems
to be pure waste, something that serves absolutely no purpose.

Ethics in terms of attempts to do something good only re-entrenches the

presence of the omnipresent evil
Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics
of the Real, p. 86)
The theme of radical evil is currently something of a hot topic, and Kant, as a theoretician of
radical evil, is subject to very diverse and sometimes contradictory readings. In his book,
LEthique Alain Badiou points out that the topic of radical evil has become a spectre raised by

ethical ideologists every time a will to do something (good) appears. Every positive project is
capable of being undermined in advance on the grounds that it might bring about an even greater
evil. Ethics would thus be reduced to only one function: preventing evil, or at least lessening it. It

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seems that such an ethics of the lesser evil is justified in its reference to Kant. The criticism of
Kant according to which he defined the criteria of the (ethical) act in such a way that one can
never satisfy them goes as far back as Hegel. From this point it follows that all our actions are

necessarily bad, and that one can remain pure only if one chooses not to act at all. In this
perspective, good does not exist, whereas evil is omnipresent.
People already realize they have a moral obligation but dont actually follow
them or treat them as anything but another obligation
Leiter

1997

(Brian, Professor at the University of Chicago, Princeton University; JD, 1987, PhD (philosophy
Nietzsche and the Morality Critics, Chicago Journals) MF
Morality's purportedly threatening notion of "obligation," for ex-ample, is constructed by Williams entirely from the works of Kant
and Ross, with no gesture at showing what relation their philosophically refined notions of "obligation" bear to those in play in

people treat "moral obligations] [as]

inescapable" (ELP, p. 177) and that they accept the idea that "only an
obligation can beat an obligation" (ELP, p. 180)? Surely the evidence is not in the
way people actually live, in the way they actually honor-or, more often,
breach-their moral obligations, a point Nietzsche well understood.'7 What is
the evidence that, in our relativistic culture, individuals think that "moral
obligation applies to people even if they do not want it to" (ELP, p. 178)? Even Williams,
ordinary life. Yet where is the evidence, one might ask, that real

in leading up to the specter of morality dominating life, says that "the thought can gain a footing (I am not saying that it has to)
that I could be better employed than in doing something I am under no [moral] obligation to do, and, if I could be, then I ought to
be" (ELP, p. 181, emphasis added). But surely this "thought" might only gain a footing for Kant or Ross, or some other philosopher

It is a pure philosopher's fantasy to

think that real people in the moral culture at large find themselves
overwhelmed by this burdensome sense of moral obliga- tion. Like the other Morality
who followed out to its logical conclusion a deontological theory.

Critics, Williams writes as though he is attacking "morality," when what he is really attacking is "morality" as conceived,
systematized, and refined by philosophers. Such a critique may be a worthy endeavor, but it is far different from worrying about
the "dangers" of ordinary morality as understood-unsystematically and inchoately-by ordinary people. What, then, distinguishes a
Morality Critic from a Theory Critic if both are ultimately talking about moral theory? Roughly, the idea is this: for the former,

Theory (in the

technical sense) is the heart of the problem, not part of the solution. These points
are well illustrated in Stocker's well-known paper "The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories."'8 Stocker argues that "if we
... embody in our motives, those various things which recent ethical theories
hold to be ultimately good or right, we will, of necessity, be unable to have
those motives" (p. 461) and thus be unable to realize the associated goods (e.g.,
there is always room, in principle, for a better theory to thwart the criticsm, while for the latter,

friendship, love, pleasure). Stocker claims, however, that a suitable ethical theory must be one in which reasons and motives can
be brought into harmony, such that one can be moved to act by what the theory identifies as "good" or "right." Stocker's point
isn't, then, that theorizing in ethics is a misguided enterprise; it's just that we need better theories, ones in which theoretical
reasons can also serve as motives for action. Like a Morality Critic, Stocker holds that adherence to morality as it is (read: moral
theory as it is) is incom-patible with having the motives requisite for certain personal goods ("love, friendship, affection, fellow
feeling, and community," p. 461); unlike a Theory Critic, he allows, or at least implies, that a better (i.e., nonschizophrenic) theory
could solve the problem.'9

Ethics fails to take into account human nature and therefore does not allow
the individual to embrace oneself. Instead, it forces a model that is not
grounded in humanity and actually alienates human life
Daiger 2006

(Christine, Associate Professor President, NASS Chair, Equity Committee, CPA Member of the Team CPA B.A. Concordia, M.A.
Universit de Montral, Doctoral studies Brock University, Nietzsche: Virtue Ethics.. Virtue Politics,Project Muse) MF

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Nietzsche does indeed

share the critical program of virtue ethicists. His attacks against the
traditional view of morality and the nihilism he proposes make clear that, for
him, traditional morality is alienating to any human life. In The Gay Science he says: In
In this section, I will delineate Nietzsches own brand of virtue ethics. It should be clear that

the main all those moral systems are distasteful to me which say: Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome thyself!On the other
hand I am favorable to those moral systems which stimulate me to do something, and to do it again from morning till evening, to
dream of it at night, and think of nothing else but to do it well, as well as is possible for me alone! [. . .] I do not like any of the

he talks
about a sin of morality: The most general formula at the basis of every
religion and morality is: Do this and thisand you will be happy! Otherwise.
. . . Every morality, every religion is this imperativeI call it the great
original sin of reason, immortal unreason (Errors 2). Nietzsches view of traditional morality can
negative virtues whose very essence is negation and self-renunciation (304). Elsewhere, in Twilight of the Idols,

be found throughout his writings; however, I think these quotations are satisfactory for our purpose. These two clarify the spirit

The problem with traditional morality is that it

does not take into consideration human nature. It does not look at the
individual as he is and aim to embrace what he is but, rather, aims to impose
a model on him that has no ground in the reality of the human. This model is
of a transcendent nature and does not fit the immanent nature of the human
being.
with which Nietzsche approaches morality.

Philosophers provided ethics as a rational foundation for thought and moral

responsibility but never really quested or compared them, only when
questioned can they actually be considered
Walter Kaufmann 1980
From Shakespeare to Existentialism http://taimur.sarangi.info/text/kaufmann_nietzsche.htm
One should own up in all strictness what is still necessary here for a long time to come, what alone is justified so
far: to collect material, to conceptualize and arrange a vast realm of subtle feelings of value and differences of
value which are alive, grow, beget, and perish - and perhaps attempts to present vividly some of the more frequent
and recurring forms of such living crystallizations - all to prepare a typology of morals. To be sure: so far one has
not been so modest. With a stiff seriousness that inspires laughter, all our philosophers demanded

something far more exalted, presumptuous, and solemn from themselves as

soon as they approached the study of morality: they wanted to supply a
rational foundation for morals; and every philosopher so far has believed
that he has provided such a foundation. Moral ity itself, however, was
accepted as "given." How remote from their coarse pride was that task
which they considered insignificant and left in dust and dirt - the task of description,
although the subtlest fingers and senses can scarcely be subtle enough for it. Because our moral
philosophers knew the facts of morality only very approximately in arbitrary
extracts or in accidental epitomes - for example, as the morality of their environment, their class,
their church, their time, their climate and part of the world - because they were poorly informed and not even very
curious about different peoples, ages, and the past, they never laid eyes on the real problems of morality; for

these emerge only when we com pare many moralities. In all previous studies
of morality one thing was lacking, strange as that may sound: the prob lem
of morality itself; what was lacking was the suspicion that there was anything at all problematic here. What
the philosophers called "a rational foundation for morality" and tried to supply was, properly considered, only a
scholarly variation of a common faith in the prevalent morality; a new means of expression of this faith; in short,
itself simply another feature of, or rather another fact within, a particular morality; indeed, in the last analysis, a
kind of denial that this morality might ever be considered problematic certainly the very opposite of an
examination, analysis, questioning, and vivisection of this very faith.

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Ethics is a faade, a back bone by which western philosophers could bounce

contrived ideas, ethics as a whole must be questioned to critique the culture
that creates it instead of the inconsequential rationalizations
Walter Kaufmann 1980
From Shakespeare to Existentialism http://taimur.sarangi.info/text/kaufmann_nietzsche.htm
Nietzsche revolutionized ethics by asking new questions. As he saw it, his predecessors had simply taken for
granted that they knew what was good and what was evil. Moral judgments had been accepted as incontrovertible
facts, and the philosophers had considered it their task to find reasons for them. In other words, traditional

moral philosophers made it their business to rationalize the moral

idiosyncrasies of their environment. What F. H. Bradley was to say of metaphysics in his Preface
to Appearance and Reality (1891) is what Nietzsche said in effect of traditional ethics: it is "the finding of bad
reasons for what we believe on instinct.'" But Nietzsche would not have added like Bradley that "to find these
reasons is no less an instinct.'" Nor, indeed, did he consider moral idiosyncrasies instinctive in any literal sense. Far
from construing them as part of our biological make-up, Nietzsche was struck by the great variety of moral views in
different times and places.To cite Nietzsche's Zarathustra ("On Old and New Tablets," 2): "When I came

to men I found them sitting on an old conceit: the conceit that they have
long known what is good and evil for man. All talk of virtue seemed an old
and weary matter to man; and whoever wanted to sleep well still talked of
good and evil before going to sleep." With Nietzsche, our common moral
valuations are suddenly considered questionable, and ethics, instead of
being a matter of inconsequential rationalizations, becomes a critique of
culture, a vivisection of modem man.
Morality is complex Blanket claims that we need to save people in poverty
prevent us from making rational choices
Stubbs, 81
(Anne, @ the U of Combridge, "The Pros and Cons of Consequentialism," Oct, Philosophy, Vol. 56, No.
218 (Oct., 1981), pp. 497-516, jstor, AD: 6/30/09) jl
There is a common criticism of absolutism which, if sound, could be taken to demonstrate its
irrationality. It is that the absolutist refuses to consider the details of particular cases and insists
instead on the automatic application of a blanket rule; he thus fails, it is said, to 'take each case
on its merits'. Now there may be absolutist positions which are vulnerable to this kind of objection;
for example, the position that one is never justified in taking a human life, whatever the
circumstances. Someone might reasonably object that there are moral distinctions to be made
over which this view simply rides rough-shod. Someone may kill a fellow human being in many
different circumstances and for many different reasons; for personal gain of some kind; to put a
loved one out of his misery; in self-defence; in just war or revolution; as retribution; and so on.
Surely it would be irrational, if not absurd, to insist on making the same moral judgment about all
these cases. However, even if this is correct, it is a count against only some absolutist positions,
not against all. It is commonly assumed that the absolutist must operate with some highly
general, exceptionless rules; but this is not an accurate picture of the kind of absolutism of which I
have been speaking throughout this paper. I have spoken, not so much of moral rules, but of
specific moral notions, concepts, or categories-murder, courage, cowardice, honesty, loyalty, etc.;
and I have maintained that these operate as fundamental in moral assessment, in the sense that
their applicability to a particular action will often be morally decisive, and, for some of them, will
always be so.14 Let us consider the example of murder, which is a notion the applicability of
which to an action is always morally decisive. My absolutist claims, not that killing can never be
justified, but that murder can never be justified; and he will not classify all cases of killing as cases
of murder. Thus it is simply not true that he does not have to investigate the details of a particular
case; indeed it is only through such an investigation that he can be in a position to decide whether
or not the action in question is properly classifiable as 'murder'. Further-more, he will take into
account many features of the situation not con-sidered relevant by the consequentialist, for

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example, the agent's motive for the killing. Indeed, it could be maintained that the
consequentialist's claim to consider each case 'on its merits' is vitiated by his extremely restricted
conception of where these merits must lie. I maintain that it is he, with his exclusive concentration
upon consequences, who abstracts from morally relevant features of particular cases. Again, this
is a point to which I will return. Thus, if readiness to pay attention to the details of individual cases
be a test of rationality, my absolutist passes it with his colours flying rather more conspicuously
than those of the supporters of consequentialism; they, after all, have theformula.

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**Ethical Action & Legality Mutually Exclusive**

Ethical action cant be based on the legal and illegal
Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics
of the Real, p. 12)

We might say that the ethical dimension of an action is supernumerary to the

conceptual pair legal/illegal. This in turn suggests a structural connection with
the Lacanian notion of the Real. As Alain Badiou has noticed, Lacan conceives
of the Real in a way that removes it from the logic of the apparently mutually
exclusive alternatives of the knowable and the unknowable. The unknowable is
just a type of the knowable; it is the limit or degenerate case of the knowable;
where the Real belongs to another register entirely. Analogously, for Kant the
illegal still falls within the category of legality they both belong to the same
register, that of things conforming or failing to conform with duty. Ethics to
continue the analogy escapes this register. Even though an ethical act will
conform with duty, this by itself is not and cannot be what makes it ethical. So
the ethical cannot be situated within the framework of the law and violations of
the law. Again, in relation to legality, the ethical always presents a surplus or
excess.
Ethical action and legality cannot be related
Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences, 00
(Alenka Zupancic, researcher, Institute of Philosophy in the Slovene Academy of Sciences, 2000, Ethics
of the Real, p. 14-16)
But then, what exactly is at stake, what is this pure form? First of all, it is clear that the form
in question cannot be the form of the matter, simply because Kant situates the legal and the
ethical in two different registers. Hence matter and form, the legal and the ethical, are not two
different aspects of one and the same thing. Despite this, several commentators have
suggested the following solution to the Kantian problem of form: every form has a content
associated with it; we are always and only dealing with a form and a content. So, in this view, if

we are to decide whether an act is ethical or not, we simply have to know which in fact determines
our will: if it is the form, our actions are pathological; if it is the form, they are ethical. This
indeed, would rightly be called formalism but it not what Kant is aiming at this his use of the
concept of pure form. First of all we should immediately note that the label formalism is
more appropriate for what Kant calls legality. In terms of legality, all that matters is whether or
not an action conform with duty the content of such an action, the real motivated for this
conformity, is ignored; it simply does not matter. But the ethical, unlike the legal, does in fact

present a certain claim concerning the content of the will. Ethics demands not only that an action
conform with duty, but also that this conformity be the only content or motive of that action.
Thus Kants emphasis on form is in an attempt to disclose a possible drive for ethical action.
Kant is saying that form has to come to occupy the position formerly occupied by matter,
that form itself has to function as a drive. Form itself must be appropriated as a material
surplus, in order for it to be capable of the will. Kants point, I repeat, is not that all traces
materiality have to be purged from the determining ground of the moral will but, rather, that
the form of the moral law has itself become material, in order for it to function as a motive
force of action. As result of this we can see that there are actually two different problems to be
resolved, mysteries to be cleared up, concerning the possibility of a pure ethical act. The

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first is the one we commonly associate with Kantian ethics. How is it possible to reduce or
eliminate all the pathological motives or incentives of our actions? How can a subject disregard

all self-interest, ignore the pleasure principle, all concerns with her own well-being and the wellbeing of those close to her? What kind of a monstrous, inhuman subject does Kantian ethics
presuppose? This line of questioning is related to the issue of the infinite purification of the
subjects will, with its logic of no matter how far you have come one more effort will always be
required. The second question that must be dealt with concerns what we might call the
ethical transubstantiation required by Kants view: the question of the possibility of converting
a mere form into a materially efficacious drive. This second question is, in my view, the more
pressing of the two, because answering it would automatically provide an answer to the first
question as well. So how can something which is not in itself pathological (i.e. which has
nothing to do with the representation of pleasure or pain, the usual mode of subjects
casuality) nevertheless become the cause or drive of a subjects actions? The question here is no
longer that of a purification of motives and incentives. It is much more radical : how can form
become matter, how can something which, in the subjects universe, does not qualify as a
cause, suddenly become a cause? This is the real miracle involved in ethics. The crucial
question of Kantian ethics is thus not how can we eliminate all the pathological elements of
will, so that only the pure form of duty remains? but rather, how can the pure form of duty itself
function as a pathological element, that is, as an element capable of assuming the role of the
driving force or incentive of our actions?. If the latter were actually to take place if the pure
form of duty were actually to operate as a motive (incentive or drive) for the subject we
would no longer need to worry about the problems of the purification of the will and the
elimination of all pathological motives.This, however, seems to suggest that for such a subject,
ethics simply becomes second nature, and thus ceases to be ethics altogether. If acting
ethically is a matter of drive, if it is as effortless as that, if neither sacrifice, suffering, nor
renunciation is required, then it also seems utterly lacking in merit and devoid of virtue. This,
in fact, was Kants contention: he called such a condition the holiness of the will, which he also
thought was an unattainable ideal for human agent. It could equally be identified with utter
banality the banality of the radical good to paraphrase Hannah Arendts famous expression.
Nevertheless and it is one of the fundamental aims of this study to show this this analysis
moves too quickly, and therefore leaves something out. Our theoretical premiss here is that it
will actually be possible to found an ethics on the concept of the drive, without this ethics
collapsing into either the holiness or banality of human actions.

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**State Ethics Bad**

A Government that drops political obligation in order to obtain correct

moral or ethical responsibility has the ability to totalize into a
destructive regime that strips human dignity (turn)
Diprose 08

(Philosophy Social Criticism 2008; 34; 617 Rosalyn Diprose, Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity
http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/6/617)
The final point I want to highlight about Arendts account of responsibility is this: she asks the burning question, what
provides the criterion of judgment if not moral norms one has inherited or explicit laws that may have been reversed by those
who govern the public sphere? On the basis of the idea that judgment is a reflective self-relation in the form of a dialogue with
oneself, Arendt argues that the criterion that limits what one permits oneself to do is set by what would allow one to live at peace
with oneself (SQMP 108). Following Socrates, conscience, she argues, is governed by the desire to avoid self-contradiction or,
following Kant, the desire to avoid self-contempt.13 Put simply it is better to suffer wrong than do wrong (a dictum that she
claims, while originating with Socrates, underlies all moral philosophy) because you could not, logically and with dignity, live with
that other part of yourself that you would kill or make suffer. As a lover of contradiction Nietzsche would not hold to this idea that
making peace with oneself either inspires or provides the criteria for conscience. While I think he is right about that, I am not
convinced that he succeeds in coming up with appropriate alternative criteria. That is what I will attempt to do. What is radical

about Nietzsches approach to responsibility, and what will be my focus in the next section, is that he
locates the condition of conscience, normativity and responsibility, not first of all in reflective thinking or judgment, but in

what opens that gap between past

and future is the constitution of a corporeal and affective self-relation that
manifests as a futural ability to respond to circumstances with conscience
and in excess of existing law and custom. This is an important intervention
into the meaning of being-responsible, for several reasons. First, it moves
the debate about responsibility beyond the impasse between freedom and
determinism by proposing that the relation between the self and the
juridico-moral code is constitutive (and therefore habitual), but, as with
Arendt, it must also be excessive, self-critical and potentially transformative
of norms. Second, in a departure from Arendt, Nietzsches idea that this constitutive and
transformative relation involves feeling, or the channeling of affect into
action and thought, is crucial I think for explaining how political ideals of national
identity that effect a reversal of moral norms in the public realm can have
such a rapid and potentially destructive impact on a population . Third, in placing the
responsiveness based on what I will call somatic reflexivity. For him,

highest value in the uniqueness and opacity of this somatic reflexivity, rather than in, say, life itself14 or human dignity based
on autonomous practical reason, Nietzsche revises the very basis of normativity in ethics and politics: this somatic reflexivity is
that through and for which we are, most fundamentally, responsible whatever the other characteristics (sex, race, religion, age)
that corporeality may signify. This responsiveness and, hence, responsibility, as Emmanuel Levinas later puts it, is what first
enables one to catch sight of and conceive of value.15 Fourth, Nietzsches emphasis on the temporal dimension of somatic
reflexivity reveals what is most at stake in a crisis of morality in politics. It is the body open to an undetermined future that is a
condition of agency, normativity and responsibility and it is this futural inclination or futurity of the body that is most at risk in
such a crisis. Where Arendt improves on Nietzsche is through implying another criteria of judgment besides the criterion she
highlights, the supposed desire to avoid self-contradiction. This other criterion of judgment that would limit what we can do in
good conscience is implied in her work on political community where it becomes apparent that we are not only responsible
through our own futurity, we are also responsible for maintaining the world for the disclosure of the who and hence the futurity
of others. And this is where morality meets politics. The political concern is not whether the act of striking somebody unjustly or
being struck is more disgraceful. The concern is exclusively with having a world in which such acts do not occur. (SQMP 93)

morality, understood as fixed principles for guiding action that vary

between individuals and groups, along with individual thought itself, have
no place in politics, as politics is concerned with collective dialogue and
action and the maintenance of law regarded as essential to the integrity of
our common humanity (PRD 22). While one may concede that compromise lies at the heart of the political, there
Ordinarily,

is a conceptual difficulty with the way Arendt always insists that thinking is individual, is distinct from and runs counter to the
collective speech and action that characterizes the political.16 This is why she describes the moral I have been discussing as a
borderline phenomenon: moral judgment is only relevant to politics in times of crisis, that is, when customary moral standards,
which would ordinarily guide action without thinking, have been suspended or reversed in the public realm (SQMP 1045). It is

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also why she needs to posit judgment of particulars, experienced as conscience, as the bridge and arbiter between thinking and

Morality and law intersect, for example,

insofar as they deal with persons rather than institutions and systems (SQMP
57) and they presuppose the same power of judgment of what is right and
wrong (PRD 22). I suggest that morality is a borderline political issue also in the
sense that when political initiatives of government precipitate a conflict
then dampening of conscience within a citizenry what this exposes is that
these initiatives have undermined, not just customary moral standards, but
with that the basis of normativity that both liberal democratic politics and
morality would ordinarily share, whatever particular moral values one holds .
Taking into account the corporeal and affective basis of conscience , I will argue that the basis of
normativity in both politics and morality in a secular democracy is not only
the preservation of human dignity understood as the capacity for judgment in Arendts sense but, more
morality, on the one hand, and politics and law on the other.

fundamentally, and as a precondition of judgment, maintenance of the collective exposure to each other of the uniqueness of the
futurity of bodies. Government that puts this in jeopardy, by abandoning political responsibility for maintaining the conditions for
this, is no longer anonymous in the Foucauldian sense it has separated itself from the collectivity of the polis that it would then
totalize.

Ethico-politics gives governments the logocentric nature that leads to the

worst atrocities in humanity such as the Holocaust (turn)
Sharpe 02
(Department of Philosophy and Ashworth Center for Social Theory, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, PHILOSOPHY &
SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 28 no 2 pp. 173189)
I hope that this necessarily overbrief argument has served to lay down the coordinates for a thinking together of Camus and
Derrida. For both authors, the possibility of an identity wholly insulated from [the] Other[s] is debarred to us as finite. Indeed, a

further parallel between their works consists in how both consider the lure of this possibility profoundly dangerous. In The Rebel,

Camus argued that the crimes of the Holocaust (like those of the Gulag)
represented not outbreaks of chaos within the enlightened world, but the
products of an inhumanity ever close to the enlightenments elevation of
reason. What a clean up! Clamence likewise remarks of the Nazis spacing . . . out of the
Jewish quarters of Amsterdam, where (significantly) Camus has him residing in The Fall: Seventy-five thousand
Jews deported or assassinated; thats real vacuum cleaning. I admire that
diligence, that methodical patience! When one has no character one has to
apply a method (1963: 10). Havent you noticed that our society is organized
for this kind of liquidation? (ibid.: 8).Derridas comparative Zeitdiagnose, defended in such pieces as The
Principle of Reason (1983), is more widely known. Indeed, what I will argue gives deconstruction its prophetic tone is how

There is always
a danger, Derrida argues, of a politics of the archive that deconstruction
resists and decries (cf. Caputo, 1997:265). It is an ethic-politics that gives body to
the logo centric desire which he has always argued organizes even the most
apparently extra philosophical praxes and institutions. It has the form of the
claim that we are the . . . uniquely chosen archive of the Truth , Caputo
writes in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: In that sense, the mal darchive lies at the
basis of every feverish racism, nationalism, fundamentalism, or messianism,
at the root of every identitarianism.Burning with the desire to kill off, to
incinerate, the memory and the trace of the other, archive fever is not a
finite, limited threat, no tone threat among others. . . . Archive evil, mal
darchive, is the root of all evil . (Caputo, 1997: 265) The question then becomes for both Camus
and Derrida what viable alternative exists to such a fevered ethic politics.
For the famed death of God in modernity has not quelled its radical evil,
Derrida like Camus always argues that untainted Identity is not only impossible, but to be prohibited.

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both agree. It has only given rise to refigurations of this evil .6

As Clamence again
rejoins towards the end of The Fall: He who clings to a law does not fear the judgement that puts him in his place within an order
he believes in. . . . [T]he keenest of human torments is to be judged without law. Yet we are in that torment [today]. Deprived of
their natural curb, the judges, loosed at random, are racing through their job. Hence we have to try to go faster than they, dont
we? And its a real madhouse. Prophets and quacks multiply: they hasten to get there with a good law or a flawless organization
before the world is deserted. (1963: 867) How does Derrida respond to this madhouse? In Passions, in fact, he takes up the
logic of responding tout court. The context is an invitation he has received to speak on the occasion of the publication of Derrida:
A Critical Reader. How should he have taken up this invitation? Derrida asks himself. To speak authoritatively, he notes, would

Derrida and the texts which it

names, as if he had the right and the capability to assume such an authority.
To not respond, he notes, however, would be no less dangerous, since
silence is a mode of discourse which can humiliate others more violently
than anything said. As Caputo notes, then, here Derrida adduces a moral
refiguring of the double bind. Either way, he says, Derrida . . . is
sacrificed: this is a double bind in which his two hands are tied or nailed
down (Caputo, 1997: 106).
involve running the risk of claiming an exclusive patent over the signifier

Whenever ethics is reinforced through ideals and norms chosen by the state
it results in a world where people are desensitized. Any universally imposed
ethics will result in the destruction of man as people gain the conscience of
a machine. (turn)
Rosalyn Diprose 2008
Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity
With regard to this overarching concern for the bodys futurity, Nietzsche has three related criticisms of juridical selfresponsibility. First, insofar as the constitution of the responsive self is normalizing, with

reference to a morality of mores and the social straitjacket that guides future action,
any responsibility the individual assumes for such action is not genuine (GM II 2 and HAH
105): responsibility cannot rest on blind obedience to ideals and norms that have been
imposed rather than chosen. Second, and conversely, Nietzsche is critical of the fable of responsibility insofar as it
rests on the illusion of free will (HAH 39). Two aspects of his well-known critique of free will are relevant here. One is that the
illusion of free will carries with it the illusion that we can choose and predict the future in advance (HAH 105). The other is
Nietzsches claim that the individual is not responsible for anything arising from his nature because his nature is not freely
chosen; it is to some extent inherited it is an outgrowth of the elements and influences of past and present things (HAH 39; see
also GM I 13). While, for Nietzsche, we cannot choose the future or our inheritance, we can, through somatic reflexivity, transform
our inheritance and so keep the future open. Nietzsches third criticism of juridical self-responsibility follows from the other two
and is the one I wish to emphasize: in pre-empting a future, juridical self-responsibility dampens

responsiveness and forecloses futurity. 22 Insofar as the last man, for example, is the
embodiment of a socially prescribed good, in him the future, ordained in advance, is
actualized. He is the endpoint of a teleological conception of history where everything
leads toward the realization of some ideal identity. But, if such an ideal could be realized, those who
embody it would be unable to create, unable to respond to elements and influences of concrete existence in a way that keeps
the body open to the future and keeps affects and their interpretations open to revaluation. Any set of ideas or legal

order thought of as sovereign and universal . . . would be a principle hostile to life, an

agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future
of man (GM II 11).23 The last man is the end of history, the end of spatio-temporalization, and so would be as dyspeptic as
the self for whom the force of forgetting is dysfunctional he cannot have done with anything (GM I 1). He would have
the conscience of a machine.

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The affirmative cant reach out to the other when mandated by the state to
do so, your evidence is perverted on this, using the state allows
authoritative action against the other.
Savu 01
Jacque Derrida / Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond.
Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/symploke/v009/9.1savu.html

in light of pressing contemporary topics and events such as

immigration, terrorism, the Internet and its censorship or surveillance by the
State (police), civil wars, etc., these canonical texts reveal to Derrida the heterogeneous yet
irreducible relation between a genuine ethics of hospitality and a politics of
hospitality. Whereas absolute/unconditional/all-inclusive hospitality
suggests a "law without imperative, without order and without duty" (83), the
laws of ordinary/conditional/exclusive hospitality refer to the actual
conditions of hospitality, its rights and duties, which preexist the subject
and are inscribed in the social/political order (25). These political structures
share a phallogocentric model that Derrida traces back to the Greco-Roman
and the Judeo-Christian traditions. According to them, it is always a male
figure of authority that, in laying down the laws of hospitality, testifies to
the "violence of the power of hospitality" (149). Playing upon the ambiguity of the
French word "hte"--which can mean both "guest" and "enemy "--Derrida reflects on the
paradoxical status of the host at the moment of his/her initial encounter
with the xenos. This proximity between "host" and "hostage" also accounts
for the nexus between hospitality and hostility, which Derrida turns to when
he considers the false dualities of private and public, private law and public
law. Derrida's careful analysis of the political uses and abuses of an ideal
hospitality leads him to suggest that political action should take place in the
space between ethics and politics. Digressive and informal, his discourse on hospitality is also rich
When revisited

in potentialities due to the deconstructive method through which he uncovers the mystery at the heart of the
"naturally obvious" (136). In the sense that it expands, or, to quote Dufourmantelle, "takes to the limit" the "field of
the thinkable," the movement of Derrida's "spoken reflecting" (10) is indeed "hyperbolic," just as it constitutes an
act of remembrance, in that it "revives questions held in forgetfulness and secrecy" (140). Thus both lectures
deserve credit not only for representing a significant step in Derrida's reflection on ethics and politics but also for
prompting us to begin our own deconstructive work and rethink our identity.

The goal of ethics to the other and the ethics of the refugee actually furthers
state control. Only by challenging sovereignty can we have independent
ethics.
Popke 03
(Jeffrey, Department of Geology, East Carolina University, Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity,
responsibility and the space of communitySage) MF
In sum, the subject of modern ethics is a subject fundamentally constituted through the
maintenance of boundaries, both social and spatial. Partly for this reason, much modern
ethical thought has focused concern on those distant others who are located on the other
side of the boundary. Indeed, as Zygmunt Bauman (1991: 59) has noted, within the modern
spatialization of subjectivity, the figure of the stranger becomes the prototypical ethical
problem, because the stranger is . . . someone who refuses to remain confined to the far
away land or go away from our own and hence . . . defies the easy expedient of spatial or
temporal segregation. In a similar vein, Michael Dillon (1999) has argued that the refugee,

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existing outside of ontopolitical borders, has come to represent a scandal for modern
political subjectivity, calling into question the nature of political and ethical conduct. The
typical response to such problems has been to endow the autonomous subject with a set of
rights, which can be legally enforced within the boundaries of political jurisdiction . One of the
most important figures in this conception of ethics is Kant, who believed that the project of modernity
could be universally extended for the benefit of humankind through the application of reason and
judgment (Shapiro, 1998). Kants philosophy, as Walker (1999: x) notes, was an attempt to internalize
the law of reason, to develop the autonomous rationality, the mature personality realizable within each
individual so that it might act in accordance with some universal moral norm. Importantly, Kant viewed
this universal norm arising from the spatial interconnections between different parts of the world,
which necessitated a cosmopolitical right that would guarantee conditions of universal hospitality.
Kant writes (1939: 27): [due to] the connections, more or less near, which have taken place among the
nations of the earth, having been carried to that point, that a violation of right, committed in one place,
is felt throughout the whole, the idea of a cosmopolitical right . . . is the last step of perfection
necessary to the tacit code of civil and public right. For Kant, this notion of a public right was founded upon a
federation of free states (1939: 18), and thus depended upon a bounded notion of state citizenship.
These two notions the autonomous subject of political reason and the territorialization of
the state system have come to define contemporary politics based upon an epistemology
of sovereignty. Recent work in international relations theory has posed significant challenges to this
conception of sovereignty, politics and space (Edkins et al., 1999; Campbell and Shapiro, 1999b).
Rather than accepting state territorialization and citizenship as natural, such work suggests
that we view it as part and parcel of the philosophical infrastructure of modernity. As Shapiro
notes (1999: 60), our understandings: tend to be constructed within a statecentric,
geostrategic cartography, which organizes the interpretation of enmities on the basis of an
individual and collective national subject and cross-boundary antagonisms. Ethical
approaches aimed at a normative inhibition of these antagonisms continue to presume this
same geopolitical cartography. One of the provocations of poststructuralism would be to call into
question this conception of subjectivity and space, to follow Jean-Luc Nancy (2000: 136) in asserting
that in order to think the spacing of the world . . . the end of sovereignty must be faced
head-on. It is in this sense that Whatmore (1997) has called for a dissecting of
theautonomous self in order to promote a relational ethics (see also Cloke, 2002). We need,
as David Slater (1997: 68) puts it, to rethink what we might mean by responsibility to
otherness. This responsibility can be linked to a notion of radical interdependence, in which
the ethics of intersubjectivity are in the foreground.

Deconstructing universal conceptions of right and ethics actually opens up

the possibility for responsibility to the other. Working within the state reentrenches current oppressive dualisms
Popke 03

(Jeffrey, Department of Geology, East Carolina University, Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity,

responsibility and the space of communitySage) MF
Although I am sympathetic with the impulse behind such sentiments, I think that Smith mischaracterizes the nature of
postmodern thinking, and I would suggest that a deeper engagement might be possible between the concerns of

This engagement would reject any normative

ground for ethical conduct, not in order to evade our responsibility to
distant others, but rather because foundational normative theories provide
the means by which our ethical responsibility can be elided . From this perspective,
the deconstruction of universalist conceptions of rights, ethics and justice
should be viewed as a means of opening possibilities, rather than closing
them. In what follows, I want to elaborate on this perspective, focusing attention on three areas in particular: the nature of
poststructuralism and geographical ethics.

the subject, the question of politics, and the ways in which these imply particular understandings of space. Most renditions of
moral or ethical theory have their roots in Enlightenment thinking, when the decentering of the authority of God and monarch
placed human individuals at the center of the social world, and thus provided the possibility for an ethics that would be based
upon human reason and agency (Venn, 2000). The locus of this agency is the Cartesian subject, endowed with autonomy and
rationality, and thereby capable of making moral decisions. There are two dimensions in particular of this modern subjectivity that

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the modern subjects coherence and autonomy has been

managed and maintained through repeated attempts to define, categorize
and classify a range of deviant others. Modern notions of autonomy and
agency, in other words, have been dependent upon the specification and
control of difference (ethnic, racial, gender, class, etc.), against which the
positive identity and self-image of the (western, male) Enlightenment subject
could be maintained. The birth of the modern subject, in this sense, is tightly
bound up with the processes of colonialism, industrialization and
governmentality through which certain kinds of difference were made to
matter in both conscious and, perhaps especially, unconscious ways (Pile, 1996;
are worth highlighting here. First,

Wilton, 1998; Venn, 2000). The second and related point is that the ways in which these various axes of identity/difference have

Modern subjectivity is not only inscribed through a

dualism between self and other, but also between here and there, via the
spatialization of inclusion and exclusion, presence and absence, and the
specification of what is in-place and out-of-place (Shields, 1992; Sibley, 1995; Cresswell,
been mobilized are fundamentally spatial.

1996; Kirby, 1996). The Cartesian subject is interpellated within ametaphysics of spatial presence in Heidegger s terms, Dasein,
or being-there and circumscribed by a location or place from which it can negotiate the world. Derrida (1994a: 82) has referred
to this metaphysics as ontopology, an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being to its situation, to
the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general.

Government enforcement of responsibility takes away from the individuals

ability to think and act on an individual level of morality, which is key to
regaining lost sense of morality in politics
Diprose 08

(Philosophy Social Criticism 2008; 34; 617 Rosalyn Diprose, Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity
http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/6/617)
First, in Some Questions of Moral Philosophy and Responsibility Under Dictatorship (or what Arendt prefers to call

Arendt, following
Nietzsche, argues that conscience, and hence the capacity for personal or
self-responsibility, is not determined either by the moral norms we inherit or
by the particular laws of the society into which we are born. Otherwise how
could such norms be so easily reversed and the reversal embraced by a
majority of a citizenry, and, further, as Nietzsche would say, how can we be
responsible for acts determined by conventions we did not choose ? Arne Vetlesen
shows, in his comprehensive analysis of Arendts thoughts on the relation between conscience and doing
evil, that she actually points to two kinds of conscience: that ever present
conscience that operates habitually and is influenced by prevailing norms
and laws (TMC 186), and conscience that, as the experience of judgment of
particulars (TMC 189) that is a by-product of thinking, makes thinking
manifest in the world (LM I 193), where the thinking that conscience makes
manifest is not knowledge of the good but the challenging of all
established criteria, values and accepted rules of conduct (TMC 188).8 This second kind
of conscience is what matters to Arendt. Put simply, both she and Nietzsche posit a difference between
acting habitually in accordance with moral and legal rules that dictate what
is right and wrong and what Nietzsche would call genuine conscience the
experience of the capacity to judge what is right or wrong for oneself. Second, in
totalitarianism), and crucially for a revision of the juridical sense of responsibility,

linking conscience to reflective critical thought or judgment, Arendt posits a connection between the experience of conscience
and both the undeterminable and futural character of the self. That is, reflective thinking (hence judgment of particulars
experienced as conscience), and along with it our finitude, temporalize the self in a way necessary for both responsibility and an
undetermined future. Arendts account of the historicity of the self borrows from Nietzsches concept of time in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, The Vision and the Riddle.9 Against both cyclic and linear notions of time, Zarathustra formulates time in terms of

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two paths extending from the present gateway called the moment in which human beings stand, one toward the past and the
other toward a future that contradicts the past. In Life of the Mind (especially LM I 20213) Arendt argues that it is the act of
reflective thought that opens this gap between past and future to disrupt the passive passing of linear historical time between

Only a finite being can inherit a

tradition of laws and moral norms, but in inheriting a tradition that would
determine the path one takes, the act of reflection, that is, remembrance
and anticipation, opens an undetermined future. Nietzsches gateway, for Arendt, is . . . [t]he
those two exemplars of human finitude: the moments of birth and death.10

path paved by thinking [or judgment] . . . within the space-time given to natal and mortal men. Following that course, the
thought-trains, remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time. This
small non-time space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, cannot be inherited and

This gap between the past (tradition memorialized)

and an undetermined future, which thinking opens and conscience makes
manifest, constitutes the selfs futurity. And it is this futurity that is
foreclosed in a dampening of conscience and a failure of personal
responsibility. Not only do totalitarian government and a reversal of norms
for the treatment of others jeopardize this fundamental undetermined
futural aspect of the human condition, but it also destroys human plurality
in general.11 Arendts third salient point then is that the capacity for judgment (and therefore conscience) expresses what
handed down by tradition. (LM I 210)

she had referred to in The Human Condition as the who as opposed to the what of the person (HC 179). Her model of judgment
in her reflections on responsibility is explicitly Kantian, although it owes much to Socrates. Conscience is at once the capacity to
judge particulars autonomously and rationally and it is a self-relation, that is, it is self-awareness and an internal dialogue with
oneself (e.g. SQMP 76; see also LM I 17993). As an internal dialogue between the habitual self and the selfs other internal
witness, judgment expresses both difference in identity (TMC 1834) and the persons capacity to transform the past and
embark on a new path: judgment or thinking expresses the person in his or her uniqueness, and conscience is the experience of
this uniqueness made manifest in the world. The process of thinking, as opposed to knowing, therefore indicates that humans
exist in the plural (SQMP 96) and thinking and remembering . . . is the human way of striking roots, of taking ones place in the
world into which we all arrive as strangers. What we usually call a person . . . as distinguished from a mere human being or
nobody, actually grows out of this root-striking process of thinking (SQMP 100). So, although Arendt does not put it this way, this
capacity to discourse with oneself, including the judgment of what is right and wrong, is, for her, the basis of normativity in two
senses: it is the capacity through which we arrive at our own norms of conduct and, as a capacity in others, it is what gives other

Acting according to conscience, being responsible in a nonjuridical sense, rather than being coordinated by a totalizing politics, is, she
says, how one can regain what those in former times, including Kant,
called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps of mankind but of the
status of being human (PRD 48).
persons moral value.

Government established norms of ethical and moral right and wrongs lead to
the dulling conscience of the individual taking out all solvency. It also leads
to accepting the shift to totalitarian regimes in the name of crises.
Diprose 08

(Philosophy Social Criticism 2008; 34; 617 Rosalyn Diprose, Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity
http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/6/617)

The juridical concept of self-responsibility cannot explain, and indeed may

exacerbate, a contemporary crisis of conscience of the order that concerned
Arendt: when liberal democratic governments initiate programs that citizens
feel are contrary to what they had assumed (rightly or wrongly) to be law or
moral custom.4 Examples of this abound in the present: a government engages in what its citizens consider to be an
unjustified war or it annexes part of its territory for what its citizens may consider to be immoral and illegal treatment of refugees
(in the case of Australia) or prisoners of war (e.g. Guantanamo Bay in the case of the USA). Or, as happened in Australia in
December 2005, a government implements (anti-terrorism) legislation that puts in jeopardy fundamental rights and freedoms of
its own citizens (for example, provisions allowing preventative detention without charge and control of the movement of
individuals or groups merely suspected of terrorist activities, and antisedition provisions that criminalize activities that urge

under the umbrella of

economic rationalism a government gradually abdicates responsibility for
the well-being of the disadvantaged or the sick. Such government initiatives
disaffection against the government).5 Or less dramatic but of a similar order,

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can precipitate a crisis of conscience, and responsibility (in the juridical

sense of either duty or blame) seems to vanish or falls disproportionately
toward women, particular racial and ethnic groups, the socially
disadvantaged and/or the dispossessed. Rather than examine this shift in
the distribution of responsibility, my concern is with the mechanism of the
dampening of conscience that disables it or precipitates its redistribution.
This crisis, then dampening, of conscience can manifest in different ways.
Citizens may take the government initiative to be establishing an exemplar
for the ill-treatment or neglect of particular groups and, without question or
even passionately, hold those groups responsible for their own suffering or
for felt insecurity in a population, and follow the governments example in
their conduct toward these others. Arguably, the race riot on Cronulla beach in Sydney on 11 December
2005 (the week after that anti-terrorism legislation was rushed through Parliament amid a flurry of publicity) was a particularly
graphic example of this flow-on effect, where a large group of flag-waving inebriated and largely Anglo-Celtic Australians
aggressively sought to protect their beach from what they felt to be an invasion by unwelcome Lebanese youth.6 While the
Prime Minister explained the riot in terms of isolated criminal behavior and others viewed it as an eruption of wider suppressed
racism, it could be equally well explained in terms of an unthinking imitation, albeit disordered and extreme, of norms of conduct
toward particular groups emerging from several years of a nationalistic politics of division and fear that would direct blame for felt

A dulling of conscience and disabling of

responsibility under such circumstances can take less spectacular but no
less affective forms. Citizens may feel uncomfortable or distressed about such trends but turn a blind eye in the
insecurity toward those considered un-Australian.

belief either that this is a localized problem or that the rule of law, more compatible with their own moral sensibility, will be
restored. Or citizens may strongly oppose such government initiatives, and abhor their flow-on effects, but, in the absence of any
obvious culpable agent, may feel powerless to do anything about it (after all, this is government of the people by the people). In

volatile emotions or passive compliance or confusion about what is

right and wrong govern our conduct toward others. That we are reluctant or
cannot find someone to blame for acts carried out in accordance with such
government initiatives is in part because, insofar as modernity can be
characterized by anonymous government, as Foucault following Nietzsche
has analyzed, this involves a transfer of responsibility for upholding law and
moral norms from the state to the disciplined, self-governing individual.
Under such conditions liberal democratic governments can act apparently
without conscience but with impunity while the individual citizens who bear
the burden of responsibility, in the juridical sense, seem unable to assume
it. What is at issue when such governments seem to initiate a reversal in
customary standards of conduct toward others is not only whether
individuals should be held responsible for acts committed in accordance with
that regime, but also whether they have the capacity to assume
responsibility in any ensuing dulling of conscience. What happens to the capacity for
any case

responsibility, and to the normative basis of conscience, judgment and conduct, when the laws and moral norms we supposedly
embody through a disciplinary regime of anonymous government are undermined by that same government which remains,
nonetheless, anonymous and beyond judgment? This was Arendts concern. Not so much the transfer of responsibility from the

but the dulling of

conscience and failure of personal responsibility that follows. The
government she had in mind was totalitarian not a dictatorship, she
hastens to add but totalitarian in the sense of government that reaches
beyond the political into all spheres of life and that coordinates human
existence toward, for example, a uniform national identity (PRD 334).7
Insofar as such government can be democratically elected and
enthusiastically embraced in times of felt insecurity, Arendts question as to
why so many went along with and allowed themselves to be coordinated by
the Nazi reversal of law and moral norms is just as pertinent now, 30 years after she
state to the individual or any ensuing failure of leadership in upholding political responsibility,

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last asked it. As a consequence of neglecting the corporeal and affective dimension of conscience, Arendt, I will argue, cannot
adequately explain how conscience can be dampened and personal responsibility fail under such government (I will turn to
Nietzsche for that). But she does pinpoint what is at stake in such a failure (the humanness or value of persons) and why
conscience must be restored if the world of potentiality and plurality that we share is to endure. I now draw together and
provisionally summarize her salient claims about conscience and responsibility that move the meaning of responsibility away
from, without abandoning,
its juridical sense.

Forcing ethical views upon people through politics results in the ethics being
short lived as individuals are unable to feel invested in these new ideals.
Nancy Luxon 2008
Ethics and Subjectivity: Practices of Self-Governance in the Late Lectures of Michel Foucault

Yet, although he believes such ethical work might prepare for public
engagement, Foucault avoids any claim that such ethical cultivation
translates directly into political action. Individuals may have a richer set of
ethical resources upon which to draw and potentially enter politics, but it
remains to them to make that choice. Forcing that connection might be
perilous. A clue to the perils of such self-governance for politics appears in
Alexanders famously reported comment to Diogenes: if I were not
Alexander, I should like to be Diogenes. Politically, this remark might be
interpreted as reflective of Alexanders own humility and of the moderation
with which he exercised his own power. Yet it also alerts us modern readers
to another danger: for Alexander to express himself as does Diogenes would
be to require him to be someone other than who he, in fact, is. It would be to
deny his currency, his powerful position, and the very real relations that
constitute the political and social terms of communityin Christian terms, it would be an act
of self-renunciation, while in Deleuzian terms it would be an act made from longing.59 In both instances, the cost of
longing or self-renunciation would be that stability of mind and presence to
oneself that Foucault finds to be so difficult to establish and so inherently
fragile. Renunciation and desire simply return individuals to the unsteady longing to be other than what they are.
Paradoxically, the daily adjustments of parrhesia result in a greater steadiness both in thought and action. Requiring
individuals to be otherwise is to unsettle them without educating them to
the techniques by which they might regain their balance. As a political
program, then, its effects will be fleeting, as individuals are unable to
situate themselves in these new ideals or to feel invested in the relations to
themselves, to others, to

truththat sustain it.

State ethics violate the very idea of democratic ethics (no solvency)
Jeffrey Minson 1985
Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics. Lecturer in the School of Humanities Griffith
University, Queensland, Australia

the current tarnished image of morality, by which

may be traced back to an
historical event. Somewhere back in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, morality became delimited in both law and opinion as a province
of social life and thoughts in its own right, alongside politics , economics, the fine arts
Midgley argues in a semi-genealogical fashion that

she means its equation with moralism and its vulnerability to social criticism,

and so on. In identifying this representation as an historical-intellectual development, Midgley predictably cites J. S. Mils essay
On liberty as a milestone in that history. In this essay, which is often regarded as the definitive philosophical manifesto of

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a sphere of independent action and moral judgment for every

morally competent citizen of a modern (democratic) state. Independence is
cashed out in terms of Mills famous distinction between private and public
domains. The ethical is thus defined as a domain of personal freedom of
thought and action; it is a private domain insofar as neither law nor
organized public opinion are permitted to intervene into this domain in order
to enforce collective moral strandards (or even to prevent self-inflicted damage).
liberalism, Mill delineates

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**Universal / Absolutist Ethics Bad**

Universal morality is impossible because everyone has individual passions

and views.
Walter Kaufmann 1980
From Shakespeare to Existentialism http://taimur.sarangi.info/text/kaufmann_nietzsche.htm

The highest type, to Nietzsche's mind, is the passionate man who is the master of
his passions, able to employ them creatively without having to resort to
asceticism for fear that his passions might conquer him. But not everybody
is capable of this achievement, and Nietzsche does not believe in the possibility of a universal morality. He prefers self-control and sublimation to
both license and asceticism, but concedes that for some asceticism may be
necessary. Those who require such a radical prescription strike him as
weaker, less powerful types than men like Goethe, for example. The will to
power is, according to Nietzsche, a universal drive, found in all men. It prompts the
slave who dreams of a heaven from which he hopes to behold his master in hell no
less than it prompts the master. Both resentment and brutality, both sadism and
asceticism are expressions of it. Indeed, Nietzsche thinks that all human behavior
is reducible to this single basic force. He does not endorse the will to power
any more than Freud endorses sexual desire; but he thinks we shall be
better off if we face the facts and understand ourselves than if we condemn
others hypocritically, without understanding.
Institutional ethics results in a homogenous mindless unconscious. Only by
advocating individual ethics can humans gain value for themselves
Daiger 2006

(Christine, Associate Professor President, NASS Chair, Equity Committee, CPA Member of the Team
CPA B.A. Concordia, M.A. Universit de Montral, Doctoral studies Brock University, Nietzsche: Virtue
Ethics.. Virtue Politics,Project Muse) MF
Let us remember the three points under criticism in the critical program of virtue ethicists: the overreliance on rule models of
moral choice, the overly rationalistic accounts of moral agency, and the formalism inherent in such theories. If we did not know

Nietzsche does
reject rule models. His ethics of creativity argues that one must create
values for oneself and not rely on any external (transcendent) rule. Nietzsche also
that we are talking about virtue ethicists, we would readily say that this pertains to Nietzsche.

fiercely rejects the rationalistic account of moral agency. He struggles to rehabilitate the repressed parts of human nature,
claiming that reason is but a very small part of ourselves. He talks of the human being in terms of a fiction (see D 105). We are
wronged in the conception of ourselves: we are led to believe that we are neatly divided between reason and instinct. But this
division is illusory. The human being is a social structure of many souls (BGE 19). We possess a soul that is a social structure
of the instincts and passions (BGE 12). Nietzsche says further that [i]f we desired and dared an architecture corresponding to
the nature of our soul (we are too cowardly for it!)our model would have to be the labyrinth! (D 169). We are indeed very far
from the traditional picture of the self and also far from the superiority of reason that is proposed by traditional philosophical

Nietzsche rejects the formalism

inherent in traditional moralities as he would generally reject any formalism
in thought. Nietzsche does share the critical program of virtue ethicists. The nihilism he proposes is
supposed to remedy the alienating traditional philosophical (and religious)
discourse. But does he stop at the nihilistic moment? Is his program purely nihilistic, as Leiter suggests? I have argued
elsewhere that far from being purely nihilistic, Nietzsches philosophy is entirely
approaches and moralities in particular. Last, it is also evident that

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constructive.19 His challenge consists in rejecting the existing morality to

construct anew. The old systems deficiencies cannot be adjusted by
reorganization. One must erase everything and start from scratch. This is where his
attacks on morality come into play. In this moment Nietzsche announces the death of God and its metaphysical import. Nietzsche
is clear about his self-attributed immoralism: At bottom my expression immoralist involves two denials. I deny first a type of man
who has hitherto counted as the highest, the good, the benevolent, beneficent; I deny secondly a kind of morality which has come
to be accepted and to dominate as morality in itselfdcadence morality, in more palpable terms Christian morality (EH

His rejection of morality is thus clearly identified by him as a

rejection of traditional morality. He also says of fellow immoralists, they see [their] honor in affirming (TI
Destiny 4).

Morality 6).20 There is no question of abandoning ethics. Ethics is needed and will be his preoccupation for the first steps of his
reconstruction, for it was a preoccupation before his reconstruction as it lead to the rejection of the defective ethics. Nihilism is a
necessary step toward this reconstruction. As he says in The Gay Science: We

deny, and must deny,

because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something which we
perhaps do not as yet know, do not as yet see! (307). What is it that wants to affirm itself?
In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche says that We are accountable to ourselves for our own
existence; consequently, we also want to be the real helmsmen of our
existence and keep it from resembling a mindless coincidence (1). The bermensch,

in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is the figure who is successful in becoming his own master. He is an Overman, more than a man, a
human being that is human and more. Why more? The bermensch is the individual who has overcome the fragmentation
inherent in tradition. It is the person who has reunited himself, who has decided to live fully as he is. It is also the person who
knows that life is will to power and that he himself is an instance of this will to power. Accordingly, he wishes to embody and
respect the will to power within himself. In addition to all of this, he accepts the eternal return hypothesis. He is ready to suppose
that the actions and decisions he makes during his life will return eternally the same. The change from man to bermensch is
tremendous. So much so that we cannot talk about an elevation from man to bermensch but really of a transfiguration, as
Nietzsche himself refers.21 Even the highest type of human being present in Nietzsches writings, the strong man, is far below the
bermensch. He says: Your souls are so unfamiliar with what is great that the Superman would be fearful to you in his goodness!
And you wise and enlightened men, you would flee from the burning sun of wisdom in which the Superman joyfully bathes his
nakedness! You highest men my eyes have encountered! This is my doubt of you and my secret laughter: I think you would call
my Supermana devil! (Z Manly Prudence). The bermensch is an ideal type of human being. Every individual should emulate
this figure as an illustration of what one can become if only one were to engage oneself in the way of creation. When I speak of an
ideal type, the bermensch, I mean that it is a figure toward which one must strive, not to be confused as a state one can reach.
For one thing, it is not clear in Nietzsches mind whether there will ever be bermenschen. For another thing, I think we should
interpret the figure he presents to us as a dynamic state of being. If the bermensch accepts life and himself as an instance of
the will to power, he will be in constant becoming. The drive for more power, characteristic of Nietzsches being, will lead the
individual into a continuous flux and constant overcoming of oneself. This is how one should understand the ber of bermensch.
But even if we are talking about a state of flux, this is a state that one should strive to acquire while engaging in the process of
attainment. According to Nietzsche, there are certain things that one must do in order to approach this excellence and in turn

the creation of oneself and the creation of

values that is essential in supporting a new ethics. The human being should
be the creator of oneself. She should be her own master and define her own rules (which is what is truly meant
become an bermensch. Among these things are

by the famous, or infamous, Master morality).22 Once the sky of values has been emptied, the task is to fill it again for oneself.
The individual should no longer rely on any transcendent to provide these values, as the previous experiment of Christianity and

Human beings must create an

ethics for human beings. The individual must create an ethics that respects
ones nature as human and as will to power. This is expressed in Nietzsches maxim: What Saith
its transcendent morals has proven that its only possible result is alienation.

thy Conscience?Thou shalt become what thou art (GS 270). You must flourish! Note that there is nothing in Nietzsches writings
until Beyond Good and Evil that indicates that the way of the bermensch is bared for certain individuals. He makes clear that this
potentiality exists in every individual. It is only a matter of the individual choosing to actualize his or her own self as will to
power.23 Thus the emphasis is placed on the flourishing of the agent via the adoption of certain virtues in line with ones own
being.

Any project that defines a universal ethical claim fosters indifference. Only
by finding ethics in the absence of universal norms can ethical action take
place
Popke 03
(Jeffrey, Department of Geology, East Carolina University, Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity,
responsibility and the space of communitySage) MF

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From an empirical perspective, these insights have provoked a re-examination of geographical phenomena in a wide range of
domains, with emphasis increasingly placed upon the ways in which social meanings and categories take on the appearance of
truth or objectivity. Recent work has examined, for example, the discourses governing geopolitics ( Tuathail, 1996; Tuathail
and Dalby, 1998), the economy (Barnes, 1996; Gibson-Graham, 1996), urban space (Soja, 1996; Dear, 2000), colonialism and
development (Jacobs, 1996; Yapa, 1996), the environment (Braun and Castree, 1998) and the nature of identity, particularly the
spatial structuring of gender/sexual and racial/ethnic difference (Sibley, 1995; Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Nast, 2000). The
poststructuralist intervention has also prompted a series of philosophical debates, which have posed a challenge to traditional
understandings of metaphysics and epistemology. In this more theoretical vein, poststructuralism offers a critique of
logocentrism, the centering or grounding of claims to truth or objectivity . From this perspective, the apparent stability of meaning
embedded in any system of thought is potentially destabilized by elided traces of difference, and by the multiple contexts in
which knowledge is produced, received and interpreted. As Strohmayer and Hannah (1992: 36) put it, the truth of any statement,
scientific or otherwise, which ultimately must rely on some anchoring in order to avoid being completely arbitrary, is

undecidable. This deconstruction of universals poses a significant challenge to

traditional understandings of ethics, for the anti-foundational stance of
poststructuralism implies that any project aimed at defining an ethics, or a
normative theory of society, would be doomed to failure. From a poststructuralist
perspective, universal claims to knowledge and truth can become a barrier to
fostering a sensitivity to difference, and thus ethics would need to find its
purchase in the radical instability of meaning and the deconstruction of
universal normative claims. The goal of such an anti-essentialist approach, as David Slater (1997: 69) has

noted, is to cultivate a political openness, or an ungrounded ground, where foundations or norms or universal prescriptions only
exist to be put into question as a permanent feature of the process of democratization. Some commentators have gone so far as

we should take up a position against ethics, in the sense of a

model of moral or ethical actions, and instead work to foster an ethics of
encounter without a commitment to resolution or closure (Campbell and Shapiro, 1999a:
to suggest that

xi, xvii; see also Caputo, 1993). I will try below to suggest how we might imagine such an ethics of encounter, but first I turn to
examine some of the responses within geography to the postmodern challenge to ethics.

Their form of moral absolutism prioritizes clean moral hands over moral results: they are
more concerned with not acting directly immoral than preventing much larger immoral
consequences

Nielsen 1993 (Kai, Phil. Prof @ U. Calgary, Absolutism and It Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber, p. 170-2)
letting him remain stuck while the whole group
drowns is still more monstrous. The consequentialist is on strong moral
ground here, and, if his reflective moral convictions do not square either with certain unrehearsed or with certain reflective particular moral
Blowing up the fat man is indeed monstrous. But

convictions of human beings, so much the worse for such commonsense moral convictions. One could even usefully and relevantly adapt here-though for
a quite different purpose-an argument of Donagan's. Consequentialism of the kind I have been arguing for provides so persuasive "a theoretical basis for
common morality that when it contradicts some moral intuition, it is natural to suspect that intuition, not theory, is corrupt." Given the
comprehensiveness, plausibility, and overall rationality of consequentialism, it is not unreasonable to override even a deeply felt moral conviction if it
does not square with such a theory, though, if it made no sense or overrode the bulk of or even a great many of our considered moral convictions that

Anticonsequentialists often point to the inhumanity of people

who will sanction such killing of the innocent but cannot the compliment be
returned by speaking of the even greater inhumanity, conjoined with
evasiveness, of those who will allow even more death and far greater misery
and then excuse themselves on the ground that they did not intend the death
and misery but merely forbore to prevent it? In such a context, such reasoning and such
forbearing to prevent seems to me to constitute a moral evasion . I say it is evasive because rather than steeling
himself to do what in normal circumstances would be a horrible and vile act but in this circumstance is a harsh moral necessity he [it] allows,
when he has the power to prevent it, a situation which is still many times
worse. He tries to keep his 'moral purity' and [to] avoid 'dirty hands' at the
price of utter moral failure and what Kierkegaard called 'double-mindedness.' It is understandable that people should act in this
would be another matter indeed

morally evasive way but this does not make it right.

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Ignoring consequences is immoral - they sacrifice others to preserve moral purity. It is most
moral to act to produce the best end regardless of the moral cleanliness of the means

Ailinsky 1971

(Saul D., Activist, Prof, Social Organizer with Int'l Fame, Founder of Industrial Areas Foundation, Rules for Radicals, p.

24-7)
"Does this particular end justify this particular means?" Life and how you live it is the story of means and ends. The end is what you want, and the means is how you get it. Whenever we
think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The person [man] of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other
problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only
whether they will work. To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a
corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life. The practical revolutionary

conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action in

action one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both
with one s individual conscience and the good of [humankind. The choice
must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the
individual's personal salvation. He [or she1 who sacrifices the mass good for
his personal conscience has peculiar conception of "personal salvation"; he
doesn't care enough for people to be "corrupted" for them . The people [men] who pile up the heaps of
will understand Geothe's "

discussion and literature on the ethics of means and ends-which with rare exception is conspicuous for its sterility-rarely write about their won experiences in the perpetual struggle of
life and change. They are strangers, moreover, to the burdens and problems of operational responsibility and the unceasing pressure for immediate decisions. They are passionately
committed to a mystical objectivity where passions are suspect. They assume a nonexistent situation where men dispassionately and with reason draw and devise means and ends as if
studying a navigational chart on land. They can be recognized by one of two verbal brands; "We agree with the ends but not the means," or "This is not the time." The means-and- end
moralists or non-doers always wind up on their ends without any means. The means-and- 'ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots
against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive-but real-allies of the Haves. They are the ones Jacques Maritain referred to in his

The fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not

virtue, but a way of escaping virtue." These non-doers were the ones who
chose not to fight the Nazis in the only way they could have been fought; they were the ones who drew their window blinds to shut out the
shameful spectacle of Jews and political prisoners being dragged through the streets; they were the ones who privately deplored the horror of it all-and did nothing. This is
the nadir of immorality. The most unethical of all means is the nonuse of any
means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences
statement, "

between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced from the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not to men. The
standards ofjudgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be. 1 present here a series of
rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends: first, that one's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue. When we are not
directly concerned our morality overflows; as La Rochefoucauld put it, "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others."

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**Aesthetic Ethics Good**

Foucault proposed an aesthetical ethics in which individuals choose their

ethics based on an aesthetic existence.
Poster 07
Mark, Swans Way: Care of Selfin the Hyperreal University of California, Irvine Configurations, 2007, 15:151175
2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.

To be sure, in the late project on ethics, Foucault does not propose a new
version of the liberal notion of the autonomous individual, self-reliant and
free, one who builds a stable identity, like the comic character Baron von
Munchausen, by lifting himself up by his own bootstraps. This Western
conceit is, after all, the main subject of Foucaults critique, and the chief
preoccupation of his work. The post structuralist in fact presents his notion
of self-subjectivation as an alternative, and overlooked or repressed, stream
of thinking in the West, one that has been overshadowed by the injunction know thyself.Foucault
formulates the tradition he points to as the care of self, implying that this
somewhat underground alternative culturemight provide resources in the
present for new types of emancipator endeavors. Here he takes his cue from
Nietzsche, who foresaw atransvaluation of values in which ethics would be
based not on renunciation and self restraint but on aesthetics .31 Foucault anticipates
the project of the hermeneutics of the subject contributing to a culture in which everyones life [might] become a work of art.32
I shall raise the question of the care of self in relation to cosmeticsurgery reality TV, but before embarking on this project, a
thorough understanding is required of Foucaults idea of the care of self. In the 1982 lectures at the Collge de France, Foucault
presented a genealogy of ethics in the ancient world, concentrating on the Hellenistic period where the care of self reached its
richest point of development. He contrasts the care of self with the relation to the self in Platonism, Christianity, and modern

Foucault strives to distinguish the care of self

as a spiritual practice in which the self is transformed. In the care of self,
the self is not discovered as it is in Descartes, or realized in its authenticity
as it is in Sartre; rather, Hellenistic care of self is a complex of lifelong
practices in which the individual attempts to change himself/herself. It is not
a case of attempting to discover the truth of oneself, as in Plato, or to
convert oneself in the image of a transcendent principle, as in Christianity. Here is one definition Foucault
philosophy, primarily Descartes. In all three cases,

gives of the Hellenistic care of the self: The Greeks of the Hellenistic period developed a culture of self-constitution, potentially
open to all, through meditation, writing exercises, group meetings, and other practices. The direct goal was an art of living, an
aesthetic of self-relation, an ethic of spiritual formation.

Narcissism were the Other is supposed to discover themselves is opposed by

Foucault, indicating that we should live aesthetically instead and draws a
line between this narcissistic enlightenment and aesthetic values
Poster 07
Mark, Swans Way: Care of Selfin the Hyperreal University of California, Irvine Configurations, 2007, 15:151175
2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.

One more aspect of Foucaults position must be clarified before I begin. As we have seen, Foucault rarely
addresses the idea of the care of self in relation to contemporary culture. But one distinction about the
care of self is crucial and must be borne in mind. In response to a question from Paul Rabinow and
Hubert Dreyfus suggesting the common narcissism in modern society and ancient Greek ethics,
Foucault offers the following comment: In the Californian cult of the self, one is supposed to
discover ones true self. . . . not only do I not identify this ancient culture of the self with what
you might call the Californian cult of the self, I think they are diametrically opposed. 40 If I Want a

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Famous Face and The Swan are understood only as depictions of individuals in quest of their true selves, then
clearly the issue is not one that concerns Foucaults idea of the care of self. I want rather to inquire if there is
a hint of care of self in these most abject television series. For as Foucault writes, our culture, complex
as it is, does not easily support this idea: We have hardly any remnant of the idea in our society
that the principal work of art which one must take care of, the main area to which one must
apply aesthetic values, is oneself, ones life, ones existence. 41 Surgeries Reexamined The question
I shall pose in relation to The Swan and I Want a Famous Face is this: What can be learned about these shows
when they are approached from the vantage point of the concept of the care of self? And what does such an
interrogation reveal about popular culture at a time when the media are disseminated throughout society
ever more densely and with increasing variation and intermediation?42

Aesthetic judgments, or judgments free of bias and societal opinion, are the
best alternatives to judging morals and ethics without placing our own
vanity and egos as the hidden priority
Downard 04
(Northern Arizona University. Nietzsche and Kant on the Pure Impulse of Truth. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27)

Nietzsche maintains that art and not morality is the origin of our pure
impulse to truth. I believe that Nietzsche's purpose in appealing to art is to
find a basis for establishing and perhaps improving our freedom as
inquirers. According to both Nietzsche and Kant, aesthetic judgments
express a special kind of freedom. Kant maintains that this freedom
surpasses even the autonomy of our moral agency. 11 Like moral judgments,
aesthetic judgments must be free from any given inclination or contingent
purpose. Unlike moral judgments, aesthetic judgments must be free from
any given concept or principle, including the ends and principles of reason .
Given Nietzsche's larger philosophical project, this fact makes it easy to see why he would appeal to art. His question is one of
how the capacity to act from a pure impulse ever evolved from natural inclinations. Furthermore, he wants to give an account of
how this capacity evolved that does not make an appeal to either language or reason. It is the independence of art from both the
concepts embodied in language and the principles of reason that makes art an especially appealing candidate. At this point, I
would like to review the general features of Kant's account of aesthetic judgment. At the same time, I will offer some textual
evidence [End Page 30] for thinking that there are substantial agreements between Kant and Nietzsche about the nature of
aesthetic judgments. In his early essay on truth, Nietzsche does not offer an account of aesthetic judgment. As such, I would like
to start by briefly reviewing the agreements that Nietzsche expresses in both The Birth of Tragedy and Zarathustra with Kant's
aesthetics. According to both Kant and Nietzsche, there are two types of aesthetic judgments. We experience the sublime when
we confront the infinitude of abysses, mountains, and storms. We experience the beautiful when we hear the harmony of a piano
sonata or see the unity in a painting. Setting to the side the differences between these two types of judgments, let us focus on the
points that are common to both. Kant's analytic is an attempt to make sense of three conflicting intuitions that we share about
aesthetics. 12 On the one hand, matters of art are a matter of personal taste. Aesthetic estimations are subjective judgments.
Because they are subjective, there are no objective proofs to which we could appeal to settle disputes. At the same time, we do
quarrel about matters of beauty and sublimity. If I find a painting beautiful and you think it is ugly, we take ourselves to be
engaged in a real disagreement even if there are no objective grounds to settle the dispute. In order to help settle our quarrel, I

Nietzsche maintains that

the distinction between the subjective and the objective cannot be used in
aesthetics to do any philosophical work. Nietzsche's main point, like Kant's,
is that aesthetic judgments are not merely subjective. They are not
expressions of what is merely agreeable for an individual. A judgment of
taste cannot be based on the satisfaction of personal preferences: "the
striving individual bent on furthering his egoistic purposescan be thought
of only as an enemy to art, never as its source" (BT, 41). At the same time,
aesthetic judgments are not determinative judgments, for there are no
objective grounds for matters of taste. Nietzsche challenges the idea that
aesthetics is grounded on standards of reason (Z, 166). He wants to suggest
that the aesthetics must be independent of such determinate concepts and
principles. Nietzsche recognizes that there can be quarrels over matters of taste. In fact, he elevates the idea to a crucial
might point to the harmony of shapes, while you might point to the unattractive colors.

position in his argument in Zarathustra when he challenges those who would maintain that judgments of taste are merely
subjective expressions of personal preference: "[t]astethat is at the same time weight and scales and weigher; and woe unto all

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The fundamental
prerequisite to being a self-conqueror is that one overcome one's personal
biases and prejudices. According to Kant's transcendental analysis, judgments of taste must be grounded on a
the living that would live without disputes over weight and scales and weighers!" (Z, 117).

disinterested pleasure. In order for the pleasure that we take in an aesthetic experience to be disinterested, we must seek a
higher ground for our judgments. In exercising [End Page 31] his judgment, Zarathustra tells us that he "had to fly to the highest

Not only do we need to set aside our

interest in what we find agreeable and what we find to be consistent with
our prudential interests, but we must also set aside our interest in satisfying
the requirements of morality (BT, 142). According to Kant's analysis, aesthetic
judgments must be purposive without any given purpose. Zarathustra
teaches us to live without any dependence upon given ends. He urges us to
renounce any servitude under given purposes. Often, Nietzsche refers to
such a condition as a matter of chance or accident. It is through the
purposiveness of art that purposes grow from mere accidents (Z, 62).
Purposiveness is realized where harmony and unity are restored to what was
merely fragmentary. Under the last two moments of Kant's analysis, aesthetic judgments must make claims of
subjective universality and subjective necessity. When we estimate the beauty or sublimity of an
object, we make claims to the effect that all other human beings ought to
agree with our judgment. 13 The judgment is universal insofar as it makes a
claim on all others. According to Nietzsche, judgments of taste help us to
become reconciled to one another by teaching the "gospel of universal
harmony" (BT, 19-24). A judgment of taste is necessary insofar as it makes a claim on how others ought to estimate the
spheres that (he) might find the fount of pleasure again" (Z, 98).

object. According to Nietzsche, in the Apollonian state we experience dreams with a sense of real necessity. For Zarathustra, the
"Thou shalt is higher than to command for those that are sublime" (Z, 48). Nietzsche recognizes that it is possible to make such

As such, you can only make

such claims where you call this cessation of all need "necessity" (Z, 77, 222). So far,
claims of necessity only where you have set aside personal biases and prejudices.

we have reviewed the agreements between Kant and Nietzsche on aesthetic judgments and have found them to be in substantial
agreement on major points. The fact that the agreements are found in both The Birth of Tragedy and Zarathustra is evidence that
Nietzsche did not dramatically alter his position on these points in aesthetics between his early and later periods. 14 Furthermore,
the fact that "Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense" and The Birth of Tragedy were published at about the same time
indicates that Nietzsche was likely working with such ideas in his early essay on truth. Kant tells us that the key to the critique of
taste is in the solution to the following problem. The question is whether the feeling of pleasure that we take in an aesthetic
judgment follows from the judgment, or whether the feeling of pleasure precedes the judgment. 15 Only if the feeling of pleasure
follows from the judgment is the judgment free from determination by external causes. Only if the judgment is free from such

As an aesthetic reflective
judgment, [End Page 32] the basis for the correctness of the judgment is the
complete freedom of the subject. Here we find what may be the key to understanding Nietzsche's account
causes can we presume to require that others agree with our judgment.

of aesthetic judgments. In Nietzsche's terms, the purely perspectival character of aesthetic judgments is the key to their
legislative authority. For Kant, one who is engaged in an act of aesthetic judgment can tell us how we ought to judge because only
a subjective necessity is presupposed by such judgments. Taste claims a special kind of autonomy. Only where we have
overcome all of the external causes of bias in judgment, including the tyranny of our feelings, the tyranny of reason (scientific,
prudential, and moral) and even the tyranny of the object and the truth of its existence, does our judgment have autonomy. Only
where autonomy has been realized can we presume to tell others how they ought to judge, assuming that they have adopted an
aesthetic perspective and distanced themselves from their own biases and prejudices. The structural similarities between Kant's
two arguments against consequentialism are striking. In both Kant's ethics and his aesthetics, the issue is one of the purity of the

Because of the structural similarities between the two arguments, we

can make the same kinds of arguments against rationalist and empiricist
accounts of truth from the perspective of art as can be made from the
perspective of ethics. On Kant's account, aesthetic reflective judgments
share some of the same features as determinative moral judgments. Most
important, aesthetic reflective judgments are categorical in their form even
though they are singular judgments and are not determined by an objective
principle of reason. Because they are categorical and not hypothetical,
aesthetic judgments must be grounded in a pure impulse. Kant claims that the experience
of the sublime teaches us to esteem in opposition to our interests and that the experience of the beautiful teaches us to love. In
judgment.

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a similar fashion, Nietzsche claims that the experience of the sublime gives
us a height above our vanity and the experience of the beautiful teaches
how to love something, such as the truth, from a pure impulse (Z, 116-18).
By placing our own individual art and judgment before the worlds ethics we
have the ability to question the institutionalized ethics that leads our lives
and form our own idea of ethics by the superior imperatives
Downard 04
(Northern Arizona University. Nietzsche and Kant on the Pure Impulse of Truth. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27)

Why should we think that Nietzsche is right to claim that art is the origin of
our pure impulse to truth? Why shouldn't we agree with Kant that a pure impulse to the truth
can and should be grounded in practical reason? I believe that Nietzsche can make the same
criticism of Kant that he has made of empiricist and especially rationalist
accounts of truth. Namely, that on certain questions, Kant's account of truth
is grounded in a principle of self-love. The main [End Page 37] reason Kant
falls prey to such an objection is that there are a whole host of questions
Kant is unable or unwilling to admit are real questions. Let us start with Nietzsche's
example of honesty. According to Kant, why should we be honest? The answer is that any minimally
rational agent recognizes a duty to be honest. Rational agents need no further reason to do their duty
because the principles of morality give them overriding reasons to be moral. On Kant's account, can a
moral agent honestly question what it is to be honest? What I mean is, supposing the circumstances are
perfectly clear, and supposing that there are no apparent conflicts of duty, can a moral agent honestly
raise the question, what ought I to do? Kant maintains that any minimally rational agent already knows
the answer. Such an agent may feel a temptation to violate the duty to be honest, but the agent
recognizes that the duty to be honest should always be given the highest respect. Nietzsche seems to
think that we can raise honest questions about our values. On the one hand, the requirements of
conscience do appear to impose necessary obligations for our conscience. On the other hand, we can
raise questions about what, in particular, is required by an obligation. Furthermore, we can raise
questions about the legitimacy of an obligation itself. As moral agents, we realize that social traditions
and personal biases may unduly affect our conception of the requirements of morality. Even those
requirements of conscience that seem the clearest and the strongest may, in a manner great or small,
be infected by certain biases and prejudices. Kant insists that all minimally rational agents know what
duty requires and, as such, are aware of the principles of morality. When a question about the
requirements of morality arises, all we need to do is carefully abstract from our personal biases and
prejudices and focus our attention on the principles that are innate to our power of practical reason. In
effect, the answers to any moral questions that might arise are already contained in the principles
embedded in our conscience. We can rest assured that the principles are absolutely universal and
necessary. As a system of principles, the set is complete, consistent, and unchanging. Why does Kant
believe that the system of moral principles has these general features? In ethics, he takes a

stronger stand than he does in natural science. The ideas of freedom,

immortality, and God are regulative ideas that are justified only as practical
postulates. But the ideas that the requirements of morality are absolutely
universal, necessary, complete, consistent, and unchanging are constitutive
of the very idea of a categorical imperative. In ethics, we know with
significantly more certainty that the requirements of morality really do have
these general features. 20 Nietzsche is free to question Kant's assumptions
on such general points. How do we know the truth about honesty with such
certainty? Kant's response is that we just know the principles of morality.
Nietzsche's point is that such a response is empty. It is not an answer to the
question. Rather, it is an attempt [End Page 38] to avoid the question. Why
does Kant seek to avoid the question? His reason seems to be that the question leads us to skepticism
about the requirements of morality. A natural response to Kant's worry is that such questions may lead

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us to be skeptical about claims to certainty in ethics, but it is an open question as to whether or not we
need such certainty in ethics. Kant's mistake was to turn his back on questions that

we ought not ignore. He closes the door to inquiry by setting to the side
questions to which we ought to seek answers. That is a bad habit to
inculcate. Nietzsche's criticism works equally well against both the
rationalists and Kant (GM, 289-92). The attempt to avoid real questions by
saying that the question has no answer, or by simply assuming an answer, is
ultimately grounded on vanity. The fact that you happen not to like the consequences that
follow from the question is not sufficient reason to set the question to the side. Kant would have been
better off to forward such claims as regulative principles. He could have made his claims about the
absolute necessity and universality of the principles of duty as transcendental hypotheses. While such a
move would have avoided premature claims to certainty, it would not remove Nietzsche's objection. As
a hypothesis, the claim that the principles of practical reason are absolutely universal and necessary is
not a good hypothesis. The problem is not that it is false. For all we know, the principles of

morality may be absolutely necessary and universal. The problem is that, as

a hypothesis, it does not answer real questions. How can I be so sure that
my understanding of my moral duties is correct? I have a clear
understanding of the principles of morality and it is plausible to suppose
that those principles are absolute. Simply asserting that the principles of
morality are absolutely universal and necessary does not answer the
question, regardless of whether the assertions are forwarded with certainty
or only as hypotheses. Having made what I take to be the main point of Nietzsche's criticism in
his early essay on truth, and having turned the criticism toward Kant's ethics, let us step back and
consider how he might have obtained the upper hand in the debate. The main question is, When
engaged in inquiry, why ought I to commit myself to standards of correctness in general? Kant and
Nietzsche agree that the pursuit of truth must be grounded on a free impulse . The advantage

of
modeling the standards of correctness on aesthetic judgments and not moral
judgments of duty is the following. The former but not the latter are free
from determination by any given purpose or rule. As such, Nietzsche does
not need to make nearly as many presumptions about the nature of truth as
Kant. The fact that aesthetic judgments are not determined by objective
principles was thought to be their greatest weakness. But Nietzsche seeks
to turn a weakness into a source of strength. The greatest strength of
aesthetic judgments is their superior freedom from such presumptions.
Aesthetic judgments are a natural model for such hypotheses because
neither makes a claim [End Page 39] to truth. When we forward a
hypothesis, we say that it would explain a certain phenomenon if it were
truth. We think it is a plausible conjecture, but we do not (at least yet) claim
that it is true. Similarly, the freedom of an aesthetic judgment is predicated
upon its independence from any claims to truth. Nietzsche wants to raise further
questions. What is the origin of our pure impulse to the truth? How can beings that were once governed
entirely by self-interest ever gain the capacity for freedom? In order to gain the upper hand on these
questions, Nietzsche does not need to assume that the capacity to act from pure impulses did in fact
evolve from natural inclinations. The main advantage to his position is not merely that he can give
answers to questions that Kant cannot. Rather, the main advantage to his position is that he can raise
the questions in the first place. Because he does not need to presuppose the status of any rules or
ends, he is free to pursue any line of inquiry whatsoever, let the consequences of what he discovers be
damned. Once we have decided to address such questions in the terms of art,

we have new resources available to us. Instead of having to ignore certain

difficulties, we can stare them in the face. For Nietzsche, overcoming our
servitude to vanity is the greatest hurdle: "Nature threw away the key; and

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woe to the fatal curiosity which might be able for a moment to look out and
down through a crevice in the chamber of consciousness, and discover that
man is indifferent to his own ignorance, is resting on the pitiless, the
greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, and, as it were, hanging in dreams on
the back of a tiger" (TF, 177). Ultimately, the way in which we need to face
such challenges is to let the sublimity of the task remind us of the sublimity
in ourselves.

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**AT: Kants Categorical Imperative**

Institutionalized ethics, such as the Kants Categorical Imperative, places

regulations of what is right and what is thought to be wrong without
explanation or freedom to assume an alternative pathway by the individual
Downard 04
(Northern Arizona University. Nietzsche and Kant on the Pure Impulse of Truth. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 27)
All four types of moral theories fall prey to the same objection. The principles that they hold up as the primary principle of
morality all have the form of a hypothetical imperative. Hypothetical imperatives establish only that a means is good relative to
some end. In order to show that a given end is worth [End Page 27] pursuing, all of these moral theorists simply assert that we
are inclined toward such an end either because it is something that we desire, or because we have rational impulses that move us

in such a direction. According to Kant, all such incentives, regardless of whether they are empirical or rational in
character, are impure. As such, they fail to express our freedom as moral agents. Only an incentive of respect that is generated
by an awareness of the categorical imperative is pure. The reason is that only a principle of this form expresses our autonomy as
moral agents. The difference is a matter of priority .

The feeling of respect is pure because it

follows from the moral law. All other moral theories use a form of
justification that puts the incentive first and the principle second. At this
point, let us turn to Nietzsche's argument against both rationalist and
empiricist accounts of truth. I hope to show that Nietzsche's criticisms can be defended using Kant's moral
argument against consequentialism. If Nietzsche's criticisms can be defended in this manner, then his criticisms will work against
any philosophical account of truth that is grounded on a principle of self-love. The targets of Nietzsche's criticisms in his early
essay on truth can be divided, according to Kant's table, along the axes of subjective and objective accounts. Taking them in
reverse order from Kant's argument, let us first examine rationalist accounts of truth. According to Nietzsche, such theories posit

Rational beings control their behavior entirely by

abstractions. Their aim is to avoid being carried away by a disorderly array
of perceptual impressions. Abstract concepts can be put into a pyramidal
order of genus and species, with the unruly impressions residing at the
bottom. Standing back, looking at the pyramid that we have constructed, we
are impressed by those concepts that are "more fixed, general, known,
human of the two and therefore the regulating and imperative one" (TF, 181).
In creating such a world of concepts, our conduct is regulated by
imperatives. These imperatives guide the conduct of our inquiry and
determine how we ought to form concepts and distinguish between those
assertions that are worthy of being believed and those that ought to be
treated as false. The target of Nietzsche's criticism is, first and foremost, the
imperatives that rationalists think should guide the conduct of our inquiry,
and only secondly the beliefs that are held to be true at any given time as a
result of following those imperatives. Nietzsche makes his criticism of rationalist accounts of truth in
the

following

kinds

of

claims.

the following terms. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as
well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth"
within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal"
I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. [End Page 28] Nietzsche's criticism has the

On both accounts, the mistake of the

rationalists was to assume that merely logical principles could establish how
we ought to conduct ourselveseither morally or in scientific inquiry. Logical
principles cannot establish what we ought to hold as true any more than
they can establish ends that are morally worthy of our pursuit. In order to hide this
same structure as Kant's criticism of Wolff's moral theory.

flaw, rationalists try to sneak in a given end or belief. But the question remains, is that end really worth pursuing and is that

Nietzsche does not assert that the belief

adopted on the basis of such a procedure is false. Rather, he says that it has
limited value as a truth. The reason is that the belief is, to some extent,
assertion really worth believing? We should note that

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improved by following the rationalists' method. It is rendered more

consistent and harmonious with all the other assertions that are held to be
true. But the rationalists have failed to use a method that honestly asks
whether or not the belief itself is worthy of being believed. By way of contrast,
empiricists explain the origins of our beliefs in the following kinds of terms. A habitual relation between a word and certain images
is caused by mere repetition. A nerve stimulus causes an image to appear in our consciousness as a sound or a sight. Objects
external to us cause the stimulation of our nerves. Nietzsche's first point against an empiricist account is that the appeal to an
object outside of us is the "result of a wrong and unjustifiable application of the concept of causality" (TF, 177). This concept has
led empiricists to formulate a chain of causes, each one explaining what follows it in the series. Empiricists such as Hobbes and
Hume openly assume that all objects have the same basic nature (material objects for Hobbes and conscious impressions for
Hume), and all relations between things must be understood in terms of de facto causes. But insufficient justification is given for
the presumption that words, images, nerve impulses, and objects external to us all have the same nature and can all stand in
causal relations to one another. Empiricists believe that these kinds of philosophical assumptions should guide our inquiry.

Nietzsche takes issue first and foremost with the imperatives that they think
should regulate our conduct. What is the basis of these imperatives? Why not
think that there is a difference in kind between nerve impulses and conscious images? Why not think that the relation
between the two is fundamentally an aesthetic relation and not a merely de facto causal relation? The question that Nietzsche

The point of Nietzsche's

criticism of both rationalists and empiricists can be understood by
considering his account of our move from the state of nature to the state of
society. In order to end the war of all against all, human beings forge a
peace treaty in which they agree to use concepts according to fixed
conventions. This treaty establishes the difference between truth and lie.
The [End Page 29] honest person follows the fixed conventions, the liar uses the
fixed conventions to make things that are "unreal appear to be real" (TF, 2). He
puts to the empiricists is at root the same as the question he puts to the rationalists .

reverses the fixed conventions and says, for example, "I am honest," when the correct word for his actions is "dishonest." The liar

The majority of people

follow the established conventions, but are their actions any less
fraudulent? What the majority of people hate is not being deceived, but the
harmful consequences of being deceived. Once again, Nietzsche does not
assert that there is no value to such a grade of truth. Rather, he wants to
question whether there is a higher grade of truth that we ought to pursue.
The point of his criticism of both rationalists and empiricists is to question
whether or not the imperatives that they recommend for the conduct of our
inquiry can lift us out of the this state. In this state, we can establish a
certain peace. We can rest in confidence that the fixed conventions have the
status of accepted certainties. But we lack freedom. Nietzsche does not
believe that either account can improve our freedom. The reason is that
neither teaches us to act from a pure impulse to truth. Rather, they
encourage us to seek the pleasant consequences of preserving the fixed
conventions.
misuses the proper designations for his own selfish purposes and causes harm to others.

Kants categorical imperative results in duty being impersonal. This results

in a society where we work simply out of necessity and no person choice
resulting in the destruction of ourselves like the German writer Heinreich
von Kleis
J. Thomas Howe 2003
Faithful to the Earth. J. Thomas Howe studied at Lake Forest College (BA, 1989), Yale Divinity School (MAR, 1993), and Claremont
Graduate University (PhD, 1999). He teaches at the Iliff School of Theology and Regis University in Denver, Colorado

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With this point in mind, Nietzsche takes Kants categorical imperative as the
very recipe for decadence, even for idiocy (A,11). The ideas of a good-in-itself
and universal (noncontextual) notions of cirtue and duty are chimeras and
expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life (A, 11). They make duty
impersonal. Nietzsche does not dismiss notions of duty and virtue but only
suggests that they must be personal discoveries. Regarding Kant, he says: Yet
this nihilist with his Christian dogmatic entrails considered pleasure an objection. What could destroy us more
quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any inner necessity,
without any deeply personal choice, without pleasureas an automaton of
duty? (A,11) For Nietzsche, the result of this is a general weakening of the
human personality. Along similar lines, Nietzsche takes Kants aesthetics to lead to the same sort of weakening of
human personality. For Kant, Nietzsche quotes, the beautiful is that which gives us pleasure without interest (GM, III:6).
Nietzsche is amused by this, writing, If one can even view undraped female statues without interest, one may laugh a little at
their expense (GM, III:12). Nietzsche offers Stendhals idea of beauty as a contrast to Kants disinterested aesthetic. Stendhal
calls the beautiful une promesse de Bonheur, which ought to arouse the will (GM, III:6). In schopenhauer, Nietzsche finds a
manifestation of the Kantian aesthetic that brings its nihilism into clear light. Making use of the Kantian notion of disinterested
beauty, Schopenhauer finds aesthetic contemplation to be lupulin and camphor, a sort of anesthesia for the will. Asking us to
listen to its tone and sentiment, Nietzsche quotes Schopenhauer: This is the painless condition that Epicurus praised as the
highest good and the condition of the gods; for a moment we are delivered from the vile urgency of the will; we celebrate the
Sabbath of the penal servitude of volition, the wheel of Ixion stands still! (GM, III:6) Schopenhauer thought that the beautiful
should calm the will, and, by calming it, the human being can find a degree of relief. Not far down the road from this point in

To be sure, there is a
difference between the last man and the human being Kant envisioned as
governed by the categorical imperative. But insofar as Kant relegated the
sphere of meaningfulness to the sphere of the noumena, he made such a
realm ultimately unavailable. If such a person were to live according to the
Kantian worldview, with a high degree of honesty, he or she would
resemble, as Nietzsche writes, the German writer Heinrich von Kleist. In
1811, Kleist committed suicide. His desire to live was diminished earlier
when his conviction that the world was meaningful, purposeful, and
knowable was shattered by Kants epistemology. Nietzsche writes in Schopenhauer as Educator
that Kleist suffered from a despair of truth (SE, 3). This danger, he continues,
accompanies every thinker whose starting point is Kantian philosophy (SE,
3). Nietzsche then goes on to quote a letter from Kleist: A short while a go I
became acquainted with Kants philosophyand I must now share with you
one of his ideas, whereby I dare not fear that it will shatter you as deeply and
painfully as it did me. We cannot decide whether what we call truth is really truth, or whether it only appears to us
intellectual history is Nietzsches last man, who no longer desires anything.

to be such. If the latter is the case, then the truth we collect here is nothing upon our death. And all our efforts to procure a
possession that will follow us to the grave are in vain

and I have no other.

My sole, my supreme aim has disappeared,

(SE, 3).

Kants categorical imperative creates a world where people are impersonal

to the notion of duty. A nation following this categorical imperative of
impersonal duty will assure its destruction as it makes a nation of
conscience lacking machines.
Nietzsche
The Antichrist
Friedrich

1895

A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it

must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case it is a

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source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue
which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of "virtue," as Kant
would have it, is pernicious. "Virtue," "duty," "good for its own sake,"
goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity
these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the
decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Konigsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most
profound laws of selfpreservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find hisown virtue, his own categorical imperative. A
nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of
duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every
"impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.To
think that no one has thought of Kant's categorical imperative as dangerous
to life!...The theological instinct alone took it under protection !An action prompted by the lifeinstinct proves that it is a
right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded

What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and

feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without
pleasureas a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for decadence,
and no less for idiocy. . . Kant became an idiot. And such a man was the contemporary of
pleasure as an objection . . .

Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopherstill passes today! . . . I forbid myself to say

Didn't Kant see in the French Revolution the

transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic ? Didn't he ask
what I think of the Germans. . . .

himself if there was a single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the basis
of it, "the tendency of mankind toward the good" could be explained, once and for all time? Kant's answer: "That is revolution."
Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German decadence as a philosophythat is Kant!

The categorical imperative destroys any individualism and promote

sovereignty by claiming in the name of self-preservation we must embrace a
universal ethics
White 97
(University of Illinois Press, Nietzsche and the problem of sovereignty)
Kants philosophy may have enabled the resurgence of tragic wisdom. But it soon became clear to Nietzsche that while his own
philosophy was also concerned with the sovereignty of the individual, Kantian solutions, like the categorical imperative, must

Nietzsche describes the

categorical imperative as typical metaphysical ploy. He views it as an
attempt to escape or redeem individual existence by directing it after a law
that is both universal and necessary. The fundamental laws of selfpreservation and growth demand that everyone invent his own virtue, his
own categorical imperative, he writes. Nothing ruins us more profoundly,
more intimately than every impersonal duty, every sacrifice to the Moloch
of abstraction AC sec. 11). We might say that for Kant we are only moral (and hence autonomous) agents insofar as
entail the complete oblivion of the individual as such. In The Antichrist, for example,

we disregard the particularities of space and time to consider ourselves the embodiment of universal law. Arguing from the

Nietzsche asserts that the categorical imperative is

therefore an immoral concept since it suppresses the singularity of
individual existence within the monotonous rule of law. In fact, Nietzsche
realized that by reason by itself, or through the meditation of the
categorical imperative, may never be used to direct or determine the nature
of individual sovereignty. This conclusion is in keeping with our basic
understanding of what sovereignty means. If sovereignty really is the
celebration of the individual, or that mode of being in which the individual
perspective

of

sovereignty,

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achieves some kind of self-possession, the legislation of any specific formula

for sovereignty actually denies individuality by attempting to order it in
advance. The paradox here is that no one may simply legislate sovereignty, since sovereignty is precisely the
commandment one has over oneself. Thus, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche celebrates his own life and the project of self-appropriation,
but he deliberately frustrates all imitation when he warns about the danger of all books, or when he counters the heroic portrayal
of himself as the champion of impossible causes with a warning to beware of all great poses(EH Why I Am So Clever sec. 10).
Clearly, he understood that to prescribe the specific content of sovereignty is ipso facto to destroy it; and he was therefore bound
to reject Kans circumspection of autonomy and sovereignty in the formula of the categorical imperative. In the end, Nietzsches
criticism of Kant is really a critique from within. For it is an attempt to radicalize Kant that is still guided by the same sovereign
ideal that is common to both of them. And perhaps for this reason ,

Nietzsches invective against Kant is

so relentless and impassioned; for in this way he empathizes the essential
difference between their retrospective projects. In fact, Nietzsches
meditation on Kants doctrine of sovereignty suggests the paradoxical
nature of Nietzsche own philosophical goal. In all of the passages quoted
above, Nietzsche criticizes Kant because the latter has abandoned the
individual to the rule of the impersonal law. Clearly, Nietzsches goal is
somehow to rescue individuals from whatever values, institutions, or
moralities constrain them and encoureage self-oblivion. But if sovereignty is to be
identified with the affirmation of the individual as such, then it follows that sovereignty can never be conceptually appropriated;
the individual is that which cannot be analyzed, reduced, or repeated in language: individuum ineffabile est. In this sense,
however, a philosophy of sovereignty is bound to express that which can never be said. Hence it must remain deeply
problematic and will require every kind of ruse and strategy if it is ever to succeed.

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*****BIOPOWER*****
**Link: State Ethics**

The affirmatives attempt to secure society allows for the government to

rule a state of exception on behalf of Humanitarian Imperatives. It allows the
sovereigns biopower to go global
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at
the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of
Human Security Sage Journals) MF
The second area of complementarity can be seen as relating to the manner in which Agamben
articulates the relationship between bare life and the exercise of sovereign power as one that operates
through the state of exception. What we argue here is that human security is instrumental

in sovereign powers ability to delineate the circumstances in which such a

state of exception can be proclaimed. What the discourse of human security
does, whether broad or narrow, is to help define the exceptional circumstances that
require the international communitys intervention , whether on behalf of
humanitarian imperatives as initially conceived or in the service of maintaining global order as
made evident more recently. It does so by initially constructing the terms that
inform the exceptional circumstances that define the range of threats to
human life. In turn, it contributes to the labour of defining and authorizing
when the suspension of conventional international law of nations can occur .
The question that surfaces at this juncture is what authorizes the suspension of the law in the name of
human security when the discourse of human security has yet to find its codification as international
law? In other words, what allows human security to stand before the law? Returning to Agamben,
human security can be understood here as participating in the institution of a form of sovereign power
insofar as it simultaneously operates within and outside the law. It points towards a zone of indistinction
in relation to its efforts to codify the authorization of a form of international intervention that becomes
apparent in the fact that this authorization has yet to receive the status of international law while, at
the same time, it must invoke the force that law normally assumes. The human security discourse thus
finds itself in an aporia in relation to international law, which it must suspend while simultaneously
invoking its force. On this point, Agambens reading of the relationship between sovereign power and
biopower clearly brings back an element of analysis that is intentionally left aside in Foucaults
biopoliticization of sovereign power highlighted through his reading of racism noted earlier. Agamben
allows us to reintroduce the connection between the institution of the juridico-political order and
biopower, which much of Foucaults work on modern forms of power under the rubric of a multiplicity of
force relations sought to sever (Neal, 2004: 375). Having said that, Agambens reading is not entirely
satisfactory either, which leads us to the final element of the assemblage between sovereign power and
biopower brought to light by the human security discourse. Following Connollys critique noted earlier,
Agamben appears to maintain a view of the logic and paradox of sovereign power as coherent and
ultimately centred on the sovereignty of the state. The cartography of the form of sovereign power that
articulates itself through the human security discourse would seem to complicate this view. Human

security can be read as informing the institution of a form of sovereign

power that ultimately has as its plane of exercise the globe. This element of
globality emerges most clearly in the manner in which the human security
discourse articulates threats. Constituting threats specifically in terms of
threats to human life means that the human security discourse, through a
categorization and accounting of such threats, must constitute them with a

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view of (in)security that is global. In conceptual terms, viewing human life as a

grounds upon which the (in)security dilemma is played out makes the life of
the human species the referent of security (Dillon, 2007). To be sure, the human
security discourse in practice identifies these threats as emanating from
specific locales insofar as its interventions target delimited non-Western
populations, and thus the Western state clearly continues to play a central
role in mounting the recent series of international interventions . However, too
much emphasis on the state misses how such interventions have come to depend upon strategic
complexes of global governance that bring together state and non-state actors, public and private
organizations, military and civilian organisations (Duffield, 2001: 45). In helping to constitute

key elements of the state of exception, the human security discourse

prepares the conceptual ground upon which such complexes are bound up
with instituting a form of global sovereign power unmoored from the formal
juridico-political sovereignty of any one state or coalition of states . Within the
post-9/11 moment, then, human security can be seen as having laid the conceptual
terrain for a form of human subjectivity amenable to the exercise of global
sovereign rule. Rather than seeing a disjuncture between pre- and post-9/11, human security
proposes a form of life that is intimately connected to the assemblages of biopower and sovereign
power that mark this rule.

The modern humanitarian movement is rendered in biopolitical terms and

actually works to extend the states biopolitical control to a global scale
Doucet 2008

(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at
the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of
Human Security Sage Journals)
This article has sought to explore the interconnections between biopower and sovereign power in
relation to the human security discourse. An entry point into understanding factors contributing to such
an assemblage is to be found precisely in the shifting conceptions of security in the postwar period. In
this frame, the circulatory dynamics become the new grounds upon which to understand global order in
terms of security. From here, the broadening and deepening of security can be
traced to the apprehension of irremediable threats at a global level . It is from
this general context that we can comprehend the advent of the human security discourse in both its
broad and narrow forms. While the human security discourse draws from the transformations of security
in the postwar environment, it also, we argued, moves towards new terrain. Most notably, it casts the
problematique of (in)security in biopolitical terms by having the health and welfare of populations as its
referent. Much of the initial work of the human security discourse has been

about properly ordering, categorizing and accounting for the true threats
to human life. More recently, the formalization and institutionalization of the human security
discourse within the UN has begun to locate areas of strategic intervention that, informed by
rationalities of governmentality, are meant to minimize risks by distinguishing between good and bad
circulation. In the post-9/11 era, we identify continuity rather than rupture in the human security
discourse. While many would see the humanitarian impulse within the human

security discourse as anathema to emerging patterns of world order signed

by the global war on terrorism, we make the argument that, in rendering
life in biopolitical terms, this discourse in fact prepares the ground for the
operation of a form of sovereign power that claims the globe as its field of
operation. What an institutional examination of the human security discourse affords us is a way in
which we can trace the assemblage of sovereign power and biopower in the contemporary moment
while concurrently revealing a complexity to this articulation that escapes its more formal theorization.

In rendering life bare and politically unqualified, human security enables a

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form of human subjectivity amenable to the sway of sovereign power

exercised from the global realm. Moreover, we argue that the human security discourse is
intimately bound with the problematique of exceptionality, and thus participates in providing the
ground for the justification of suspending founding elements of international law while simultaneously
seeking the force that law must entail in order to authorize a new form of international intervention.
Finally, we suggest that this production of human subjectivity that the human

security discourse participates in enabling, coupled with the logic of

exceptionality in the post-9/11 moment, can be understood as providing the
grounds for an exercise of sovereign power on a planetary scale.
The States attempt to be ethical is just a cover to increase biopolitical
control over the population. Humanitarian intervention is meant to justify
state sponsored security and control over life
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at
the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of
Human Security Sage Journals)

During the 1990s, the concept of human security circulating among

academics, governments, policy institutes, nongovernmental organizations,
intergovernmental bodies and the media became increasingly influential in
narrating the changing patterns of world order and prescribing action within
them. Meant to figure the shifting source and meaning of threats, human
security coincided with the broader labour of redefining traditional notions
of national security that had begun in the 1970s but intensified with the collapse of the Cold
War. Although the discursive economy of human security tended to be divided between strong notions
(emphasizing threats such as famine, hunger, disease and economic crisis) and narrow readings
(focusing on violence, state failure, civil war, crimes against humanity and genocide ), the common

thread that tied the discourse together was the emphasis on shifting the
referent from the state to the individual and, thus, bringing security down to
the lives of human beings. In so doing, the discursive economy of human
security not only sought to unravel the notion of security from statism and
the interstate system, but also attempted to couple security with the
concerns of international humanitarianism and human development. The
responses to world order marked by the events of 9/11 seem to have created two positions with regards to the present and future
of the concept of human security.1 On the one hand, there are those who would argue that 9/11 sounded the death knell of the
human security discourse. The military actions and the counter-insurgency campaigns waged in various parts of the globe that
sign the global war on terror would suggest a violent and brutal return to the discourse of traditional state-centric security and
the concomitant collapse of the vaunted New World Order foretold in the early 1990s from which the notion of human security

From unsanctioned, preemptive military actions against harbouring

states and rogue states and targeted military operations to support the war
on terror, to extralegal detention centres, state-sponsored assassinations,
extraordinary rendition, deportation without due process, suspension of
habeas corpus and indefinite detention, the contemporary moment certainly
does not seem to leave much space for governance with a human face. On
emerged.

the other hand, for others, while the policies and actions unleashed by the global war on terror
certainly appear to mark a setback in the form of world order that is necessary for the continued
implementation of human security, 9/11 served as a stark reminder of the kinds of socio-economic
conditions that the broader human security discourse was meant to remedy. Advocates would point to
the continued institutionalization of this discourse within the United Nations as

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United States do not obviate the need for,

and have not mitigated the continued articulation of policies and practices
aimed at, the development of a more humane form of global governance.
evidence that the unilateral measures of the

This article argues that both possible responses leave unattended the manner in which the human
security discourse works towards setting the terrain for the transition from the pre- to the post-9/11
world order. The initial humanitarian imperatives that drive the discussions

surrounding the need to bring greater security to human lives help to

constitute a form of life amenable to an exercise of the form of sovereign
power that has marked the post-9/11 era. This article traces this alternative reading by
illustrating how the concept of human security can be read as working to set the
discursive terrain for the dual exercise of sovereign power and biopower .
Using the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, we outline this duality by examining not only
how the human security discourse participates in defining the conditions of exceptionality, thus
enabling the exercise of sovereign power, but also how, in having human life as its target,
human security ultimately enacts the human in biopolitical terms. Seen from this
vantage point, the concept of human security informs the current biopolitical

networks of global governmentalities and works in conjunction with rather

than against the exercise of sovereign power made evident by the global
war on terrorism. The article also seeks to turn the discussion towards theory by bringing to light
how our reading of the conceptual deployment of human security from the vantage point of the
international leads to assemblages of sovereign power and biopower unanticipated by the theoretical
articulations offered by Foucault and Agamben. Our initial aim is to examine what, at first sight, may
appear as two competing modalities of power that is, sovereign power and biopower. We then turn to
the concept of security with regards to the conditions of possibility for the development of the human
security discourse in the post-Cold War world. This sets the stage for our examination of human
security. Here, our objective is twofold: (a) to interpret the concept of human security through biopower
and sovereign power, as noted above, and (b), conversely, to use the human security

discourse as a vantage point from which to read the way in which these
technologies of power can be seen as interwoven in ways not made evident
by their theoretical articulation.
The idea of human rights and a states obligation to protect things like
hunger is just the moving of security discourse into the private life. This idea
of an ethical responsibility is just the states excuse for further biopolitical
control of everyday life
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at
the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of
Human Security Sage Journals)
DT

What we propose below is an examination of the complementarity between sovereign power and biopower via the concept of
human security as it has been articulated from the realm of the international, while concurrently revealing how the human
security discourse itself provides a way of tracing some of the complexity highlighted above, thus problematizing the more formal
and theoretical assemblage of sovereign power and biopower found in the work of Foucault and Agamben. In order to place this
analysis in context, we begin by tracing the discourse of security from the post-World War II context onward. What we intend to
show is that the shift from the term defence to security helps set the terrain from which the interweaving of biopower and
sovereign power found in the concept of human security is rendered possible. The formal origins of the concept of human security
are to be found in the worldview of an international organization that was concerned with post- Cold War humanitarian issues, and
only subsequently became enmeshed in the discourse of national foreign policy concerns and academic debates on security.

the
initial impulse was to shift the referent from the state to the legitimate
concerns of ordinary people who s[eek] security in their daily lives (UNDP, 1994:
22). In other words, the objective was to bring security down to the level of human
Generally attributed to the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report and some of the concurrent writings of Mahbub ul-Haq ,

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life by seeking to develop strategies in the provision of both safety from

such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression and protection from
sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life whether in
homes and jobs or in communities (UNDP, 1994: 23). In so doing, security was to be
decoupled from the particular national interest of states and tied to the
universal concern[s] (UNDP, 1994: 22) of all people. In articulating itself universally, human
security was therefore initially meant to be built upon the bedrock of
universal human rights. This move would be accompanied by efforts to
identify a comprehensive list of threats that the all encompassing (UNDP,
1994: 24) concept of human security would respond to that is, economic,
food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security (UNDP,
1994: 2425). Clear connections were made between severe impediments to human development and pervasive
and chronic threats to the fulfilment of human potential. Such a broad formulation sought to transcend the state,
insofar as it brought into question its role as a provider of security relative to other actors for example,
international organizations, NGOs and non-military government agencies while simultaneously identifying the
state itself as a potential source of insecurity. This elision of the state also served to make the quotidian the object
of security. Whereas security tended to be understood in terms of defining historical moments centred around the
survival and integrity of the state, we now see emerging an understanding of (in)security that arises more from
worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event (UNDP, 1994: 22). In this way, human
security certainly participated in the broader redefinition of security begun in the 1970s and 1980s; however, it also
set off on new terrain, in that shifting its referent to the individual introduces as threats a host of contingencies that
emerge from daily life. This initial deployment of the concept in the mid-1990s was subsequently accompanied by
other efforts to theorize human security in ways that would be more amenable to the multilateral and middle-power
approaches found in the foreign policy concerns of certain states. Examples like the Responsibility

To Protect generally moved away from the broader development concerns of

the Human Development Report towards a more narrow focus on introducing
a new set of international norms on intervention that would guide and
restrict the conduct of the state and the international community in
extreme and exceptional cases (ICISS, 2001: 31). Here, the threats are
concomitantly narrowed down to violent threats to individuals (Human Security
Center, 2005: viii), such as mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible
expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease
(United Nations, 2004: 65). Emphasis shifts from an understanding of threats that stem from a broad set of
quotidian political, social, economic and environmental contingencies, to what are deemed to be avoidable
catastrophe[s] (United Nations, 2004: 65). Within this context, there is a partial but significant return to the state,
in that it is through the nexus of the state that the provision of both security and insecurity, by state and non-state
actors, is predominantly understood.

The State exploits and destroys the Other in the name of humanitarian
intervention and for the sake of humanity as a whole
Doucet 2008

(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at
the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of
Human Security Sage Journals) MF

The traditional apparatus of the state as concerns its monopoly over the
(il)legitimate use of violence also makes its return in the form of military
intervention as a response of last resort to the extreme violation of rights
that are held as inviolable. This then enables the shift towards tying security
to the notion of the states ability or inability to fulfil its responsibility to
protect the human beings within its care. In this sense, the referent and threats
continue to be articulated in non-territorial forms, as within the broader

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notion of human security, but the responses are framed within the nexus of
the state and therefore call forth a statist conception of security . This return
to the state is made all the more evident in the manner in which the
narrower concept of human security centres around (re)defining norms
surrounding the legitimacy of the international communitys right to intervention. Such an effort
attempts to inaugurate and codify a new law around a set of norms that
simultaneously requires the suspension of certain foundational elements of
international law in cases of violence which so genuinely shock the
conscience of mankind, or which present such a clear and present danger
to international security, that they require coercive military intervention
(ICISS, 2001: 31) on the part of the international community. It is the concept of human security that
serves to define and identify the extreme and exceptional circumstances that it itself requires in the
subsequent formulation of its responses. In so doing, the human security discourse

participates in setting the conditions for both the suspension of the law and
the authorization of its refounding in the form of new norms of intervention .
As we will explore below, this marks a key dimension of the operation of the concept
of sovereign power elaborated earlier. The bulk of the most current stage of the development of
the human security discourse can be found in the institutionalization of that discourse within the UN,
beginning with the 2004 report by the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (United
Nations, 2004), the UN Secretary-Generals 2005 report In Larger Freedom (United Nations, 2005a), the
General Assemblys World Summit Outcome Document in September 2005 (United Nations, 2005b), and
UN Security Council Resolutions 1674 and 1706, adopted in April and August of 2006, respectively.
These documents which set the stage for the formalization of the human security discourse within the
UN via its two main bodies.10 In parallel with these developments, the independent Advisory Board on
Human Security and the Human Security Unit (HSU) within the Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) were created in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Both were fashioned as a
result of the recommendations formulated in the Human Security Commissions (2003) report Human
Security Now, and both were charged with disseminating and integrating human security within the UN
and beyond. These activities have been financed by the UN Trust Fund for Human Security (UNTFHS),
set up by the government of Japan, which also sponsored the establishment of the Commission.11 The
Human Security Unit reports that an average of 24 projects have been funded per year since 2004.
While these developments are recent and cannot be overstated given the chill that 9/11 brought to the
debates on international humanitarian intervention, they do however indicate an attempt at
mainstreaming the concept of human security through a process of initiating formalization and
institutionalization. What follows is a reading of the broad and narrow conceptions of human security
informed by our earlier elaboration of the concepts of sovereign power and biopo wer.

The ability of the state to apply good or bad ethical claims is the root of
security discourse. In the name of ethics the affirmative gives the state
increased biopolitical control.
Doucet 2008
(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at
the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of
Human Security Sage Journals) MF

In (re)defining the threats to human life as its most basic operation, the
discourse of human security must begin by defining and enacting the human
in biopolitical terms. The target of human security, whether broad or
narrow, is to make live the life of the individual through a complex of
strategies initiated at the level of populations. In defining and responding to
threats to human life, these strategies have as their aim the avoidance of

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risk and the management of contingency in the overall goal of improving the
life lived by the subjects invoked in their own operation . In this sense, as with
Foucaults understanding of the biopolitical, the health and welfare of populations is human securitys
frame of intervention; however, until its recent institutionalization within the UN , the human
security discourse, from the vantage point of the international, has been marked mostly

by defining and identifying the global patterns and trends of human

insecurity. In other words, the human security discourses initial move is found
in creating the measurements that aggregate the threats to human life . The
clearest example of this initial labour in relation to the narrower understanding of human security can
be found in the Human Security Report in 2005, which boasts that no annual publication maps the
trends in the incidence, severity, causes and consequences of global violence as comprehensively
(Human Security Centre, 2005: viii). This quest to properly order, categorize and account for the true
threats to human life in the post-Cold War world is also exemplified in the series of UNDP reports. As
Mark Duffield & Nicholas Waddell (2006: 5) point out, the UNDP . . . launched its annual Human
Development Report in 1990, dedicating it to . . . ending the mismeasure of human progress by
economic growth alone. It is through this mapping that the human security

discourse then advocates on behalf of specific areas of strategic

intervention in the name of the health and welfare of targeted populations .
Although still in their infancy, the strategies are meant to foster development as a
means of securing the health and welfare of targeted populations . Recent
programmes detailed by the Human Security Unit include preventing the abuse of illicit drugs in
Afghanistan; addressing the health of women and adolescents affected by HIV in Honduras, El Salvador
and Guatemala; contributing to the provision of more secure access to small-scale energy services for
local basic necessities in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Guinea; combating the trafficking of women
and children in Cambodia and Vietnam; providing access to education in Kosovo; integrating displaced
peoples in Colombia; promoting the radio broadcasting of information covering humanitarian issues in
areas of Africa and Afghanistan; building civic participation and self-reliance in Timor-Leste; and
stabilizing refugee host communities through a multifaceted strategy that includes the reduction of
small arms and the provision of basic education, food and environmental security in Tanzania (United
Nations Human Security Unit, 2006). Such programmes operate at the level of the chronic insecurities in
the day-to-day life of targeted populations. They envision human security as part of comprehensive,
integrated, people-centered solutions (United Nations Human Security Unit, 2006: 2) that are meant to
provide a measure of remedy to quotidian threats. While the programmes target specific populations in
delimited locales, the threats are themselves framed in regards to circulation and

seek to ultimately distinguish the bad from the good flows in terms of
(in)security. In this scenario, following from the programme examples above, good
circulation would include information on humanitarian issues, civic
participation and self-reliance; bad circulation would entail, inter alia,
trafficking, illicit drugs and small arms. Returning to Foucaults understanding of security
and circulation elaborated earlier, the frame of intervention of the human security
discourse, in seeking to maximize the positive elements and minimize the
risks to human life, operates on a terrain of calculability that attempts to
manage the incalculable through probabilities. In its initial stages, the objective of
the human security discourse, in seeking to distinguish between bad and
good circulation, had as its primary grammar of reference sustainable
human development.12 With the post-9/11 moment and the ensuing war on terror, however,
the distinction between good and bad circulation tends to take as its frame of reference global order.
With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as the subsequent bombings in
Madrid and London, the globality of the circulation of threats for the West becomes more explicit, and
consequently a new cartography of threats and vulnerabilities is drawn up and rationalities and
technologies are deployed to counter them. As Duffield & Waddell (2006: 10) explain in relation to the
war on terrorism: The predominance of security concerns, especially homeland

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security, means that issuesof global circulation of people, weapons,

networks, illicit commodities, money, information, and so on emanating
from, and flowing through the worlds conflict zones, now influence the
consolidating biopolitical function of development. Unlike Duffield & Waddells work,
the tack we would like to follow in the section below is not directed towards
tracing the biopolitical function of international development practices in
relation to the war on terror, but to the way in which the human security
discourse participates in setting the terrain for and the deployment of
sovereign power.
In the name of humanitarian and ethical concerns the government
intervenes even more into the person life of the people. The biopolitical
order is reinforced by the idea that the state has a responsibility to its
people and therefore has a right to control it.
Doucet 2008

(Miguel De Larrinaga and Marc G, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa, Associate Professor at
the Department of Political Science at Saint Marys University, Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of
Human Security Sage Journals) MF
One would be hard pressed to find a more paradigmatic symbol of the post- 9/11 world order than
Camp Delta. Guantnamo Bay has become the prime example through which

the question of exceptionalism and its bounded relationship to sovereignty

has come to the fore.13 How is it possible to reconcile the biopolitical function of human security
outlined above with the exceptional times of the post-9/11 world? What are the mechanisms and
assemblages through which we can understand the complementarity between biopower and sovereign
power? In this final section, we explore what we understand to be two key dimensions that mark the
complementarity between these forms of power while simultaneously showing how their articulation
problematizes the way in which they have been understood in theoretical terms. We have already
explored via Agambens work how rendering life bare can be seen as the originary activity of sovereign
power. What can be brought to light here, in relation to our discussion of human security above, is that
the life lived by the subjects of the human security discourse can be seen as life lived as bare
inasmuch as this discourse is not meant to qualify political life. As explored previously, life through the
lens of human security is understood primarily in terms of providing for the basic sustenance of day-today life. Brought into the post-9/11 context, what this enables is an opening

towards mapping global order in a way that apportions this bare life in
relation to zones of exceptionality amenable to the logic of an exercise of
sovereign power. This is reflected in the way development objectives and
humanitarian goals now tend to submit more directly to the dictates of the
management of global order. Instead of targeting populations that are most
insecure as measured by the human security discourse and viewing the
provision of security to those populations as an end in itself, the targeting is
now overridden by the hard security concerns of homelands and ends
understood increasingly in terms of the aims of the global war on terror .14
While the human security discourse could always be critically interpreted as prioritizing its responses to
populations that are threatened in relation to servicing the maintenance of the global liberal order
(Chandler, 2004), the shift here can be understood as one where this servicing

reveals a more intimate connection between sovereign power, biopolitics

and the maintenance of post- 9/11 order. This connection comes in the way in which the
human security discourse prepares conceptually a form of life that is at hand for the mounting of
proactive interventions of pre-emption and prevention. We can see elements of this shift in the most

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recent institutional developments of the human security discourse within the UN. To be certain,

the

post- 9/11 moment can be taken as a movement away from a further

codification of grounds for humanitarian intervention that would have as its
objective the health and welfare of populations as an end in itself . As Alex
Bellamy (2006: 165) chronicles, the language of the World Summit Outcome
Document as it relates to the model of humanitarian intervention outlined in
the 2001 ICISS report was watered down in favour of reinforcing not only the
principle that the burden of protecting populations fell chiefly on individual
states, but also the idea that the threshold for interventions on
humanitarian grounds should be high. Thus, there was a clear shift in the
document away from what was meant to be shared responsibility between
the international community and the host state through a re-emphasis of the
responsibility of the latter. At the same time, the document also moved towards safeguarding
the Security Councils political discretion to choose when and whether it would intervene rather than
endorsing binding criteria that would compel the Council to act in cases of clear humanitarian
emergencies, as prescribed in the ICISS report (Bellamy, 2006: 166167). While these changes can
be seen as weakening the case for binding the Council to intervene on humanitarian grounds, they can

also be read as broadening the scope for interventions on discretionary

grounds. They do this by further codifying the range of justifications for intervention that emerged
from Security Council resolutions during the 1990s while simultaneously reaffirming the Councils ability
to choose which cases merit its attention. Perhaps most importantly, the outcome

document retains the understanding of sovereignty as responsibility

outlined in the ICISS report, reinforcing the notion that it is the host state
that has the primary responsibility to protect. The test of responsibility here
remains couched in terms of the biopolitical functions of the state insofar as
what is measured is the latters ability or inability to provide for the health
and welfare of the populations within its care. As recounted by Bellamy (2006: 164
167), the negotiations leading to the final draft of the outcome document came as a result of pressure
from representatives of states that wanted either a free hand to determine whether and when to
intervene (the USA) or to retain the traditional supremacy of sovereignty in terms of political and legal
autonomy (Russia and China). Although this can be taken as a deferral to the norms of territorial
inviolability, there is a continued adherence to an understanding of sovereignty

that is qualified in line with the states biopolitical functions, in that each
individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from
genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity (United
Nations, 2005b: para. 138). Combined with the endorsement of the Security Councils political discretion
on intervention, these most recent institutional developments could also be read

as a codification of sovereignty in biopolitical terms, and thus as reinforcing

the linkages between sovereign power and biopower.

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**Link: Ethics**
Foundationalism is a moral stance that leads towards a homogenous
biopolitical structure
Jeffrey Minson 1985
Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics

Foundationalism we define abstractly as follows. It views ethical

considerations as always grounding, and therefore ideally overriding other
considerations. The ethical cannot be confined to other province of human
and social life but rather subsumes all other provinces. This subsumption
consists in always being entitled to subject economic, political, artistic, legal
or any other aspects of situation to its criteria of evaluations. Moral evaluations takes
priority over other particularistic and consequently one-sided types of evaluations; these themselves lie under an injunction to

Evaluations takes the

form of subjecting actions or state of affairs to the test of whether they
conform to the first principles of that ethic. To take a well-known example from eighteenth century
attempt to take their cue from the ethic mode of evaluations which transcends them all.

political philosophy, Jeremy Benthams Fragment on Government advertised the merits of the principle of utility as the rock on
which all rationally justifiable Parliamentary legislation and social administration must be grounded: accurately apprehended
and steadily applied (the principle of utility) affords the only clue to guide a man through these straits (Bentham 1967, pp. 93,

However, philosophical theories hold no monopoly on this form of

argument. Anticipating the case-study on abortion in Chapter 8 below, it is on the basis of ethical foundationalism that
97).

people view abortion as primarily a moral issue, the questionable corollary of this view being that principled abortion law and
policy must flow from a prior consideration of its moral justifibiability. Foundationalism is never a purely ethical stance; over and
above principles of evaluations or justification, it always embodies a view (if not in explicit empirical propositions, then in its
metaphors, imagery and rhetoric) about its moral constituency i.e. the nature of the agents who are subjected to its constraints.
When Mary Midgley seeks to base her ethics on universal human needs, she neglects to take account of the extent to which the

foundationalism framework orders the space in which these universal

human attributes can appear as the prior and ethically decisive one.
Foundationalisms mode of evaluation conveys two implications in respect to
change: (i) if something is morally wrong, therefore we ought to move
heaven and earth to change it; and (ii) an imperialist impulse towards
homogenization, i.e. an urge to remould the whole world in the ideal image
of its first principles. For these reasons foundationalism may be singled out
as the single most important key to the enigma of the so-called eccentricity
of ethics which was first broached in the preface.
ethical

Attempts to coercively generalize ethical stances results in reinforcing the

already hierarchal and dominating system of the state, this coercively brings
people into the states control and is biopolitical
Richard Day 2001
Ethics, affinity and the coming communities. B.A.Sc.(UBC), M.A.(York,Toronto), Ph.D.(SFU)
Associate Professor

Contemporary Western societies are not only societies of the tree; they are also societies of
the state form. Since it is impossible to do justice to this concept here, I will
restrict the discussion to the couplet war-machine/state form, and the relations of this
couplet with the arborescent/rhizomatic distinction. State forms, at the highest level of
generality, are apparatuses of capture that bring outside elements inside
by connecting them up with an arborescent syste m. While Deleuze and Guattari do provide elements
of a genealogy (1986: 42437), they are careful to point out that the state form cannot be traced back to a point of origin. Rather, there have been

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states always and everywhere (429), coexisting in relations of competition and cooperation with war-machines, forces that are exterior to the state
apparatus and attempt to untie the bonds of capture (352), to destroy the State and its subjects (Deleuze and Parnet, 1983: 104). In terms of
social and political effects, states tend to perpetuate already instantiated (arborescent) forms, while war-machines tend to destroy old forms and
instantiate new ones through rhizomatic connections. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, revolutionary organization must be that of the war machine
and not of state apparatus (Guattari, 1995: 66); indeed, they see their own writing as an operation that weds a war machine and lines of flight,
abandoning . . . the State apparatus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 24). Yet, just as arborescent forms can grow rhizomatic appendages, states can
and must incorporate warmachines, tame them and put them to use in an institutionalized army, make them part of the general police function
(Deleuze and Parnet, 1983: 103). This is the special danger of the war-machine: if it does not succeed in warding off the development of a state
form, it must pass into the service of the state or destroy itself (104). It is here, in the form of ecstatic injunctions accompanied by somber warnings,
that Deleuze and Guattari, like Foucault, present not only a negative call to resistance, but also a consistent and positive ethicopolitical stance. At
times, they take us even further than this, advocating what Keith Ansell-Pearson has called novel images of positive social relations (Ansell-

We have no need to totalize that which is invariably

totalized on the side of [dead] power; if we were to move in this direction, it
would mean restoring the representative forms of centralism and a
hierarchical structure. We must set up lateral affiliations and an entire
system of networks and popular bases (Foucault, 1996: 78). This system of networks and popular
bases, organized along rhizomatic lines and actively warding off the development of arborescent structures, would
provide bases for social forces that neither ask for gifts from the state (as in the
liberal-democratic new social movements) nor seek state power themselves (as in classical Marxism).
Unlike the molar forms of social transformation, these molecular movements
would resist the will to domination in Foucaults sense, in favour of affinity;
that is, they would take up ethico-political positions but refuse to try
coercively to generalize these positions by making moral, ontological, or
other foundational claims.
Pearson, 1998: 410). Thus Deleuze:

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*****GOVERNMENT PROVISION*****
**Rimal**
Authoritarianism and constraints are key to avoid overpopulation and
resource crunch that will end life

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former

Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow
for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian
Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]

resources are finite. The conditions

that make life possible are being threatened by overpopulation and by industrial processes which
deplete resources and pollute air and water. Typically, the crisis is considered the result of increasing shortages in the physical environment. However, a more complete understanding of the
ecological crisis requires an examination of human nature, especially as it has been reflected in and
shaped by modern political thought since the Renaissance. Modern political thought, in a departure
from classical modes of reasoning, emphasized secularism, materialism, individualism, and
individual rights-the cornerstones of the political ideology of liberalism and the foundation of the
American political system. The resulting view of man's relations to his fellow man and to the
physical environment makes solutions to the ecological crisis particularly difficult in the United
States because, contrary to the liberal ideology and political institutions so long enjoyed here,
solutions will require constraints on individual and group behavior . The radical departure of modern
Essays on the ecological crisis usually stress the point that

political philosophy from the classical tradition becomes apparent on recalling Plato's Republic, in which Socrates and
the interlocutors sought to discover the meaning of justice as it appeared in the soul and in the city. Their dialetical
search for a just "City in Speech"-a hypothetical city-led them first to the simple city which provided for man's basic
needs. It was well ordered but assured adequate provisions for only the necessities of life. Though Socrates called it the
city healthy, Glaucon called it a "city of pigs," for it failed to satisfy man's desire for those comforts and conveniences
which go far beyond life's necessities. This point forced the interlocutors to continue the search for the City in Speech,
examining not only the requirements of justice but the nature of human desires and the source of proper limits for the

human beings must

control their desires, and the discovery and implementation of proper controls , said Socrates,
required rule by philosophers. In order for the City in Speech to come into being, philosophers
would have to become kings or vice versa. But since chances of wisdom coinciding with consent were slight,
soul and the city.' Creation of the just City in Speech reflected the ancient understanding that

Socrates completed the dialogue by showing how the City in Speech could degenerate because of the triumph of
governing principles other than wisdom. The City in Speech was left to stand only as a standard by which to evaluate

Its creation in the dialogue, however, exposed enduring political problems,

among them how to control human desires for material comforts and conveniences. The classical
actual political communities.

tradition assumed that part of the art of governing was the control of such desires.2 In many
ways modern political philosophy stood this classical tradition on its head by emphasizing popular

consent rather than philosophic wisdom as a major goal of politics. Individual rights and liberties
became the source of limits on governmental authority . Government came to be understood as
originating from a contract agreed to by autonomous individuals. And the pursuit of happiness
became largely a pursuit of material goods for which there were no natural limits. This modern
political philosophy has nurtured the liberal tradition in America. One of the major
accomplishments of the Founders was creation of a political system that legitimized the pursuit of
material comforts, that thinkers in the classical tradition had sought to harness. However, the
success of the Founders' experiment in liberal government depended on the infinite availability of
the natural resources necessary for such pursuits . Contemporary discovery of the earth's "carrying
capacity," or lim- its to nature's "commons," appears to jeopardize the continued success of the

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American experiment. If American political ideology and institutions have been successful in
encouraging pursuit of happiness through material acquisition, they appear incapable of
imposing the limits which are required to forestall ecological disaster. This incapability, in turn,
leads to arguments that popular government must give way to authoritarianism . But if
authoritarianism is the response to the inability of popular government to impose the limits required to avoid ecological
disaster, such a response merely reflects the crisis to which modern political philosophy and liberalism have led; it is
not itself a solution. There is no assurance that authoritarianism is any more capable of proper limits than is popular
government. Perhaps the best illumination of the dilemma posed by the ecological crisis is a review of the philosophy
of John Locke, whose thought profoundly influenced the Founders of the American republic.

Constitutional liberties encourage an unsustainable relationship with natural

resources
Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former
Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow
for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian
Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]
Lockean thought legitimated virtually endless accumulation of material goods; helped equate
the process of accumulation with liberty and the pursuit of happiness; helped implant the idea
that with ingenuity man can go beyond the fixed laws of nature, adhering only to whatever
temporary laws he establishes for himself in the process of pursuing happiness; and helped
instill the notion that the "commons" is served best through each man's pursuit of private gain,
because there will always be enough for all who are willing to work. In short, Lockean
philosophy led to a strong ideology of man's relationship to man and the earth, in which
autonomous individuals seek comfort and enjoyment through hard work and material
acquisitions. Such beliefs, added to the doctrine of inalien- able rights and the argument of
limited government, have played a significant role in the design of the American Constitution
and political

Private property and liberty encourages unsustainable resource

consumption

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former

Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow
for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian
Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]

Alexis de Tocqueville
observed that in America, "Nothing checks the spirit of enterprise ." He noted that
the enjoyment of liberty could not be separated from the "productive industry"
fostered by free enterprise. 14 The dream of life lived for the enjoyment of
liberty (freedom to pursue abundance through productive enterprise) and
happiness (the securing of abun- dance) appeared to be coming true. Nothing
in the constitutional structure threatened the dream, and it was increasingly
clear that government in the United States existed to secure the blessings of
property, just as Locke had taught. By the nineteenth century the radically secular
orientation of American liberalism was bolstered by developments in modern
natural science.15 Scientific advances provided new insights into the workings
of the physical environment and ways to control it. Technology and industrialism provided seemingly unlimited opportunities to create the material
abundance associated with happiness. Liberalism, argues Louis Hartz, proved its real
Less than forty years after the adoption of the Constitution,

strength in driving out any ideological forces which sought to compete with growing visions of
abundance and happiness on earth.16 Although liberal ideology and institutions nurtured

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neglected to
instill an understanding of America's dependence on natural resources. Foreign
observers saw the dependence much more clearly. For example, Tocqueville noted that: The
physical causes, independent of the laws, which contribute to promote general
prosperity, are more numerous in America than they have been in any other
country in the world, at any other period of history. In the United States not only is
legislation democratic, but Nature herself favors the cause of the people .17
the commitment to material abundance and earthly happiness in America, they

However, John Stuart Mill contended that despite such conditions un- limited growth was
impossible because the resources of nature were not infinite. Mill considered nature's physical
limits a blessing and looked forward to a "stationary state" in which population and capital
would be balanced. He said such a state would still man's productive passions and allow him to
cultivate social and moral endowments.l8 Nineteenth-century German biologist Ernest Haeckel
coined the term "ecology" in his effort to point out man's dependence on his physical
environment. Every system, he argued, reflects three qualities-interde- pendence, complexity,
and limitation.l9 But ecological lessons ran contrary to the liberal belief that

nature could and must be conquered to serve man's purposes. And repeated
warnings in this century that man could exceed the carrying capacity of the
environment if he did not limit population or industrial processes have gone
largely unheeded.20
Welfare is key to avoid the resource crunch that will end all life

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former

Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow
for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian
Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]
Of late, the warnings have intensified, notably in the reports of the Club of Rome. In 1972 a
sophisticated computer model developed by the Club projected that unless

population or industrialization is curtailed drastically, worldwide collapse of the

ecosphere will occur within 100 years.21 In 1974 an updated study responded to many
of the criticisms leveled at the 1972 report but came to only slightly more optimistic
conclusions: survival is possible, but only if man diverts from the path of
"undifferentiated growth" to "organic growth ." That is, growth compatible

with the requirements and limits of physical nature: For the first time in man's
life on earth, he is being asked to refrain from doing what he can do; he is
being asked to restrain his eco- nomic and technical advancement, or at least
to direct it differently from before; he is being asked by all the future
generations of the earth to share his good fortune with the unfortunate-not in a
spirit of charity, but in a spirit of survival.22

Tyranny is inevitable its only a question of how quickly we allow it to form

Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former
Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow
for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian
Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]

who now foresee and advocate authoritarianism as the only workable response to
ecological problems anticipate the demise of the liberal experiment in much the same way Socrates
Ironically, those

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anticipated the demise of democracy in Book vIII of the Republic. Socrates argued that democracy
inevitably leads to tyranny because of the refusal of the many to accept proper limits. The absence
of limits leads to chaos, which in turn gives way to tyranny because any order is better than no
order. The democratic man, unable to distinguish right from wrong, proper from improper,
eventually accepts tyranny in preference to the chaos which makes life unlivable . Hardin,
Heilbroner, and Ophuls suggest that modern man is, or soon will be, in a similar situation with
respect to the ecological crisis. Despite the hopes of "technological optimists" the carrying capacity
of the earth is bound to be exceeded unless rigid limits are imposed. Faced with chaos and
extinction, modern man will find authoritarianism the only alternative.
Frontline: Mutual coercion agreed upon by the majority will check bad
instances of coercion
Leeson 79 Adjunct Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, Former
Professor of Political Science at Willamette University, Former Judicial Fellow
for the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice for the Oregon State Supreme Court
[Susan, Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian
Challenge to Liberalism Polity Vol. 11, No. 3, pg. 303-318, jstor]

Hardin contends that coercion is the only remedy. As a safeguard against

arbitrary coerion, he prescribes "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon by the
majority of the people affected." 45 Presumably, majority rule will reduce the
possibility of arbitrariness since it will merely coerce the minority to behave in
ways that will not destroy the commons.
Uniqueness: A global authoritarian revolution is coming there is a lack of
political interest in the promotion of democratic freedoms.
Windsor, director of Freedom House; Gedmin and Liu, presidents of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty & Radio Free Asia, 09
(Jennifer Windsor, director of Freedom House; Jeffrey Gedmin and Libby Liu, presidents of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty & Radio Free Asia, June 2009, Undermining Democracy: 21st-Century
Authoritarians, http://www.underminingdemocracy.org/overview/)
When asked not long ago about the effectiveness of the European Unions posture toward an increasingly assertive and illiberal

European democracies
had lost their voice and needed to take a firmer, more open stand against abuses by
their large and strategically important neighbor to the east. * He warned that todays
Russia is advancing a new form of authoritarianism , with methods of control that are significantly more
Russia, former Czech president and communist-era dissident Vaclav Havel argued that the

sophisticated than the classic totalitarian techniques of the Soviet Union. Finally, the former Czech leader lamented that as
democratic states increasingly gave primacy to economic ties in their relations with Russia, the promotion of human rights was

The Kremlin was intensifying its repression of the political

opposition, independent journalists, and civil society organizations, but the response
from established democracies had softened to the point of inaudibility . Havel
was referring only to Russia, but he could just as easily have been speaking of China,
another authoritarian country whose high rates of economic growth and rapid
integration into the global trading system have had the effect of pushing the issues of
democratic governance and human rights to a back burner. China , like Russia, has
modernized and adapted its authoritarianism, forging a system that combines
impressive economic development with an equally impressive apparatus of political
control. As in Russia, political dissidents and human rights defenders in China continue to challenge the regime. Chinese
being shunted to the margins .

activists recently published Charter 08, a human rights and democracy manifesto that draws its inspiration from Charter 77, the
Czechoslovak human rights movement of which Havel himself was a founder. But while Europes anticommunist dissidents were

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the focus and beneficiaries of a worldwide protest movement, the Chinese intellectuals who endorsed Charter 08 labor in virtual
anonymity. Few in the United States and Europe are familiar with the name of Liu Xiaobo, a respected literary figure and leader of
Charter 08, who has been imprisoned by the Chinese authorities since December 8, 2008, for his advocacy of democracy and the
rule of law in China. Havel too spent years in jail during the Soviet period for questioning the communist authorities monopoly on
power and their denial of basic human and democratic rights. But the world paid attention to his plight; even government leaders
raised his case in meetings with communist officials. In China, Liu remains in detention and effectively incommunicado, and

Todays advocates for freedom may be

receiving less attention, and less assistance, from their natural allies in the democratic
world because the systems that persecute them are poorly understood in comparison
with the communist regimes and military juntas of the Cold War era . As a result, policymakers
democratic leaders rarely speak out publicly on his behalf.

do not appear to appreciate the dangers these 21stcentury authoritarian models pose to democracy and rule of law around the
world. It is within this context of shifting and often confused perceptions of threats and priorities that Freedom House, Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia undertook an examination of five pivotal statesRussia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and
Pakistanto advance our common understanding of the strategies and methods these regimes are employing, both within and

beyond their borders, to impede human rights and democratic development. The countries assessed in Undermining
Democracy were selected because of their fundamental geopolitical importance. They are integrated into larger economic,
political, and security networks and exert a powerful influence on international policy at the regional and global levels. However,

Iran, a unique authoritarian

polity ruled by Shiite Muslim clerics, looms over the Middle East . The governing cliques in
they are also geographically, economically, ideologically, and politically diverse .

Russia cloak their kleptocracy in a contradictory blend of Soviet nostalgia and right-wing nationalism.

Venezuela is ruled by a novel type of Latin American caudillo who holds up Fidel
Castro as his mentor. China sets the standard for authoritarian capitalism, with rapid economic
growth sustaining a single-party political system. Pakistan, a South Asian linchpin, is faltering
under the legacy of military rule and an extremist insurgency . Three of these countries
Iran, Russia, and Venezuelaare heavily dependent on oil and gas exports, and exhibit all of the
peculiar distortions of so-called petrostates. The present analysis comes at a time of global
political recession. According to recent findings from Freedom in the World, Freedom Houses
annual survey, political rights and civil liberties have suffered a net global decline for

three successive years, the first such deterioration since the surveys inception in
1972. Freedom Houses global analysis of media independence, Freedom of the Press, has
shown a more prolonged, multiyear decline . While the consolidated authoritarian systems of
China, Russia, and Iran are rated Not Free in Freedom in the World, and the rapidly evolving, semiauthoritarian states of Pakistan and Venezuela are currently rated Partly Free, all five have
played an important role in contributing to the global setbacks for democracy.
Uniqueness: Authoritarianism is spreading globally its already enmeshed
in global political and economic institutions.
Eckert, Reuters Asia Correspondent, 6-4
(Paul Eckert, Reuters Asia Correspondent, June 4, 2009, Democracy seen threatened by new
authoritarianism, http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE55344V20090604?sp=true)

China, Iran, Russia and Venezuela form a clique of authoritarian

states that use their wealth and influence to undermine global democracy and rule of
law, a study by U.S.-funded agencies said on Thursday. The report, released on the 20th anniversary
of China's suppression of the Tiananmen democracy movement, says these states' challenge to
Western democratic institutions represents a far "murkier picture" than the Cold War
because they are integrated into the global economy and world bodies. "Policymakers
do not appear to appreciate the dangers these 21st century authoritarian models pose
to democracy and rule of law around the world ," said the study by Freedom House, Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia, all prominent U.S. democracy-promotion bodies. " Just as
they rule without law within their borders, authoritarian regimes are eroding the
international rules and standards built up by the democratic world over the
past several decades, threatening to export the instability and abuses that
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -

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their systems engender," it said. The study said manufacturing and trading power
China and petro-states Iran, Russia and Venezuela shared strong similarities despite
their distinct political systems and backgrounds . Authoritarian capitalist China and Russia
have built systems that twin "impressive economic development with an equally
impressive apparatus of political control ," it said. CURBS ON OPPOSITION, MEDIA Shiite Muslim
clergy-ruled Iran and Venezuela, run by "a novel type of Latin American" strongman, held
managed elections amid curbs on the opposition and on media , it said. Ruling powers
in the four states buttressed their control with tight restrictions on the Internet and
media, promotion of nationalist versions of history in school textbooks and use of state
wealth to serve their own interests, said the report. Internationally, China has built a
strong following in Africa and Latin America with generous no-stringsattached aid packages. Russia, Iran and Venezuela have used oil wealth to
support regional clients, said the report. "At the regional and international level, these
authoritarian regimes are undercutting or crippling the democracy-promotion and
human rights efforts of rules-based organizations ," it said. Targets included the United
Nations, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the Organisation of
American States (OAS), added the report. The report also included Pakistan because of its
struggling democracy, history of military rule and growing extremist insurgency .

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**AT: Privatization**
Privatization Fails More Than Succeeds

Vestal, Staff Writer of Stateline.org, 06 (Christine Vestal, Staff Writer of Stateline.org, 8/4/06,
States Stumble Privatising Social Services, http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?
contentId=131960)
Advocates for the poor worry that putting too much responsibility in the hands of profit-motivated
companies could endanger the vulnerable people the programs are intended to help. Federal rules
require state employees to make final decisions for some entitlement programs, but letting a private
contractor make the initial eligibility cut could have a profound effect on welfare outcomes, they say.
Supporters of privatization argue that antiquated state eligibility systems no longer are cost-effective,
and say improvements best can be accomplished by a high-tech, profit-motivated contractor with
incentives to operate efficiently. Texas policy-makers say their plan not only will save taxpayer dollars
but modernize the social services eligibility process, allowing people to apply for support over the
Internet, by fax, through call centers and at self-serve kiosks. Currently social services applicants must
travel to their local social service offices during business hours and wait in line to talk to a caseworker.
Daniels, who left his post as Bushs top budget advisor to run for governor in 2003, grabbed headlines
this year when he privatized an Indiana toll road, granting a 75-year lease to a foreign consortium for
$3.8 billion. Most agree that the state welfare eligibility process with long lines, limited office hours
and error rates in the 25 percent rage -- needs improvement. But advocates for the poor argue that the
problems result from underfunding and understaffing, not lack of expertise. The only people with
experience in the complex and sensitive work of determining welfare eligibility are state workers. Why
would you hire a high-tech company to do that? asks Stacey Dean of the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, an advocacy group for the poor. Other privatization critics argue that transferring public
services to private companies has been plagued by quality-of-service problems for the last two
decades. The concept makes sense and state policy-makers always are eager to save money, but in
practice, privatization has failed more than it has succeeded, says Mildred Warner, a privatization
expert at Cornell University. In an analysis of privatization of state and local services over the last 20
years, Warner concluded that the majority of projects failed because of deteriorating quality of service.
And in more than half the cases, the projects did not save taxpayer dollars, she said.

No moral common good exists arguments that the free market will provide
for those in poverty are loose predictions and are nto morally motivated
Barry and Stephens 98 Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University and
Associate Professor Emeritus of Management at Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University [Bruce and Carroll U., Objections to an Objectivist
Approach to Integrity Academy of Management Review Volume 23, No. 1, pg
162-169, jstor]
I fully accept, however, that solidarity is desirable for and conducive to the stability of the
welfare state, although I will not venture an opinion as to whether it is necessary. I also realize
that questions of stability and legitimacy have a lot to do with each other (stability may for
instance depend upon the state's beingperceived as legitimate) but I still insist that the two
questions should be kept distinct analytically. Needless to say, in an all-things-considered
judgment, the question of what makes the welfare state function (a question of which stability is a
part) will have to be addressed but that is not what I do here . Besides, it is hardly a question best
dealt with by philosophers. I will concentrate on the normative question of legitimacy2. One
thing to note here is that for solidarity to do anything at all for the legitimacy of a certain state
arrangement it has to be solidarity on a state wide level. "Those very sentiments of loyalty and
solidarity" mentioned above are sentiments for all people within the same state. When the

existence of, or the likelihood of, such sentiments is made a component of legitimation, a picture is

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called to mind of a consensus oriented society with a substantially moral common good that
commands everyone's allegiance. The unreality of this picture aside, integrating such sentiments
in the legitimation of the welfare state is to make the strength of the justice claims of the less
fortunate dependent upon the moral motivation of the more fortunate. I do not accept that.
Legitimation requires moral argument, not loose predictions about what people may or may
not be morally motivated

Privatization Raises Death Rate

BBC News, 09 (1/15/09, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7828901.stm)
The researchers examined death rates among men of working age in the post-communist countries of
eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union between 1989 and 2002. They concluded that as many as
one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies. Following
the break up of the old Soviet regime in the early 1990s at least a quarter of large state-owned
enterprises were transferred to the private sector in just two years. This programme of mass
privatisation was associated with a 12.8% increase in deaths. The latest analysis links this surge in
deaths to a 56% increase in unemployment over the same period. However, it found some countries
with good social support networks withstood the turmoil better than others. Where 45% or more of the
population were members of at least one social organisation, such as a church group or labour union,
mass privatisation did not increase mortality. But Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
were worst affected, with a tripling of unemployment and a 42% increase in male death rates between
1991 and 1994.

Individual investors will be less profitable than the government ensuring the
failure of privatization
Anrig, vice president of policy at The Century Foundation, is the author of
The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, 04
(Greg Anrig, vice president of policy at The Century Foundation, is the
author of The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep
Failing, 12/14/2004, Twelve Reasons Why Privatizing Social Security is a
Bad Idea, The Century Foundation)
Privatization advocates like to stress the appeal of "individual choice" and
"personal control," while assuming in their forecasts that everyone's accounts
will match the overall performance of the stock market. But studies by Yale
economist Robert J. Shiller and others have demonstrated that individual investors are far more
likely to do worse than the market generally, even excluding the cost of commissions and
administrative expenses. Indeed, research by Princeton University economist Burton Malkiel
found that even professional money managers over time significantly underperformed indexes of
the entire market. Moreover, a number of surveys show that most people lack the knowledge to
make even basic decisions about investing. For example, a Securities and Exchange Commission
report synthesizing surveys of investors found that only 14 percent knew the difference between a
growth stock and an income stock, and just 38 percent understood that when interest rates rise, bond
prices go down. Almost half of all investors believed incorrectly that diversification guarantees
that their portfolio won't suffer if the market drops and 40 percent thought that a mutual fund's
operating costs have no impact on the returns they receive.
While predictions vary
significantly about how investment markets will perform in the decades ahead, it's safe to say

that any growth in individual accounts under privatization will be significantly lower than what the
overall markets achieve.

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Privatization Not Efficient

Towns, Ranking Democratic member, 97 (Rep. Edolphus Towns, Ranking Democratic Member,
11/4/97, Social Services Privatization: The Beneftis And Challenges To Child Support Enforcement
Programs, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Government
Reform and Oversight House of Representatives) [Sohn]
Privatization is the shifting of activities or functions from the governmental sector to the private sector
through vouchers, contracts or joint ventures. Before we begin that shift, we should ask whether the
activity is uniquely governmental; whether privatization would improve the economy and efficiency of
the activity and whether there is some reason to transfer a revenue stream from public to private
hands. According to the Urban Institute, there is no evidence that private service delivery is more
effective than public service delivery. The effectiveness of any service delivery depends on the same
key factors that the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight have always considered:
authority, accountability, and clarity. The General Accounting Office found that privatization in the
social service arena may be difficult to achieve because of a lack of qualified bidders. In addition to
possible contractor inexperience, there may also be a problem with governmental inexperience in
developing contract specifications, reviewing contractor bids, negotiating bond and performance issues
and monitoring overall outcomes. Mr. Chairman, I hope that we consider those findings today and
determine if those problems still exist.

Privatization Creates Disaster

Lantos, US Congressman, 97 (Tom Lantos, US Congressman, 11/4/97, Social Services Privatization:
The Beneftis And Challenges To Child Support Enforcement Programs, Hearing before the
Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight House of
Representatives) [Sohn]
Mr. Chairman, many of my friends on the other side of the aisle tend to view government as a disaster
and they are all too eager to solve a problem by turning it over to the private sector. Is Medicare too
expensive? Bring in private-sector HMOs. Irritated by the IRS? Let's hire private companies and sign a
contract. But back in California, we have learned an important lesson: The private sector can create
some spectacular boondoggles of their own at the expense of the taxpayer. California's experience with
contracting out government services to the private sector involves a Fortune 500 Corporation, a big pot
of tax dollars, and a computer system that is stuck in an endless loop of delays, cost overruns, and
excuses.
CORPORATIONS RUNNING THE PRIVATIZED ECONOMY ARE ANALOGOUS TO BIG GOVERNMENTS

Henig, political science professor, 90

(Jeffrey R. Henig, political science professor, 1990, Privatization in the
United States: Theory and Practice, Political Science Quarterly)
The first of these themes involved the analogy between government and
private monopolies. Characterizing government as a public monopoly
ACCOMPLISHED THREE THINGS. FIRST, IT Made criticisms of big government more accessible and
acceptable to a mass public that already had internalized the association between monopoly and
inefficiency, unresponsiveness, and waste. SECOND, IT gave criticisms of big government an anchor
in traditional microeconomic theory at the very time that the assumption that economists could
provide an objective and scientific underpinning for public policy was on the rise. THIRD, it made an
important step toward expanding the hegemony of economic theory. Economists previously had
based their claim to expertise upon the distinctiveness of the economic sphere; the analogy

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*****THE USFG*****
*****Courts*****
**Social Reform / Movements**
Judicial rulings fail to spur social movements on their own
Rosenberg, Gerald N. 2009 [University of Chicago political science and law professor,
law degree from University of Michigan, PH. D. from Yale. Romancing the Court.
Boston University Law Review, l/n, NS]
In other words, for judicial opinions to foster democratic accountability there must be public
and elite support, pre-existing groups and resources committed to the issue, a committed
leadership, and a predisposed target audience. When all these conditions are present, law can,
but not necessarily will, make a difference. McCann puts it this way: Even under the most
propitious circumstances . . . the contributions of legal maneuvers to catalyzing defiant
collective action will be partial, conditional, and volatile over time. 82 McCanns analysis
suggests that demos prudential dissents are neither necessary nor sufficient for mobilizing
social movements. They are not necessary because if there is an active social movement in
place then no judicial help is needed. They are also not sufficient because without a
preexisting movement and the other factors McCann identifies, such dissents will accomplish
nothing. Indeed, Guinier provides two examples of successful mobilization without
demosprudential dissents. She describes an extremely well-organized and successful
movement to restore voting rights to ex-felons in Rhode Island.83 She postulates that, [a]
dissent from the Supreme Court could help in such an effort,84 but activists in Rhode Island
did not need it. Similarly, she tells the story of how social movements in Missouri defeated an
attempt to enact a very strict voter identification bill,85 also without the help of
demosprudential opinions.

Courts cant produce social reform 3 reasons

Rosenberg, Gerald N. 2009 [University of Chicago political science and law professor,
law degree from University of Michigan, PH. D. from Yale. The Hollow Hope.
University of Chicago Press, p 10, l/n, NS]
The view of courts as unable to produce significant social reform has a distinguished pedigree
reaching back to the founders. Premised on the institutional structure of the American political
system and the procedures and belief systems created by American law, it suggests that the
conditions required for courts to produce significant social reform will seldom exist. Unpacked, the
Constrained Court view maintains that courts will generally not be effective producers of
significant social reform for three reasons: the limited nature of constitutional rights, the lack of
judicial independence, and the judiciarys inability to develop appropriate policies and its lack of
powers of implementation.

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**Courts Good: Generic**

Judicial supremacy key to maintaining constitutional unity and rights of
minorities.
Whittington in 7 <Keith E. (William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University), Political foundations of
judicial supremacy: the presidency, the supreme court, and constitutional leadership in U.S. history, 2007>
There are a number of justifications for judicial supremacy, and these justifications tend to overlap with the more political
justifications for judicial review. For some, judicial supremacy is essential to preserving the rule of law and
preventing constitutional anarchy. Thinking particularly of the competing constitutional assertions of the state
governments, this was Daniel Websters concern when he asked his congressional colleagues, [C]ould anything be more

preposterous than to make a government for the whole Union, and yet leave its powers subject, not to
one interpretation, but to thirteen, or twenty-four, interpretations? Instead of one tribunal, established
by and responsible to all, with power to decide for all, shall constitutional questions be left to four and
twenty popular bodies, each at liberty to decide for itself, and none bound to respect the decisions of
others? He doubted whether the government would be capable of long existing under such
circumstances. For others, the value of judicial supremacy is not in its capacity to provide authoritative legal settlements, but
in its capacity to provide substantively desirable legal settlements, but in its capacity to provide substantively desirable legal
outcomes. The judiciary alone serves as a forum of principle within the American constitutional system, capable of focusing on
questions of justice free from the din of the battleground of power politics. For still others , judicial supremacy is

regarded as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system because the Court
alone functions as a countermajoritarian institutions securing the liberties of individuals and political
minorities. Unfettered by political interests or popular prejudices, the judiciary can penetrate to the true meaning
of the Constitution and the subtle requirements of its principled commitments. Some questions
question of justice and rightsare too important to be left in the hands of legislative majorities or the
people themselves. Judicial supremacy insures that they are not .

Not adhering to precedent kills Court legitimacy

Hansford and Spriggs in 6 <Thomas G. (Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California,
Merced), James F. (Professor of Political Science, Professor of Law, Fellow in the Center for Empirical Research in Law, Washington
University in Saint Louis), The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court, 2006>
As a result of the norm of stare decisis, the Court can incur legitimacy costs by negatively interpreting a vital
insititionalized precedent. If instead of following a highly institutionalized, bedrock precedent (i.e., a highly
vital precedent) the Court chooses to treat the precedent in a negative manner, then the new policy set by
the Court may be perceived as being less legitimate . In other words, just as there are greater legitimacy benefits to
following a particularly vital precedent, there are potentially greater legitimacy costs to overruling or otherwise
undermining a precedent that is highly vital . There will be less of a legitimacy cost, on the other hand, when the Court
negatively interprets a precedent that is not particularly institutionalized or authoritative.
The vitality of a precedent, therefore, determines the extent to which the justices bear a legitimacy cost when negatively
interpreting the precedent. The more vital a precedent is, the greater the cost that results from treating the
precedent negatively. The ideological distance between the justices and the precedent has no effect on the costliness, in
terms of legitimacy, resulting from negative treatment. This argument can be represented as: legitimization of new policy=-b 8(V).

Undermining the Constitution causes extinction

Henkin Atlantic Comm Qtly 88 (Columbia, 1988, (, Spring)
Lawyers, even constitutional lawyers, argue "technically," with references to text and principles of
construction, drawing lines, and insisting on sharp distinctions. Such discussion sometimes seems
ludicrous when it addresses issues of life and death and Armaggedon. But behind the words of the
Constitution and the technicalities of constitutional construction lie the basic values of the
United Stateslimited government even at the cost of inefficiency; safeguards against autarchy
and oligarchy; democratic values represented differently in the presidency and in Congress, as
well as in the intelligent participation and consent of the governed. In the nuclear age the
technicalities of constitutionalism and of constitutional jurisprudence safeguard also the values and
concerns of civilized people committed to human survival.

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**Hollow Hope / Courts Bad**

The Supreme Court Prevents democracy
Zinn, historian, 2005
Howard Zinn, The Progressive, Its Not Up to the Court, http://progressive.org/mag_zinn1105

the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its
inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we
cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our
culture--the media, the educational system--tries to crowd out of our political
consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be
on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make.
They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which
is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil
disobedience that shake up the system. That is why Cindy Sheehan's dramatic stand in
Still, knowing

Crawford, Texas, leading to 1,600 anti-war vigils around the country, involving 100,000 people,
is more crucial to the future of American democracy than the mock hearings on Justice Roberts
or the ones to come on Judge Alito.

Link- Environment. The Courts were only able to help the environment once
the other branches had acted.

Rosenberg, Gerald N. University of Chicago political science and law professor. The Hollow Hope: Can
Courts Bring About Social Change? 1993. 271.
The decades of the 1960s and 1970s witnessed attempts to change much of American society.
Among these attempts was a movement to protect the environment. Part of that movement,
viewing courts as the crucial institution capable of producing change, focused on litigation.
Making explicit analogies from the civil rights movements use of the courts, early
environmental litigators explicitly aimed to contitutionalize a right to a healthy environment. In
later years, after a great deal of congressional legislation, environmental litigator went to court
aiming to broadly interpret and strictly apply these legislative attempts to protect the
environment. In this overview, I argue that while the attempt to constitutionalize a

right to a healthy environment could not overcome the constraints of the

judicial system, once the other branches acted, litigation was able to contribute
to environmental protection when one of the four conditions were present . That
is, when other actors added incentives or costs, courts were effective. Similarly,
when market forces supported court decisions, litigation helped. Finally, litigation made a
difference when those officials necessary for implementation were willing to act and use courts
as cover.

Controversial Supreme Court decisions spur confusion, accomplishing

nothing.
Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh
School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08
Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF
THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?
docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK
ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

A second, closely related, mechanism deals with words and meaning. Suppose, as a
hypothetical example, that the Supreme Court one day announces a new
approach to pupil assignment rules. Separate but equal educational facilities no

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longer satisfy the requirements of equal protection. n27 Instead, public school
authorities may not use race as a criterion for assigning students to schools, especially if they intend
to produce separate schools for white and black children.
Questions immediately arise as to what the Supreme Court meant. Does the ruling apply only in the
South? n28 Must school districts bus children to achieve racial balance, or may they rely on
remedies that operate on the [*151] basis of school choice? n29 What about segregation resulting
from housing patterns and neighborhood preferences? n30 Suppose, in the wake of the ruling, most
of the white parents move out of a city and take up residence in all-white suburbs? n31 Does the
ruling apply to public accommodations, swimming pools, and movie theaters, or just to
schools? What about singles ads in newspapers and separate high school proms?

Immediately after a law-reform ruling like Brown, public authorities will

confront a host of questions like those just listed. And because the new ruling
appears to go against the grain, authorities, even those with good will, likely
will conclude that the Supreme Court could not have meant that. n32 In the end,
the surprising new ruling will end up meaning very little. n33
The Supreme Court undermines minority rights movements causing tension
in American communities and dependence on flawed legislation.
Williams, news analyst with NPR News, 09
Affirmative action dies in multi-racial U.S. August 7, 2009
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/affirmative-action-dies-in-111147.html
So,

why now? More often than not, it is the American left that gets lost in absurd fantasies about
race in this country. They pretend there has been no progress in recent decades, even when they see
the rise of a black middle class and witness the election of a mixed-race president and the likely
confirmation of a Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court. But today, it is the right wing and its
supporters on the high court who are making stuff up. They pretend that the nation is already so
transformed that a colorblind America is a reality and that affirmative action is superfluous, so
much so that white employees in a city fire department an arena long dominated by Irish- and
Italian-Americans need help from the Supreme Court to get a promotion.
Litigation distracts time and money from successful grassroots movements
Stephen Carter, Professor of Law @ Yale, Michigan Law Review, ln, 92
Rosenberg goes beyond the assertion that litigation strategies rarely if ever produce significant change.
He argues, correctly" at they are often counterproductive, for they can distort perceptions about where
resources are needed (pp. 339-42). The particular case of abortion, Rosenberg notes that "reliance on
the Court seriously weakened the political efficacy of pro-choice forces. After the 1973
decisions, many pro-choice: activists simply assumed they had won and stopped if prochoice activity. ...The political organization and momentum that had changed laws
nationwide dissipate in celebration of the Court victory" (p. 339). The result, of course, was that
pro-choice forces abandoned the political arena to pro-life forces --and then professed surprise when
prolife forces won important electoral victories. The current broad public support for at least some
abortion rights has arisen largely because of the more recent decision of pro-choice forces to return to
the grass roots --the place, Rosenberg tells us, where real social changes take place (p. 341).

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Courts merely join movements- they dont produce social change

Devins, 92
Associate Professor of Law and Lecturer in Government, College of William
and Mary, REVIEW ESSAY: Judicial Matters: The Hollow Hope: Can Courts
Bring About Social Change? By Gerald N. Rosenberg. California Law Review,
LN
Rosenberg convincingly shows that courts cannot do it alone. Congress, the White House, the states,
and interest groups also play a pivotal role. State efforts to legalize abortion before Roe, congressional
and administrative efforts to eliminate dual school systems, and the civil rights and women's
movements highlight a remarkable inventory of non-judicial influences identified by Rosenberg. The
Hollow Hope also does an extraordinary job of demonstrating that numerous landmark Supreme Court
opinions were little known and even less discussed at the time of decision. In fact, Rosenberg's
evidence of the paramount role played by nonjudicial forces is one of the strongest to date.
The Hollow Hope then offers abundant support for a more modest, more accurate, and equally
important thesis: the Supreme Court works within and hence both influences and is influenced by a larger

culture of political and social interests. While severe problems in analysis still remain, this rearticulation
accomplishes Rosenberg's principal objective of sobering those who endorse an active judicial role.
Court rhetoric prevents the mobilization of the public, short circuiting
personal autonomy.
Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh
School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08
Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF
THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?
docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK
ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

One way to understand this mechanism is by means of a device that narrative theorist
Jean Stefancic and I have called the "empathic fallacy." n34 A counterpart of the "pathetic fallacy,"
familiar from literary theory, the empathic fallacy is the mistaken belief that one can change
another's beliefs and attitudes through words alone . In literature, the pathetic fallacy holds that
nature is like us with moods, feelings, and intentions that we can read and understand. The
poet, seeing rain, writes "The world weeps with me." n35

The empathic fallacy, which we coin, holds that narratives are of relatively
slight use in dispelling pre-existing ones. A reader confronted with a new narrative--a
black heroine, for example, when she has come to believe that blacks are lascivious and lazy,
the opposite of heroic--will disbelieve it, or else pronounce the present case an exception. We
are, in a sense, our stock of narratives. n36 These long held narratives form the basis against
which we judge and interpret new ones, such as ones about intelligent African Americans;
brave, resourceful women; energetic, hardworking undocumented aliens; or loving parents who
are gay or lesbian. Unless the new [*152] narrative is unusually clever, calculated to resonate
with another that we already hold, we tend to reject it as outrageous, extreme, or wrong. n37

Supreme Court opinions are, of course, narratives--stories--and thus subject to

both mechanisms. Over the course of history, a few Supreme Court opinions
have contained such memorable language ("Poor Joshua," n38 "There is no caste here"
n39
) that they have moved significant numbers of readers and hastened reform. Rosenberg
correctly notes their rarity, although he would be wrong if he maintains that the number is
zero.
CONCLUSION
Rosenberg's new edition, then,

soberly reminds reformers not to place undue

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reliance on courts and litigation. If dispossessed groups wish to combat unfair

practices and laws, the legal profession may offer them symbolic victories, but
little more. To secure real gains, they will need to explore other avenues,
including storytelling and literature, electoral politics, and the oldest remedy of
all--self-help and resistance to illegitimate authority. n40
Civic Engagement is key to democracy
Fretz, Director, Service-Learning Center, Naropa University, 04
(Eric, Director, Service-Learning Center, Naropa University, "Teaching
Liberty and Practicing Deliberative Democracy in the Classroom," 2004, The
Campus Compact Reader, Winter,
http://www.compact.org/reader/winter04/article2- 1 .html)
Introduction: In the past decade, many American citizens have joined a choir of voices lamenting the
demise of public life in the United Spates. The common chorus goes like this: Americans have
forgotten how to be citizens in a democracy and architects of public life. Our democratic
imagination is blunt, and public life in the United States is dying a slow death. Civic engagement,
the hallmark of American democracy, is in rapid decline. According to the Committee for the
Study of the American Electorate, less than 50% of eligible voters participated in the 1996

election and since the 1960s, voter participation has declined by more than 2.5%.
Close to 80% of the population ignores local elections. The percentage of Americans
who regularly attend public, school or political meetings is at all-time lows, and we
seem willing to trust our government only in times of extreme threat to the republic. The
general consensus seems to be there's not too much to be done about these problems
of public apathy. A 1995 New York Times ICBS News poll revealed that 59% of the people polled
could not point to one elected official they admired, and 79% believed the government is "run by a few
big interests looking out for themselves" (Boyte, "The Work of Citizenship" 4). Increasingly,

Americans see local and federal government as entities that are separate from their
own interests and needs. We have lost a sense of Abraham Lincoln's vision at the fields of
Gettysburg when he declared "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

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**AT: Hollow Hope / Courts Good**

Civil obedience follows legislation- social change is a product of
congressional law.
Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh
School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08
Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF
THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?
docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK
ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

Civil disobedience might appear to be a narrow exception to the rule that law
generally shapes behavior. n14 But the civil disobedient breaks the [*149] law
openly, nonviolently, and prepared to suffer the consequences . n15 Although one
could think of it as illustrating law's inefficacy, civil disobedience occurs rarely
enough that it does not shake our faith in the system. And because the violator
is prepared to accept punishment, it is scarcely a frontal challenge to that
system as a whole.
The same is true for cases in which a minority group believes the law is both unjust
and unlikely to change anytime soon. Then the group may seek actively to
frustrate enforcement. Anti-snitching campaigns in the black community or
efforts by Latino organizations to provide sanctuary or supplies to
undocumented immigrants crossing the desert on foot are recent examples.
n16 But even here, the law exhibits a kind of efficacy--the group seeking to
nullify it has to go through great efforts and incur considerable risk to do
so.Everyday experience with cases like these, then, conveys the impression
that law "really works." How could Rosenberg seemingly maintain the opposite?
Lawsuits can facilitate social movements
Nagin The Yale Law Journal Company, 08
Tomiko Brown Nagin, "One of These Things Does Not Belong": Intellectual Property and Collective Action Across
Boundaries 7/08
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?
docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK
ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7363&docNo=11

legal
concepts mediate the interpretative frames that socio-political mobilizations ,
Ultimately, Kapczynski wants to achieve even more. She seeks to theorize how

such as A2K, deploy to assert their interests. Kapczynski's discussion of framing theory
advances the scholarly conversation about law and popular mobilizations in a crucial way: it
helps to bury "zero-sum" propositions about law's effects on social movements. n2 Those with

a zero-sum view imagine law as a blunt instrument, either breathing life into or
taking it away from social movements . Other scholars have offered a more satisfying
account of law's impact on social movements, one that emphasizes that even [*282] failed
lawsuits can facilitate movements' cultural and political agendas . But, as I have
previously argued, even these scholars sometimes duplicate the zero-sum theorists' tendency
to ascribe far too much agency to the law, n3 a supposed "master frame" that animates
activists' each and every move.
Kapczynski posits a more dynamic model of interaction between law and social mobilizations.
IP law and legal concepts are constitutive, but not the center of the universe, in her analysis.

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She considers the internal dynamics of the A2K mobilization on its own terms, and ascribes
tremendous agency to the activists, who manipulate law to great effect. Kapczynski's
"gravitational pull" thesis deftly illustrates her conception of IP law as an important, but
interactive and dialogic, instrument of meaning. Frame theorists claim that collective actors
use frames for diagnosis, prognosis, and motivation. Legal concepts can be deployed in

a variety of ways within the framing process, Kapczynski argues, occupying

architectural, discursive, and strategic roles . A2K activists have manipulated legal
concepts to serve their interests, she shows. But so, too, have corporate actors. In fact, some of
the article's most engaging passages explore not the A2K mobilization, but how IP industries
articulated and advanced their goal of expanding IP protection in the marketplace of ideas. n4

Court decision can be transformativeits proven by the fact that Brown

affected far more than just public schools
John Kincaid, Robert B. and Helen S. Meyner Professor of Government and Public Service and Director
of the Meyner Center for the Study of State and Local Government, Lafayette College, Easton, PA.
Fellow and former Executive Director (1988-1994) of the U.S. Advisory Commission on
Intergovernmental Relations, Washington, D.C.; Editor, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, St.
Louis-Warsaw Transatlantic Law Journal, 1995 St. LouisWarsaw Trans'l 13 3, 1995, p. 147

Lastly, the federal courts, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, have played
important roles in national standard-setting since 1954 when the high Court
struck down state laws permitting racial segregation in public schools. n33 By
relying on the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the U.S. Bill of Rights to state and
local action, the Court has virtually transformed race relations as well as
standards of practice in many state and local government institutions, such as
schools, libraries, jails, prisons, and mental-health facilities.

Court decisions are insufficient in changing public opinion

Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh
School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08
Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF
THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?
docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK
ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

When Brown v. Board of Education came down, did Americans begin thinking
about and acting toward blacks differently? By and large they did no t; Rosenberg
provides impressive evidence on this point. n17 When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade,
did a woman's access to abortion services improve? Again, no; social disapproval did the work that
an explicit legal prohibition formerly did, so that women desiring abortions were little better off
than before. n18 And we find the same in other areas where law-reform advocates secure a
breakthrough victory. n19 Rulings like those upholding same-sex marriage were soon rolled back
by narrow construction, administrative foot-dragging, or delay resulting in little progress for the
"victorious" group. n20
Judicial victories do not have a catalytic effect
Michael McCann, professor of political science at the University of
Washington, Social Movements and America Political Institutions, ed.
Costain and McFarland, 1998, p. 205
The movement-centered approach urged here tends to interpret this latter aspect of legal

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"consciousness raising" somewhat differently than many characterizations by legal scholars .

Judicial victories (or other legal actions) do not "reveal" injustice to oppressed
groups so much as improve the chances that such injustices might be
effectively challenged by movement action in and out of the courts (McCann
1994). Moreover, formal legal action alone rarely is likely to generate this
"catalytic" or "triggering" effect on movement constituents (Rosenberg 1991). Only
when concerted efforts are made by movement leaders and organizations to publicize such
evolving opportunities and to use legal resources for movement-building purposes is successful
organizing likely (McCann 1994). :1

Courts mobilize social change wage discrimination rulings prove

Howard Gillman, Law Professor, 1999 (THE SUPREME COURT IN AMERICAN POLITICS, p. 72)
Perhaps the best documented responses to judicially created opportunities and
catalysts to action involve the mobilization of political interest groups and
social movements. Stuart Scheingold demonstrated decades ago that Court actions
could be resource in mobilizing activity in a variety of ways, including
activating and organizing core constituent groups members as well as
realigning support from third parties. My own research on the politics of gender as pay
equity (or comparable worth) reform provided a detailed account of this process. The very
reform strategy its ::If was conceived by union and civil rights lawyers responding to emerging
Court ruling that demonstration of race- or ,ex-based discriminatory impact could establish a
judiciable claim under the 1964 Civil Right Act. Wage discrimination claims were filed in federal
courts during the 1970s in an attempt primarily to develop new case law, but in many lo(:al
contexts such lawsuits also became key resources for organizing women into unions or
activating grassroots involvement among the already organized. This activity increased
dramatically in local and state venues around the nation after the 1981 Court finding of sexbased wage discrimination against female prison guards in Co. of Washington v. Gunther. In
short, the movement was conceived, born, and developed as a formidable political force from
opportunities and resources created by federal court, and especially Supreme Court, rulings.
Parallel accounts have been provided for a variety of both women's rights, animal rights, and
the right of physically and mentally disabled.

Symbolic legal support to rights claims advance social movement

Michael McCann, professor of political science at the University of
Washington, Social Movements and America Political Institutions, ed.
Costain and McFarland, 1998, p. 208
Finally, the symbolic normative power of rights claims themselves should not be discounted . This
point links Scheingold's (1974) "myth of rights" and "politics of rights" analysis. Because
citizens in our society are responsive to (legally sensible) rights claims, defiant groups often can

mobilize legal norms, conventions, and demands to compel concessions even in the absence of clear
judicial (or other official) support. This power of legal discourse has several related and
indistinguishable dimensions, including: abstract appeals to the moral sensibilities of dominant
groups; more concrete appeals to the interests of dominant organizations in maintaining
cooperative relations with victimized groups, such as workers or consumers; and, perhaps,
most important, indirect appeals for moral censure from the general public regarding the
actions of specific powerful groups. The latter factor of stigmatizing publicity distinguishes
somewhat the potential impact of legal action in high-visibility social struggles from that in
everyday disputes. Formal legal actions by movements threaten to transform disputes by

mobilizing not just judges as third-party intervenors but also a variety of social advocacy groups,
nonjudicial state officials, and broader public sentiment or voting power through the catalytic
dynamic discussed in the last section. In other words, litigation often provides a powerful
means for, in Schattschneider's (1960) terms, "expanding the scope of conflict" in ways that

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enhance the bargaining power of disadvantaged groups and raise the perceived risks of hard line
opposition from their foes.
Even losses in the Courts lay the groundwork for political success
Richard Gambitta, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University in Texas at San Antonio,
Governing through Courts, 1981, p. 276-77.
A court defeat or victory is a single episode in the litigation process , quite as it is in
the policy process. Concentration on the impact of those episodes should not blind us to the
functions performed by the litigation itself. These latter need examination and explication as
well. Space limitations prevent a full discussion here, but a few items may be listed, as an
outgrowth of my research on Rodriguez, that may provide a beginning. First , litigation

provides access to influential government arenas where those without political

power in majoritarian institutions can raise issues of concern, explain their
contentions and political grievances, and receive an attentive hearing on the
merits of their cause (Scheingold, 1974). Second, through the auspices of the court,
including the vehicles of discovery and subpoena, answers may be secured to
questions that might otherwise be ignored by bureaucrats , elites, private persons,
and corporations. Gochman secured answers to extensive interrogatories detailing the
extent of educational disparities in Bexar County and in Texas. At that time, these vehicles
provided not only an expeditious and efficient method of securing that information, but
perhaps the only one as well. Third , litigation is a means of publicizing an issue, of

catching the attention, and perhaps the sympathies, of various segments of the
population. Periodically, with increased frequency after the lower court victory, headlined or
featured articles would appear in newspapers and magazines reporting the information that the
litigants had acquired. For a five-year period, the magnitude of the inequality resulting from the
Texas school finance policy appeared in the press. Fourth, the litigation process can
legitimize a political issue, regardless of the final judicial outcome. The lower court
victory in Rodriguez especially increased the legitimacy of the Edgewood cause. And the five to
four Supreme Court decision did not return that cause to its original state. Fifth, litigation has
the potential to mobilize and solidify political support for an issue. It can do so for
the defendant as well as the plaintiff, but if one has little active support and few
resources to begin with, this function generally proves of positive worth . It did so
in Rodriguez. Most importantly, litigation, as mentioned earlier, often contributes to the
establishment of a legislative agenda. Significant lawsuits can recast the nature of a debate,
whether or not they are ultimately victorious in court. In Rodriguez, earlier legislative dialogue
on reform focused on increased foundation support, not on equalization. Subsequently, both
topics were salient considerations. The lower court decision has established school finance
reform as a legislative priority. Litigation can facilitate debates that otherwise may not occur,
thus setting in motion, at times, the process of policy change, as it did in all three school
finance cases. In a sense, litigation can be viewed as a political campaign. The success of

any campaign needs to be measured not only by the vote registered in the final
election or court decision, but also by the impact that the campaign has on
current and future public policy. Like an independent political campaign
challenging the status quo, litigation that seeks policy change often raises
issues that incumbent legislators have traditionally refused to address. Also, it
may distribute unfamiliar information on the operations of a particular system, publicize certain
abuses resulting from the implementation of ongoing policies, and attempt to recast public and
governmental debates, forcing a legislative agenda that might lead to reform. Moreover, a
lower court victory, like an early primary victory, may change the course of public policy and
affairs even though that early win is never repeated and is subseqently reversed.

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Social success requires a shift in ideology that the Courts and individuals
must achieve together.
Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh
School of Law; University Professor of Law Designate, Seattle University, 08
Richard Delgado, Northwestern University Law Review, A COMMENT ON ROSENBERG'S NEW EDITION OF
THE HOLLOW HOPE 10/08
http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?
docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T7110308857&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlK
ey=29_T7110308860&cisb=22_T7110308859&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=7350&docNo=1

If judicial rulings are relatively ineffective in changing social values and

practices in highly contested areas such as school desegregation, abortion,
environmentalism, and same-sex marriage, what accounts for this failure?
I believe that the answer has to do with two related mechanisms. I call the first the
reconstructive paradox. n21 This theory holds, essentially, that the greater a social evil--say,

women's subordination or black slavery--the more massive the social effort required to eradicate it.
n22
Moreover, because the belief or practice is so deeply embedded, it is invisible to many. n23
Furthermore, the massive social effort necessary to alter a historical social practice will inevitably
collide with other social values--property rights, settled expectations, the southern way of life,
etc.--that are widely held. n24 This effort will require shifts in spending and changes in the way we
relate to one another.
These efforts for social change, by contrast, will be out in the open, where they will spark sharp
resistance and the accusation that the reformers are totalitarians, moving too fast, imposing
costs on innocent people, reviving old grudges, and the like. n25 These considerations will
enable the opposition to feel righteous and believe that the reformers sacrifice real liberty and
security for a nebulous goal. For these reasons, social reform and reconstruction will strike
most, at first, as dubious, premature, dangerous, and wrong. n26

Rosenbergs hollow hope analysis is flawed, court decisions polarize

citizenry in exceptional ways.
Epstein ,Henry Wade Rogers Professor Northwestern University School of
Law, 91
Lee Epstein, Washington University-St. Louis review,
THE HOLLOW HOPE: CAN COURTS BRING ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE? 91
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/rosenber.htm

As Rosenberg knows, the key precedential cases were brought to the Court by
interest groups or movements. According to Greenberg's account in the
JUDICIAL PROCESS AND SOCIAL CHANGE, for example, the LDF spon- sored the
litigation needed to achieve victory in Brown; it was the group's persistence
and not "luck," that weakened "the remaining legal constraint." I think this is an
important
link,
but
one
Rosenberg
largely
overlooks.
Another quibble I have is that some of his analyses are too casual . Those on public
opinion immediately come to mind. Because he does not examine trends in survey
data in a rigorous way, his observations tend toward the pedestrian. Here is
what he writes about public opinion on abortion: "there was clearly no rapid or
large change in American's support of abortion after the Court's decision"
(p.238). He may be correct on an aggregate, first blush, level, but he misses an
important point brought to light in Franklin and Kosaki's (APSR, 1989: 751-777) intriguing
study: Roe did have the effect of polarizing the citizenry in an unprecedented
way

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Judges are seen by the public as essential to social change

Stephen Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Yale University.
B.A. 1976, Stanford; J.D. 1979, Yale. -- Ed., Michigan Law Review, 90 Mich. L.
Rev. 1216, May 1992, p. 1216-1217
Since the pioneering work of Robert A. Dahl, most theorists have viewed the Court as one of many
actors in the development of national policies on a variety of issues. n3 The implication is that the
Justices are serious players in the game of societal transformation . Some scholars, Alexander
Bickel to the fore, have been more cautious, suggesting a Court of limited ability to make
changes. n4 Bruce Ackerman, for example, has compared the Court to a group of brakemen
sitting in the last car of a train, able to make it stop but not to make it go. n5 Yet in the popular

image -- the one enshrined by the political rhetoric of left [*1217] and right alike --the Justices ride
right up in the engine and choose which track to take.
Courts cant solve broader womens rights even precedent setting
decisions fail because courts lack the essential tools to solve for alt.
causalities
Neal Devins (Associate Professor of Law and Lecturer in Government, College of William and Mary)
1992: Judicial Matters: The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? California Law

Review. Lexis
The Hollow Hope's assessment of abortion and women's rights, while less detailed and less systematic,
reaches similar conclusions. Indeed, Rosenberg uses identical metaphors, speaking of the Court as
"join[ing]," "not creat[ing]," "a current of social change and a tide of history" (p. 265). Moreover, like his
analysis of civil rights, Rosenberg sees courts as trying to play a leadership role but failing: "As with civil
rights . . . the Court is far less responsible for the changes that occurred than most people think" (p.
201); "advocates of women's rights have 'won' quite a number of legal cases" (p. 212), but
"precedent-setting decisions in women's rights have produced little because courts lack all
the essential tools required of any institution hoping to implement change" (p. 227).
Roe v. Wade, rather than being characterized as a watershed, is seen as solidifying a "widespread,
vocal, and effective" pro-choice lobby (p. 184). That forty-six state laws were invalidated under Roe is
downplayed; highlighted, in its stead, are statistics showing that the rate of legal abortions rose more
dramatically the two years before Roe (300%, from 193,500 in 1970 to 586,800 in 1972) than the two
years after Roe [*1035] (52%, from 586,800 in 1972 to 898,600 in 1974) (pp. 178-80). Rosenberg also
minimizes Roe's impact by arguing that nonjudicial market mechanisms were critical in effectuating the
decision. Specifically, had Roe demanded that abortions be performed in hospitals, the widespread
refusal of hospitals to perform abortions (only 17% of public and 23% of private hospitals perform
abortions) suggests that the case's impact would have been negligible (pp. 189-201).
Rosenberg's examination of "women's rights" is also critical of the Court. Noting that the gap between
men's and women's earnings has stayed constant since 1955, that litigation has not affected the wage
structure, that most employment is sex-segregated, and that the ABA Committee on Judicial Selection
typically gives better ratings to men than women, Rosenberg deems court action in this area
inconsequential (pp. 207-12). The crux of the problem, instead, is a long list of social ills, including
domestic violence, disproportionate household work, inadequate child support, and biased laws (pp.
212-26).

Rosenberg is wrong bad theory and no reason why congress and the
executive do provide change
David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen
E. Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A
Reassessment of Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law
and Policy. Lexis
Certain deficiencies in Rosenberg's approach do limit the value of his conclusions about functionalism.
Functionalism is a theory about how law and its interpretation by courts influence society. Rosenberg is
unable to address questions of influence fully because he uses inappropriate methods and because he
ignores the most important aspect of judicial influence -- the power of courts to redefine structures and

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expectations. Admittedly, whatever their mode of influence, judges are not always able to effectuate
their goals. Rosenberg claims that such failures illustrate the ultimate impotence of the courts.
Nonetheless, he fails to explain how he can conclude, at the same time, that the legislature and the
executive are effective institutions even though these bodies face implementation difficulties
comparable to those which, for Rosenberg, illustrate that courts are ineffective agents of change.
Finally, Rosenberg fails to inquire whether results would be different if courts did not seek to effect change. Without answering
this question, Rosenberg cannot compare the relative effectiveness of various government branches or definitively conclude that
courts do not influence society.

Perm on the counterplan solves the DA to be effective, the court must work
with other branches of government
David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen
E. Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A
Reassessment of Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and
Policy. Lexis
Despite the deficiencies in Rosenberg's analysis, his work still offers important contributions to the ongoing discussion of
functionalism. We conclude that Rosenberg's analysis actually demonstrates that the Court is, indeed, an effective institution.
When we realize that the Court is but one branch of government, which, like every other branch, must work with others to
effect its goals, Rosenberg's claim that courts can effect change in combination with others is in reality an important affirmation of
judicial efficacy and, ultimately, of the functional role of law.

Courts solve social change massive swings in public opinion dont matter,
minor changes in assumptions overtime build up and influence actors
David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E.
Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis
Rosenberg's inquiry is flawed from the outset because he fundamentally misperceives the nature of
influence and which evidence properly indicates its presence. Influence need not be manifested as
blatantly as Rosenberg suggests it must be, but it may involve subtle changes in assumptions and
minor shifts among coalitions. Similarly, Rosenberg's theory of causation fails to recognize that major
changes most often unfold over extended periods of time and that people may not respond to a
particular event immediately. If Rosenberg is to provide sufficient support for his theory, he must
expand his inquiries far beyond their current limits and reestablish them upon a different and improved
foundation. Rosenberg assumes that the influence of any event may be adequately measured by noting
direct responses to it: actors may acknowledge its influence, or their reactions may betray its direct
effect on their decisions. n81 Yet it is also likely that they will attempt to mask this influence. They may,
for instance, wish to give the impression that they have been right from the beginning. Politicians are
not big on footnotes. n82 Just as the origins of reform may be masked, so too advances in reform need
not be indicated by wild swings in public opinion. Politics is often a game of inches . The civil rights
movement broke out in a country where candidates were considered "safe" if they gained 55% of the
vote, and a large percentage of districts were not safe. n83 Even the expectation of small changes in
public opinion could have a significant impact on political actors. Often, this "swing vote" was held by
blacks. Rosenberg thus errs in assuming that the Court could only influence policy by engendering
massive swings in public opinion; altering the views of only a few may have an explosive impact in such
an atmosphere. n84 In this political environment, the mere fact that Brown altered the law of the land
could have had significant impact itself. It was not even necessary that anyone be converted to the
cause of desegregation. Some of those who disagreed with the Court might have become convinced
that the rule of law was more important than continued support for segregation. Even such limited and
tepid support for Brown could have supplied the necessary margin of political victory to reformers in
certain districts.

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Social change doesnt need to be seen, court decisions simply need to

challenge current assumptions to provide for change elsewhere
David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E.
Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis
Even if Brown actually engendered opposition to segregation itself, such opposition need not have been
open and active. Further, the decision need not even have gained a visible and prominent place in
public or elite discussion. Game theory teaches that merely altering signals to indicate that additional
choices are available may suffice to induce significant change in a situation where players previously
doubted the availability of alternatives. n85 Brown need only have challenged the assumption that there
was no option but loyalty to the segregationist status quo. n86 Not only did Rosenberg entirely fail to
address this possibility, but his insistence upon a purely statistical approach disables him from
adequately analyzing this important possibility. Manifestations of power and influence cannot be
adequately investigated with a purely quantifiable approach, as Dahl's attempt to do so indicates. n87
This means that assessments of influence may require historical or other indices of impact.
Judicial decisions can change assumptions not only by opening new options for opposition, but also
through their power to grant legitimacy to certain claims and to redefine norms of institutional action .
Undoubtedly, by changing the constitutional rule, Brown opened new doors for resisting segregation
through actions at law. But it did more. It invalidated arguments in favor of segregation, both by
excluding them from the courtroom and by stigmatizing their use in public debate. n88 It also opened an
avenue for changing the law elsewhere, as courts and others applied the newly approved
desegregationist argument in other situations. n89

The Hollow Hope theory is wrong Rosenberg misrepresents the efficacy of

the lower courts in court decision enforcement
David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E.
Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis
Rosenberg also fundamentally misunderstands the nature of judicial policy making and policy making in
general. His approach evaluates judicial and legislative policy making under different standards and , as
a result, unreasonably elevates legislative and executive influence over that of courts. When viewed
in light of the true nature of the policy making process, Rosenberg's analysis actually
demonstrates that the Court is an effective agent of social change.
Rosenberg paints an unfairly impotent picture of the Supreme Court, in part, because he refuses to
examine the work of lower courts. The Supreme Court generally does not implement the rules it
develops, but relies upon lower courts to apply its rules in particular cases. Lower courts are like streetlevel bureaucrats or administrative agencies undertaking the enforcement work of Congress or a
legislature. n103 The policy implementation literature stresses that once Congress passes a law, the real
implementation and battles over enforcement occur as officials seek to ascertain and implement what
Congress intended. n104 An effective analysis of Supreme Court influence cannot disregard the
application of its decisions by inferior tribunals. How closely were important Supreme Court decisions
followed, and how often were they relied upon? Were these decisions applied in new situations and
extended to other areas of the law? Were lower courts amenable to claims under these rules, or did
they consistently resist their implementation? Who won and who lost, and how was this changed by
decisions of the Supreme Court? How did new found success or failure in litigation affect policy in other
arenas? By refusing to pursue this rich line of inquiry and preferring to reign his inquiry within an
arbitrary time period, Rosenberg's analysis is severely impoverished and his conclusions are brought
into question.

Rosenberg fails to take into account problems with implementation at the

Congressional level
David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E.
Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis

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While Rosenberg may have forsworn systematic analysis of the process through which Court decisions
are implemented, he did not forswear all reference to the process. Rosenberg argues that biased judges
and obstructionist interest groups placed such monumental obstacles in the path of judicial efficacy that
the courts could not be labeled "dynamic" institutions, at least when compared with other bodies like
Congress. n105 Yet Rosenberg's analysis seems to embrace a double standard. n106 He makes no
reference to the obstacles legislatures face in implementing policy. State and federal officials may do
much to interfere with effective implementation, n107 and interest groups effectively can close down the
legislative arena for years. n108 Rosenberg notes none of these obstacles . He seems far more eager to
ascribe change to forces other than the Court on the basis of purely post hoc argument. n109 He also fails
to restrain his inquiry into the role of other institutions and phenomena within the same strict temporal
limits as he did the inquiry into judicial efficacy. n110 In short, there may be no institution that lives up to
Rosenberg's "dynamic" model. His failure to focus equally on the obstacles faced by various institutions
brings his exaltation of Congress as the ultimate agent of social change into significant question.

Courts are important the Hollow Hope fails to take into account that the
judiciary works with and results in the action of other branches of
government to enforce decisions.
Neal Devins (Associate Professor of Law and Lecturer in Government, College of William and Mary)
1992: Judicial Matters: The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? California Law Review. Lexis
[*1067] Courts matter. They matter a lot. Sometimes their orders set in motion market mechanisms
which guarantee their effectiveness. n199 Sometimes the threat of judicial action prompts either
settlement or legislative initiative. n200 Their opinions influence legislative deliberations n201 and change
the status quo. n202 Occasionally, they trump agencies and interpose their normative views into the law.
It may be that these influences sometimes result in unwise policy decisions and sometimes exceed the
proper judicial role in our system of separated powers, but they are judicial influences nonetheless.
The Hollow Hope unduly discounts these judicial contributions. Courts are given inadequate credit for
what they do, as well as too much blame for what they do not do. n203 While Rosenberg does a masterful
job of showing that courts do not effect change alone, he goes too far in refusing to recognize that the
judiciary is actively involved in a partnership with elected government. His repeated broadsides at the
judiciary sound a message of judicial irrelevance rather than one of limited governmental partnership.
n204

Rosenberg asks too much of court decisions he implies there is intent

where there isnt justices rely on enforcement at the local level
David Schultz (University of Minnesota, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union) and Stephen E.
Gottlieb (Cleveland-Marshall School of Law) 1996: Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of
Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? Journal of Law and Policy. Lexis
Not only does Rosenberg fail fully to explore the nature of judicial and legislative policy implementation,
but he also fundamentally misunderstands the nature of those portions of judicial decision making
which he does explore. By demanding that the Court elicit broad acquiescence to the principles of its
decisions if it is to be deemed effective, Rosenberg demands of courts results that litigants and judges
rarely intend. Generally, their aims are far narrower. It has long been disputed in the public policy
literature what relationship the intentions of actors should play to the standard by which their success
in policy implementation is measured. n111 Judicial decisions may have effects beyond what litigants or
judges subjectively intend, but it seems unreasonable consistently to hold courts to a standard they
rarely seek to reach. Such an approach seems to constitute little more than assigning intent to actors
with no more evidence that they entertained such an intent than that a decision has, years later, come
to stand for a principle of social reform. n112 Merely bringing a case and having it heard may be all
litigants actually seek. n113 Others may wish to overturn a particular law without intending to restructure
social policy across the nation. n114 Furthermore, the Court may consciously avoid direct and immediate
judicial coercion, as in Brown, where the Court ordered local officials themselves to adopt remedial
measures. n115 Even the "all deliberate speed order" of Brown II was not a fully complete remedial
decree: the Justices still chose to rely on local officials for implementation. n116 The Supreme Court did
not clarify implementation orders until after 1964 and into the 1970s. It was only in Green v. County
School Board n117 and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, n118 decided after the 1964
Civil Rights and 1965 ESEA Acts, that the Court demanded particular affirmative steps toward

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desegregation. n119 It was during this time period that some of the most pronounced changes in
integration occurred. n120 Perhaps, then, the cases that ought to be examined are the cases in the late
1960s and early 1970s, and Rosenberg's ten year time frame should be adjusted accordingly. As
Nathan Hakman, one of our constitutional law mentors, used to say, "Courts first decide cases and not
causes." Rosenberg has entirely missed this simple truth.
Finally, Rosenberg's definition of what constitutes the "significant social reform" that he seeks to
examine is dangerously imprecise. n121 How many people must be affected for reform to be significant?
What types of people? How much must change before reform has "occurred"? All these questions are
left open, and the indeterminacy of this phrase undermines the force of Rosenberg's arguments
throughout. n122

Rosenbergs claims arent warranted- groups he says lose hope are activist
lawyers
Malcolm M. Feeley, professor, School of Law, University of California, 1992
REVIEW SECTION SYMPOSIUM The Supreme Court and Social Change
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?
collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/lsociq17&type=Text&id=753
Although he draws on many sources and quotes many of them at length, Rosenberg is not
at all systematic in his effort to locate those re- formers and other observers
whose hopes he finds hollow . Perhaps he views it as unnecessary; after all, these views
may be so commonly held that it is impossible to locate a school of proponents. But to say that
he has not clearly identified this group does not mean that he has not identified
anyone. By my rough count, he mentions 42 advocates of the "dy- namic court" whose hopes
he concludes are hollow.'0 (The inclusion of several of these people might be challenged
because he mentions them only in passing or only briefly quotes from them.) Of this list

nearly half are activist lawyers and another quarter are judges and law
professors. The rest are a smattering of political scientists, journalists , and
others whose professions I cannot identify. But with respect to the frequency of cita- tions and
the length of quotes, the focus is overwhelmingly on activist lawyers and judges. In essence,
he contrasts the wishes, desires, and hopes of these reformers with subsequent social policy
developments related to important Supreme Court decisions.
So far as I can tell , this

group of reformers is an ad hoc collection of activists (and their

friends) who exaggerate claims about their own efficacy. That there is a
huge gap between their views and subsequent policies is hardly surprising. Imagine such a
study of sports teams, contrasting coaches' preseason rhetoric with the teams' performances
during the sea- son ("This team has a legitimate shot at the championship; on a good day it
can beat anyone"-yet the team finishes three games out of the cellar). Or imagine someone
reporting that there is a huge gap between candi- dates' campaign pronouncements and
policies after election. Would any- one complain that the coaches had hollow hopes or that the
information about the candidates is newsworthy? I suspect that no one other than a few
sports writers, or opposition candidates, would find it worthwhile to take such rhetoric
seriously. Certainly no one would take it as a disinter- ested diagnosis of the strength of the
team or the candidate.
Yet this is more or less what Rosenberg has done; he has

taken the rhetoric of the intensely partisan at face value and then shown that
per- formance falls short of rhetoric. What he does not do is offer any reason-convincing or not-why observations of this group should be taken so
seriously. I emphasize this because his book is so relentless. Each case study follows a
similar format: each begins with a mobilization of quotes by reformers which are then followed
by a piling on of data to show that they were wrong. But Rosenberg never pauses to ask what
the views of these reformers signify or why they are privileged voices to be taken so seriously.

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In cases of lost hope, the court didnt actually act on the social changehollow hope is a myth
Malcolm M. Feeley, professor, School of Law, University of California, 1992
REVIEW SECTION SYMPOSIUM The Supreme Court and Social Change
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?
collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/lsociq17&type=Text&id=753
In each of these case studies-and others not mentioned here- Rosenberg concludes that the
Court was weak because the goals of the re- formers were not met. But as I have tried to
show, the Court never even attempted to do what he observes it did not do . It is hard to
know what to make of such observations. At best it is myth debunking, although if so, we need to
know more about the myth than he tells us. He promises to explicate this myth with his second
provocative metaphor, "flypaper." But, as we shall see, he-does not keep the promise.
Rosenberg and followers exaggerate the power the court has to lose hope
Malcolm M. Feeley, professor, School of Law, University of California, 1992
REVIEW SECTION SYMPOSIUM The Supreme Court and Social Change
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?
collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/lsociq17&type=Text&id=753
Who is attracted to the Court and why? A substantial number of people attribute
exaggerated powers to the courts . It would be interesting to know who they are.
Unfortunately Rosenberg does not explore this group systematically. At the outset of
each case study he marshals quotes from a variety of sources revealing that a number of
prominent people
have had great expectations from litigation. But he provides no

sustained discussion as to how he selected those to be quoted, or who they

are-why their views matter. One way to summarize his argument is as follows:
"A lot of people think the Court is really powerful, but my study
reveals that it isn't." Even if he is correct, and I am impressed with the data he has
marshaled, his study is at most a successful effort at debunking an ill-de- fined myth than it is
in explaining the nature of the Court's powers or the pervasiveness and significance of the
myth.
A more sociological and theoretically informed study would have used the myth-the
"hollow hope"-as the beginning of inquiry rather than the conclusion. It would have gone
beyond myth debunking and asked, Who holds this "hollow hope"? Why do they persist in
holding a belief that is so patently false? What functions does the myth serve? What is the
nature of the flypaper Court? What functions does it serve? Throughout the book, Rosenberg
raises such questions, but he never addresses them.
Indeed, his brief concluding chapter,
"The Fly Paper Court," is a dis- appointment. The metaphor promises to explore the seductions
of the Court and those attracted to it. Yet it only reiterates his point that those who place their
faith in the Court as an engine of social change are mis- guided. This, of course, is an
important point, but the question is, Why are so many people then attracted to the Court? We
know why flies are attracted to flypaper; flypaper is aromatic and flies are dumb. But the people Rosenberg identifies who are attracted to litigation are not so dumb; they are prominent
lawyers, journalists, and public officials. How can they be so misguided?
One can also ask,
Is the metaphor apt? Certainly the metaphor is powerful: The Court attracts would-be
reformers only to entrap them in a futile struggle. But flypaper is designed for this purpose. Is
the Court? Is the Court responsible for trapping would-be reformers? Or has someone else
fostered the myth? And is it in fact as dysfunctional as Rosenberg argues?
Whatever the
case, the anomaly Rosenberg has identified-the deep belief in a powerful Court coupled with a
finding of abject weakness- should have been a central problematic in the study. To

conclude that the Court is like flypaper that entangles would-be reformers in a
fruitless enterprise is to pose a problem, not conclude the analysis . Thus the

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unasked and unanswered questions: Who fosters the myth of the dynamic court? Who
maintains it? What social functions does it serve? Rosenberg's book would have been far more
satisfying had he pursed such questions.

Turn: Court action encourages further litigation and strategy- Brown proves
David S. Meyer, Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Steven A.
Boutcher, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, University of California, March
2007, Signals and Spillover: Brown v. Board of Education and Other Social
Movements http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS
%2FPPS5_01%2FS1537592707070077a.pdf&code=0953f61b8fdb83aea22b52
fd9ff5084a
Next, we can consider emulation . Civil rights activists success in using the
courts led a range of other interests to adopt litigation strategies, and indeed,
even the organiza- tional structure of the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund.
OConnor, for example, describes pressure from board members of the National Organization
for Women (NOW) to create a subsidiary directed to litigate on behalf of womens rights. 39
Baker, Bowman, and Torrey report that the feminist movements concern with discrimination
against women, and inequality between women and men, led them to adopt the NAACPs
approach as the only obvious model . . . . . following the NAACPs example, liberal feminists
worked within the system to achieve change by focusing on gaining equal opportunity for
women as individuals. 40 They report that NOW deliberately cop- ied the methods,

structures, and funding techniques of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and
concentrated, like that organization, on the courts as an instrument of change
through litigating cases raising constitutional claims. 41 Costain notes that
members of Congress made the con- nection between women and blacks, and
copied legisla- tive provisions for civil rights as well.42 The successful
example of litigation, and the simple story about social change implicit in a
judicial pronounce- ment, encouraged the strategy , and groups sought to frame
themselves as like African Americans in some way, usually as a distinct group that suffers
discrimination. Activists organized to provide for equal protection under the law,

the same standard articulated in Brown, regardless of the nature of their

constituency.43 The model was most easily adopted by other ethnic minorities
and women, but it spread to consumers, disabled people, anti-war activists,
crusaders against poverty, and even animal rights and envi- ronmental activists. Handler
reports that the war on povertys legal services program, started in 1967, was explicitly
modeled on the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund, 44 as was the Envi- ronmental Defense
Fund, also founded in 1967. 45 In these cases, as with the NAACP, dedicated organizations
raised money to hire lawyers to le litigation to achieve their political goals, to win political
visibility, and to raise more money. The iconic status of the Brown decision, in which the

Supreme Court reversed a long-standing precedent and articulated a clear

vision of individual rights that man- dated, although it did not effect immediate
change in laws and policies, provided an incredible temptation for envi- ronmental groups. If
the Court could nd a right for equal access to education, perhaps it could also nd a Constitutional right to a clean environment.46

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Social movements will continue even if they dont win- resources, need to
fight opposition
David S. Meyer, Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Steven A.
Boutcher, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, University of California, March
2007, Signals and Spillover: Brown v. Board of Education and Other Social
Movements http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS
%2FPPS5_01%2FS1537592707070077a.pdf&code=0953f61b8fdb83aea22b52
fd9ff5084a
Second, some social movement organizations have extensive resources invested in the pursuit of
social change through litigation. Activists are committed to social change, but they are also
bound to support the survival of their organizations, and to make best use of the tools and
expertise they have. Social movements comprise multi- organizational elds, including groups that
specialize in litigation. In order to sustain the ow of resources into these groups, they must
maintain an identity distinct from their allies, and continue to offer the promise of victory .58
Continued litigation lls a distinct organizational niche within a social movement, and makes
use of well-established organizational expertise; even in the absence of social change, it is an
organizational survival strategy. Third, like organizations, individuals have investments in
particular identities and tactics. Lawyers committed to social change employ familiar tactics
and make use of the skills they have. The choice of the legal system as a venue for political
action reects not only beliefs, but educa- tional and professional investments that support
those beliefs. Its easy to imagine the cause lawyer doubting the effectiveness of shifting his
or her skills and efforts to an alternative political venue. Finally, advocates of social change

continue to litigate at least partly because their opponents do. When an oppos- ing group seeks to
pursue its interests through the courts, it virtually forces its opponent to do the sameor risk
leaving a potentially important front in the political battle undefended .59 Groups can try to
respond to their oppo- nents by bringing alternative cases to the legal system, ones with more
favorable facts or district judges; mini- mally, they can le amicus curiae briefs in opposition to
other advocates As long as either side sees the courts as a potentially relevant institution,

numerous groups will continue to channel their efforts there. Clearly, efforts to pursue social
change through the courts continue against long odds of success.

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*****Congress*****
**Social Reform / Movements**
Congress is the most effective agent for solving societal problems
Dodd, Lawrence 2001 [Lawrence Dodd is a Professor at the University of
Florida, Published in Congress Reconsidered, 7th Edition, Edited by
Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Washington, D. C., CQ Press,
pages 389-414. Re-Envisioning Congress: Theoretical Perspectives on
Congressional Change.]
What we know at this point is that we have adjusted our governing perspectives during these
decades and that, despite the bitter partisan battles that have come with the experimentation
and shift, and to some extent because of them, our society is as prosperous and productive as
ever. We also know one other thing: that Congress, the parties, and the electorate are capable
of reassessing governing strategies, experimenting with new ones, learning innovative
approaches, and addressing societal problems. To appreciate this capacity, we must attend to
the conceptual lenses through which we examine Congress and craft multiple theoretical
perspectives that can aid us in looking beyond momentary personalities and short-term
stalemate to see the dynamic, historical processes at play. In doing so, we must bring to
Congress the common-sense judgment we bring to daily life, taking care to focus on the
motives and strategic behavior of participants in the foreground, on the shifting background
contexts, and then ultimately on the critical ways in which the ideas that participants hold
about politics and society shape their strategies and actions. As we do so, crafting social choice
theories to analyze the foreground, social structure theories to interpret the background, and
social learning theories to comprehend the role of ideas, we see an overall pattern that no one
of our theories could fully illuminate, and that helps us understand how Congress can
constructively respond to societal problems. Through these multiple lenses, we see the contest
for governing power that ensures partisans will highlight societal problems as they challenge
for control of Congress. We see the dynamic societal changes that generate new citizen
demands and policy challenges. And we see the coming of a new generation of legislators,
social activists, and engaged citizens who push Congress to experiment with fresh ideas,
address the pressing policy challenges, and solve societal problems.

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**Centralization / Government Bad**

The affirmatives acceptance of centralization prevents social movements by
discouraging individual actionthe result is extinction
Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World
Review, Peace Through Social Empowerment, "Primary Causes,"
http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp14.html)
It is simply this; that our primary problem is not war, or the environment, or population pressures, nor
the squandering of the planet's finite resources, nor the alienation from life of many millions of
people; THE PRIMARY PROBLEM IS THAT OF SIZE, size developed on such a scale as to disempower
people and which makes their moral judgements irrelevant to the passage of events. If we ignore that
and simply focus our energies on particular abuses then, however commendable our objectives and our
efforts, we are dealing with the effects of the abuses of power and ignoring their causes. It was Einstein
who remarked 'You cannot solve a problem with the mindframe that has created it'. In saying as much
he was pointing to the core of our problem; a 19th century mindframe which accepts, without question
or challenge, giant centralised states and economic entrepreneurship global in its scope, which together
have created a doomsday scenario for the human race. No body can be healthier than the cells of which
it is comprised. If the cells of small-scale community life are debilitated or non-existent in the body
politic then what we are confronted with is a form of social and political leukaemia, a destroyed immune
system which cannot prevent multitudinous forms of life-threatening malignancy, such as monster
global wars, from flourishing. We are not going to solve the problems of the 21st century with the mindframe of the 19th. Social empowerment, involving the deliberate creation of an organic, multi-cellular
structure and process of our political and economic institutions, is today the only realistic path to
enduring peace and to any genuine social progress.

Voting negative challenges the inevitability of centralization and opens up

local communities for action
Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Peace Through Social
Empowerment, "Primary Causes," http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp14.html)
Supposing then our reform movements changed tack? Supposing they tackled the problem of giantism
and of excessive size in order to restore control of affairs back in citizen hands? And suppose all these
reform and protest organisations joined hands to do so? What then would be involved? They would be
agents of the most thoroughgoing and peaceful revolution the world has ever seen. A revolution not to
capture power but to dissolve it. To dissolve it into people's hands where it rightly belongs in the
manifold neighbourhoods, villages, parishes and human scale political structures throughout the world.
They would be putting paid to the absurd notion that the citizen can have a meaningful voice or
influence in political parties or in governments so enormous as to make it inevitable that power will be
in the hands of those who are controlling things at the centre, a control which ensures that they control
the party conferences, agendas, policies, candidate lists and so on. So persuasive is the power of
established practice, and the powerful propaganda that accompanies it in asserting the natural and
inevitable validity of our current institutions, that it requires a real effort of mind to recognise that far
from being natural or inevitable they are neither. They are based in fact on quite unsustainable
assumptions and not least of these assumptions relates to current scheming and plotting (it really is
nothing less) to unite Europe under one Brussels-dominated Government.

Decentralization Solvency - Seeking institutional solutions while failing to

question the assumptions that underlie such institutions will inevitably fail
Papworth 02 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Cut the Cackle,"
Fourth World Review, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwr118.pdf )

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When confronted with a crisis of epic proportions, it might be thought that it would
evoke a concern of like degree, that if it was so obvious that something was quite
fundamentally wrong with our political and economic arrangements we would be
posing no less fundamental questions about them. We are not. We are sedulously
avoiding any serious attempt to probe the assumptions on which those arrangements
are based, instead we are continuing to seek solutions which leave those assumptions
untouched, and therein lies the roots of the modern crisis. What we need to think we
instinctively regard as unthinkable, and the most imposing peak of this untouchable
realm of our own minds relates to the size and scale of our institutions.
No net benefitthere is only a risk the CP alone solves best.
Federal action coopts local movements
Papworth 01 (John, Editor @ Ecologist + editor of Fourth World Review, Bringing Up the Local Issues,
The Ecologist, June, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp3.html)
We now have 'national' schemes and ministries for health, education, welfare and other essentially local
matters. The evidence abounds and grows that these bodies are increasingly wasteful and inefficient,
where they are not indeed riddled with the maggot of corruption, and not least of course they operate
on organisational parameters which make a mockery of democratic principle. Somehow the illusion has
been fostered, for example, that people who have devoted their lives to clambering to the top of the
greasy pole are better qualified to ordain how children should be educated than are the parents and
their local committees. So our public prints are loaded with otiose speculation about 'national'
examination standards and results, and about the content of 'national' educational curricula;
meanwhile, in rural areas, large numbers of children are bussed to giant 'comprehensive' schools where
they learn about computers and nothing about how to grow food. Local government, instead of being a
power in its own right but working in tandem, where necessary, with national government, is now the
pawn of the latter, which is making a mess of the whole works. It is time to cry halt to the assault on
freedom involved in all this centralisation; time to restore the power and the spirit of local power,
responsibility and commitment of genuine local government as a precondition of a healthy democratic
way of life.

Centralization and individualism are zero-sumthe growing power of

centralized power necessarily decreases the significance of individuals
Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Peace Through Social
Empowerment, "Introduction," http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp11.html)
As any political (or other) unit grows in size, the significance of the individual proportionately declines. If
you are a member of a 500 strong community, in the governance of its affairs your membership and
your morality matter simply because your membership is both morally and statistically significant. They
will matter even more if you are deeply concerned, since a large number of people in any community
are generally, because of age or disposition, unable or unwilling to care. But if your political unit
numbers 500 million your significance is reduced from 1/500th to 1/500 millionth! Yet despite this
shrinking of your significance to proportions so minute as to be infinitesimal, the power of the unit itself
has increased to quite staggering proportions: Where then is that power located? It is of course at the
centre. The price of your diminished power is the tribute you pay to the swollen octopus of power at the
centre.

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The centralization of power in the center of an organization inevitably trades

off with the individual.
Papworth 05 (John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the Fourth World Review,
Village Democracy)

To enlarge the scale of such relationships to a giant mass is to effect a near total
transformation of reality. For example, the workings of a modern mass political party, which
may number millions, becomes an entity where the morality factor has largely been
supplemented by that of power. Whatever moral objectives an individual may seek to pursue
by joining a large mass organisation, his relationship with it can only be a power relationship.
This is fundamental to his reasons for becoming a member at all; he is seeking, after all, to
change the way power in society is used, but his individual power is emphatically unequal to
that of the central controlling mechanisms. It is in fact power he surrenders by the mere
fact of becoming a member. The same power cannot be in two places at the same
time, either a member has it, as in his bowls club by the small size of the club, where his
membership is a significant factor in controlling such power as it may deploy, or he doesn't,
as in a mass political party where he is an insignificant cog in a massive wheel controlled by
others at the centre. The mere fact of enlarged size makes size itself an assault on the
democratic ethic as a matter of course.

Perm fails- power cannot reside in two places at once.

Papworth 5 ( John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the Fourth World Review,
Village Democracy)
Current thinking in any case takes no account of an essential prerequisite for the successful
working of any federation. History is eloquent that if the members of a federation are
significantly unequal in size and strength it will only be a matter of time before the bigger
members dominate it. This proved the case in 'Germany', which, after its formation by Bismark,
soon became dominated by Prussia and in the USSR, which was dominated by Russia. What
ensues is not so much a federation as an empire under the dominance of the most powerful
member. It is noticeable that in the USA and in Switzerland, two of the most successful
federations in the record, no single member is strong enough to dominate the rest. This does not of
course resolve the problem of the power drives of any federation when it gets big enough to dominate other federations,
as the USA does today. We can anticipate the prospect of China, or India, achieving a degree of power to rival that of
the USA, especially when the power of the latter inevitably declines. But this does not resolve the problem of war so
much as open up the prospect of even bigger global wars between rival federations. Hence any projects for a world
federation will need to involve a massive scaling down of the big powers that now dominate world affairs so that the
members achieve some approximation of parity in terms of size and strength. The same power cannot be in

two places at the same time; either people have power in their hands or they don't.
Either giant governments and corporations have it in their hands or they haven't.
Nevertheless the dream of some such international authority continues to shine like a beacon in
the eyes of many pacifists and peace lovers, as well as being vaguely acknowledged as a good
thing by a great many other people. The fact is that they have no grasp at all of the
power realities involved or that any such body would be only too to likely make
peace-lovers and their ideals its first victims. But then, an anxious enquiring voice will be
heard to venture, 'Won't largely self-governing local communities or bioregional provinces
sometimes want to make war on other neighbouring communities?'

The perm cannot solve. The endorsement of a mass movement, no matter

how well meant, will inevitably lead to a loss of individual power.
Papworth, Albery, and Sale 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World
Review, Director of the Middlebury Institute, Founder of the institute for Social Inventions (John,
Kirpatrick, Nicholas, Common Sense,
http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf)

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We cannot expect to transform the bureaucratic and market dominated subversion of democracy now
prevalent overnight. So often we are not even in contact with our neighbours, and in seeking change
we tend to immerse ourselves in mass political bodies - themselves part of the disease
rather than its cure, or in good causes such as campaigning for peace, or for the homeless, or to
save the rain forests, where concerned people tend to find themselves in a moral ghetto largely talking
to each other. A new approach to secure neighbourhood power implies a need to focus on the
neighbourhood and on its problems and possibilities for both local and wider social transformation. No
body can be healthier than the cells of which it is comprised. We cannot begin to do this if we are not in
contact with our neighbours and this means we need to explore and adopt such measures as enable us
to form and maintain working community relationships. Mass anonymity is its own form of mass
powerlessness. Power cannot be in two places at once. If centralized government controlling a mass
electorate has the power, then the citizen in no way has it or, on such a basis, can have it.

Centralized power inevitably trades off with the local.

Papworth and Sale 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review,

AND Director of the Middlebury Institute, and Albery, Founder of the instiute for Social inventions,
01(John, Kirkpatrick,Nicholas, Common Sense,
http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf)
Over the last century or more there has been a sedulous transfer of the power of local villages,
parishes and neighbourhoods to the ambit of central government. The measures involved have
been presumed to be justified on the grounds of efficiency and economy. Neither has been justified by
events. Numerous services heretofore often conducted on a voluntary basis by dedicated, publicspirited local citizens have been taken over by salaried officials appointed by the central government,
with a number of consequences which has helped to create a gratuitous social tragedy of ever widening
dimensions. It is a tragedy which has been accentuated by the emergence of new forms of
power in commerce, communications and transport which have also been deployed on a nonlocal basis and which have served even more to divorce the citizen from any real control over many of
the many factors that now dominate citizen life. Two centuries ago an average villager had a distinct
element of control over his school, medicine, police, entertainment, dress, cookery, food production,
transport, shopping, welfare and social provision. Today such control has passed from citizen hands into
the hands of powerful central bureaucracies appointed by the central government or into the hands of
no less powerful commercial concerns. This process has often been justified by reference to the
extension

Central government action discourages individual movements to solve the

problem because they posit problems as out of our control
Papworth 02 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Cut the Cackle,"
Fourth World Review, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwr118.pdf)

Over half a century ago an Austrian professor of economics asserted, If anything is wrong it is because
it is too big. Perhaps an oversweeping statement, but all experience since simply confirms it. Too big.
Just that. So government is too big, banks, shops, farms, industries and fisheries are too big, and even
more imposingly unthinkable, nations are too big. Why? Because giantism has made them
unmanageable in keeping the peace or in ensuring economic justice and stability; the forces
dominating them are out of control and producing effects we are powerless to prevent or to
alleviate. This despite the ballot box and freedom of speech. Too big is the problem of the modern
world and the challenge confronting us all is to reduce the size and scale of things so as to enable us to
control them. Nobody would want a pair of shoes which was too large, so why do we tolerate far more
important matters which suffer the same defect? We need to challenge that deep-rooted assumption in
our minds that making things bigger makes them better when we are living in a crisis which howls with
evidence indicating the contrary; evidence indicating that the small is generally better, far more
stable, responsive, beneficial, controllable, peaceful and prosperous.

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The government is the root cause of problems

Papworth 95 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Small is Powerful,
The Monster, page 2-3, 1995)
We need to see that in any mass form of society (i.e., one in which empowered local communities just do not exist), these
powerful forces have little difficulty in deploying their abundant resrouces so as to secure an almost unlimited degree of
acquiescence to their standards and values of a vast mass of uncritical, and all too often uncaring, individuals- who nevertheless
have the power to vote. Ordinarily nature provides an abundance of leadership in every kind of community

which will take the initiative in tackling its problems; but when communities as such cease to exist, as
centralized forms of power come to exercise a dominance over the affairs of the mass, such
localized leadership loses the mainspring of its capacity to act ; it no longer has a stage, one
might say, on which it can perform. It is this factor of negated or subjugated leadership which gives
added signifncance to the proliferating number and variety of protest, reform or campaigning groups
which today are such a marked feature of public life. An empowered community would not find itself
faced with such groups for the simple reason that the conduct of its affairs would reflect the wishes of
its members as a matter of course. Its leaders, instead of founding or joining some national movement,
would be largely running the local show; but since there is no local show to run, if matters as coffee mornings, jumble
sales, or discos to raise funds for table tennis tables for teenagers are excluded, what role is there left for it to play in matters
which will help to determine its character, its use of local resources or the general quality of life? So that what we are now

observing is a form of government which, because of the nature of the behind-the-scenes forms of
power which sustain it and because of the values these forces are concerned to promote, is compelled
to act in accordance with those values (which a mass electorate has been manipulated into adopting as
its own), is creating a multitude of problems which the more public spirited elements are
being driven to seek either to reform, combat or negate . So that in a very real sense we are in
the grip of a process of government of the people and supposedly for the people which is creating
problems, often of crisis proportions, which under a system of government by the people
would scarcely arise at all.

Decentralization solves democracy and poverty

Kauzya 05 - The Chief in the Division for Public Administration and
Development Management, United Nations Department of Economic and Social
Affairs (John Mary, Decentralization: Prospects for Peace, Democracy, and
Development, September 2005,
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan021510.pdf,
K. Ward)
As part of the efforts to promote the participation of the people in the decision-making
processes as well as the development activities, the policy of devolution of power and
authority to sub-national governments (generally referred to as decentralization) is
increasingly adopted and applied in many countries as one of the tenets of good
governance. This is based on the premise that decentralized governance provides a
structural arrangement and a level playing field for stakeholders and players to promote
peace, democracy, and development. Many countries are promoting decentralized governance
as a measure for democratization, people empowerment and poverty reduction. However, the
efforts in this regard are not moving at the same pace, with the same political conviction,
using equally competent capacities, and with the same success. Some countries have gone
beyond political hesitation and put in place policies of decentralization but they lack the
requisite capacities for the implementation. Others are still politically hesitant, not sure of the
role of decentralized governance in democratization, people empowerment, and poverty
reduction.

The government is the root cause of environmental destruction, wars, and

economic upheavals
Papworth 95 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Small is Powerful,
The Monster, page 10-11, 1995)

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Hence to assert that our societies are out of control is surely to assert something too patent to be
gainsaid; and that they are out of control because they have overreached themselves and have become
too big is no less obvious. Too big, both in terms of the private and public institutions within each state
and also in terms of the size of the states themselves; too big to be able to respond to the moral
judgements of the generality of their members, in the way in which responsive human scale
communities are able to evoke as a matter of course; in consequence our societies are in effect running
amok in terms of environmental destruction, social despoliation, the squandering of the earths finite
resources, economic upheaveals, a propensity for massive wars and even in terms of an uncontrolled
proliferation of human numbers.

The centralization of power inevitably leads to global destruction.

Papworth, Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review, and Sale 1
Director of the Middlebury Institute, and Albery, Founder of the instiute for Social inventions
(John, Kirkpatrick, Nicholas, Common Sense,
http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf)
One overall consequence of this lack of citizen control is control by boardroom moguls pursuing purely
short-term pecuniary gains as obliged by company law and the shareholder primacy system in some
countries. It is a deployment of power, undemocratic, irresponsible, pervasive and
importunate, which has come to act on a global scale and helped to create the current ever deepening
global crisis that now dominates all human life. It is a crisis which is destroying significant elements of
the life support systems of the planet, vast proportions of irreplaceable reserves of finite resources and
involving a wholesale degradation of the quality of life at numerous levels. Not least it has set in train a
number of forces which betoken the most catastrophic consequences, whether in terms of another
global war, environmental collapse or social disintegration, which ought now to be the central
concern of all public policy considerations. It is a crisis which can only have ensued from a grotesque
distortion of the decision-making power within human societies and can only be resolved if that
distortion is corrected so that such power is effectively in the hands of the people in their neighborhood
communities.

Individual engagement in democracy is key to preventing a collapse

Watson 04 Assistant Professor of sociology and gerontology coordinator @ Stephen F.
Austin State University (J.B. Watson, A Justification of the Civic Engagement Model, p. 7374, Service Learning: History, Theory, and Issues)
The civic engagement of ordinary citizens with voluntary associations, social institutions, and
government in local communities is a central feature of strong democracies. Further, a
fundamental feature of democratic governmental structure is its relationship to civil society,
defined as "voluntary social activity not compelled by the state" (Bahlmueller, 1997, p. 3).
Through voluntary participation in civil society associations at the local and regional level,
citizens pursue activities that potentially serve the public good. Through this rudimentary civic
engagement, citizens learn the attitudes, habits, skills, and knowledge foundational to the
democratic process-(Patrick, 1998). Unfortunately, in 1998 the National Commission on Civic
Renewal (NCCR) highlighted the declining quantity and quality of civic engagement at all
levels of American life. A number of other studies concur on the decline of involvement in civic
activities (Bahlmueller, 1997; McGrath, 2001; Putnam, 1995). This concern about the nature
and extent of civic engagement in the United States has impacted the debate on the proper
role of higher education in a democracy. Higher education institutions, as transmitters of
essential elements of the dominant culture, struggle with the development of mechanisms to
socialize the next generation about democratic values. A national debate has emerged on the
higher education response to this perceived need for revitalizing constructive democratic
engagement, building civil society, and increasing citizen participation in government at all
levels. Colleges and universities have responded with a number of civic engagement

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initiatives, including university-community partnerships, empirical studies of political

engagement, community-based (collaborative) research, and the development of new (or
expanded) service-learning programs (Jacoby 2003).

Decentralized government is key to development of democracy

Rosenbaum 99 Director of the Institute of Public Management at the Florida

International University (Allan, Democracy, Governance, and Decentralization,
1999, http://www.fiu.edu/~ipmcs/articles/dgd.htm, K. Ward)
In general, decentralized government can be a very important element in the facilitation of
an active and lively civil society. The more decentralized government is, and the stronger
local governance capacity is, the more opportunities - in essence, the more arenas - are
provided for the emergence of civil society institutions. In fact, very often it is the existence
of local governance, combined with the emergence of local civil society institutions , that
truly creates the pluralism that is so central to democratic institutional development . In that
regard, local governments can and have played crucial facilitating roles in the development
of vibrant civil societies. Local government policy and administrative practice can
profoundly impact upon the capacity for civil society to emerge and play a role in
governance. Likewise, the actions of local political leaders can either be supportive of or
create major impediments to civil society development.

Localization is a pre-requisite to solving democracy

Papworth 01 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review,

Peace Through Social Empowerment, "Primary Causes,"
http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/academicinn/jp14.html)
Our prospects of countering the evil forces promoting the global crisis and of making any significant
progress are bleak indeed if we do not grasp that if people have no real power to enable their moral
judgements to be reflected in the general life processes of their own communities, if they do not
themselves control their social structures, their schools, post office, bank, police, hospital, transport
and their welfare services; if they have no local power to determine these matters, if they do not
have their own locally elected representatives to sit, with others similarly elected, on boards which
govern matters of wider import, including public utilities such as water, gas, electricity and not least,
governing the content of radio and television, they have no effective power at all. The very
structures disempower them and it is a mere abuse of language to describe any such process as
democratic. Democracy, we should never cease to hold, does not mean government of the people,
nor government for the people, both are essentially totalitarian concepts, it means government by
the people. All else is claptrap and delusion.

Localized efforts are key to solve war and democracy

Papworth 02 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review,
Cut the Cackle," Fourth World Review,
http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwr118.pdf)
To talk of the need for a new party is the old fashioned giantist approach; what we need is thousands
of new locally-based independent political parties up and down the country! And in the world at large
millions of them. The pressing need of the moment is for a political and economic programme they
could adopt which affirms at every level the imperative need for the human scale as a prerequisite
for the effective working of democracy. And the programmes? Each local neighbourhood party will
decide its own as a matter of course, which does not mean they would not promote a common series
of principles which serve their common interests. Such principles would relate at the national level to
fundamental provisions for liberty, freedom and independence, involving of course a complete
rejection of any association with the European Community. But cut the cackle all along the line;

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currently discussion is non-stop about what government policy should be on a host of matters which
have been removed from local control. Our millions of new parties will assume as a matter of right
the power to establish their own elected regional bodies to run services where such co-operation with
other communities may be needed such as specialist hospitals, colleges, police, radio and TV,
transport, utilities, banking and investment. This is a programme of liberation, a programme to get
government off peoples backs and into their own hands. Such a political structure would at last
enable peoples wishes to prevail on the issues of war, ecological sanity and economic justice. Across
the world people would insist on the most rigorous controls on armaments production, where it was
permitted at all, and of associated scientific research. At last the questions of war and peace would
not be matters of power-brokering and diplomacy in the hands of giant states but moral questions of
right and wrong in the hands of people. The centralization of power kills democracy, by
concentrating decision making beyond the reach of the average citizen. Papworth, Sale, and Albery 1
Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review, Director of the Middlebury
Institute,, Founder of the institute for Social inventions, 01(John, Kirkpatrick,Nicholas
http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf) of the franchise, but again
what is evident is an increasing decline of citizen influence or capacity to control as giant political
parties, subject to their own highly centralized bureaucracies, ordain their workings and their general
policy direction. What emerges from this process is not one in which the citizen is able to express
preferences which party or government then seeks to effect, rather it is a matter of policy decisions
by powerful centralized bodies to which the citizen has no effective response except to assent. It is a
process which gives enormous powers of patronage to party leaders and even more to heads of
government and it is one quite incompatible with the spirit and practice of the democratic ethos.
Such patronage is a powerful weapon in the hands of those who deploy it to secure subservience to
their wishes rather than concurrence with the wishes of the citizen.

Decentralization promotes democracy

Kauzya 05 - The Chief in the Division for Public Administration and Development
Management, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (John Mary,
Decentralization: Prospects for Peace, Democracy, and Development, September 2005,
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan021510.pdf, K.
Ward)
Viewed in this light, political decentralization (being a process of transferring decision
making power and authority) becomes a strong vehicle for championing local diversity and
local autonomy. Through it, local interests are articulated, and local socio-cultural systems
are strengthened. Decentralization provides a structural and institutionalized venue through
which local people can participate and exert more influence in the formulation and
implementation of policies and the determination of their development in general.4 If it is
taken that democracy means the rule of the people, then political decentralization, by
facilitating participation of the people in decision-making, promotes democracy.

Decentralization promotes democracy

Kauzya 05 - The Chief in the Division for Public Administration and Development
Management, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (John Mary,
Decentralization: Prospects for Peace, Democracy, and Development, September 2005,
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan021510.pdf, K.
Ward)
When political decentralization is understood in the preceding sense, then it becomes clear
that it can be a vehicle for promoting democratic participation. In fact, one would not see
any value in political decentralization if it was not linked to the promotion of participation of
local people or their representatives in the process of decision-making and implementation.

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In a general way, what is difficult about using political decentralization to promote

democratic participation is not in understanding the linkage between the two but rather
how to, through the process of decentralization, create structures that inspire as well as
energize local people, and facilitate their participation in the decision-making and
implementation process.
The government is the root cause of civic disengagement
Papworth 95 (John, Senior Editor @ Ecologist + Founder of Fourth World Review, Small is
Powerful, The Monster, page 4-5, 1995)
In posing such questions let us be clear how the argument is shaping. We are noting that
society at large is afflicted with an increasing number of problems in almost every aspect
of its affairs; we are suggesting that these problems taken together point to a general
cause or causes from which they stem and that one aspect of those causes relates to the
fact that our affairs are conducted on a mass basis rather than on a localised,
empowered community basis. We are also saying that the mere existence of the mass
form of society affirms the existence of a majority which is ignorant of any serious
consideration of its problems and which is for the most part indifferent to any need to
resolve them, and that this mass unconcern is the material which dominant forces are
able to manipulate to achieve ends which are sharply at variance with the general
interests of society; in so doing they are prompting governments to pursue courses
which cannot fail to multiply problem areas which, in turn prompts the emergence of
protest or reform groups of people who are informed, who do care about the general
well-being of society and who, in empowered communities, as distinct from the mass
form of society, would be the natural leaders who would be harkened to and followed by
their neighbours. To this it needs to be added that the problems which now beset our
societies are so numerous, as well as enormous, as to constitute an overall crisis of a
magnitude which is no only causing the everyday workings of the social order to
malfunction but which now threatens its prospects of survival as the sedulous process of
social disintegration which is thus created gathers momentum.
A mass democracy is an oxymoron. As the size of a political unit increases the
moral judgement of each of its members because unimportant.
Papworth 6 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review
(John, The Fourth World Review, The ABC's of Politics II,No 136, pg 2

http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwrp137.pdf)
In terms of democratic comprehension

power entities such as India, the USA, China,

Russia, Germany, France, Britain etc. are simply a repudiation of any possibility of democratic practice .

Democracy

is a moral concept implying a condition of human freedom, and

morality in turn is wholly a function of human relationships, which is why the
numbers of humans involved in asserting and upholding moral principles is all important. Numbers of a
size that enables each persons moral judgement and decision to be significant
must be limited if such decisions are to be operative. The mere existence of giant
multi-million states, especially when power is concentrated in single centres, is an
effective repudiation of any possibility of democratic practice. A mass democracy
is an oxymoron. The centralization of power ensures that economic interests will
triumph over those of the individual, killing democracy Papworth, Senior editor of the
Ecologist and founder of the Fourth World Review, 01, (John, The Fourth World Review, The
Community Revolution. Nos 109 &110) Radical activists really must wake up here. The sheer

scale and degree of centralised power of most governments puts them effectively

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beyond the reach of any prospect of citizen control; but governments are not, in any
case, any longer masters of their own house. That office is now decisively in the hands of
a mere score or so of globally operating boardrooms. In this light, however commendable
it may be for radical activists to stage street protests or to petition governments to remedy this or that abuse,
there is a need, more urgent than ever before, to define what we are protesting for and
the kind of world we are seeking in which to live, one which rejects greed for profit or power as a motivating principle and
one which restores power to the people. It is an objective which must imperatively reject any form of mass
organisation, precisely the form which has robbed people of power and enabled boardroom greed to achieve its
dominance; it is one that commands imperatively a human-scale approach, one which enables personal decision-making
again to become meaningful and vibrant. Revolutionary politics today is community politics, and its weapons are not guns
and violence but clarity of thought and ever persistent peaceful persuasion.

Inefficiencies of the federal government are inevitable this is an inherent

characteristic in federal enterprise tradition resulting in corruption and
misallocation
Rothbard 04 Founder Center for Libertarian Studies, Doctor of Philosophy in
Economics, Distinguished Professor at the University of Nevada (Murray N.
the Myth of Efficient Government Service.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. 3-18-04. http://mises.org/story/1471)

The well-known inefficiencies of government operation are not empirical accidents,

resulting perhaps from the lack of a civil-service tradition. They are inherent in all
government enterprise, and the excessive demand fomented by free and other
underpriced services is just one of the many reasons for this condition. Thus, free supply
not only subsidizes the users at the expense of nonusing taxpayers; it also misallocates
resources by failing to supply the service where it is most needed. The same is true, to a
lesser extent, wherever the price is under the free-market price. On the free market,
consumers can dictate the pricing and thereby assure the best allocation of productive
resources to supply their wants. In a government enterprise, this cannot be done. Let us
take again the case of the free service. Since there is no pricing, and therefore no
exclusion of submarginal uses, there is no way that government, even if it wanted to,
could allocate its services to the most important uses and to the most eager buyers. All
buyers, all uses, are artificially kept on the same plane. As a result, the most important
uses will be slighted, and the government is faced with insuperable allocation problems,
which it cannot solve even to its own satisfaction. Thus, the government will be
confronted with the problem: Should we build a road in place A or place B? There is no
rational way by which it can make this decision.

Healthcare is the epitome of overcentralization. It's current practice denies

the power of local communities, whilst sacrificing quality healthcare for
profits.
Papworth 5 ( John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the
Fourth World Review, Village Democracy)
A further factor here is the role of drugs and drug companies in a national service. One
medical authority has declared that 'In Europe and the USA the drug companies now control
the medical profession. To a large extent doctors have become the marketing arms of the
pharmaceutical industry. The same author asserts many widely used drugs are dangerous
and often do more harm than healing. What stands out is that most drugs are excessively
overpriced and that their cost, as well as the costs of medical equipment and mundane
ancillary items such as bandages, plays a quite disproportionate role in health care
budgets. A local health service would be free to break out of the current constraints

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imposed by giant drug companies. Local labour could be employed to make equipment and
such items as bandages at a fraction of the prevailing charges, and the way would also be
open to employ natural traditional remedies from local services such as herb gardens.
There is a pronounced tendency to dismiss remedies based on natural ingredients as being
so much hocus pocus; it is an attitude which ignores how much more hocus pocus there is
in the promotion of high powered products of the giant pharmaceutical companies. The size
of their advertising budgets is a key pointer here; the whole emphasis of the industry is not
on healing but in making money, often in ways which are none too scrupulous with regard
to the long term effects of repeated use. What is noticeable about a national service is its
disregard of positive health promotion. It is really a National Sickness service. Very few
people have any detailed understanding of how their bodies work and are generally
ignorant of the needs of their respiratory, digestive, excretory and other organs; it is this
ignorance which enables advertisers to persuade them to purchase highly flavoured,
devitalised and chemicalised items masquerading as food on such a regular basis as to
make one form of ill health or another inevitable. Most of the shelves in most food stores
today are institutionalised assaults on any attempt to provide a proper health service; a
locally run service would be aware of the relationship between this factor and the effect on
its health budget and be concerned to promote locally-produced chemical-free food and to
make people aware of the true conditions of bodily health. Helping people to understand
you cannot buy good health, you can only Jive it, and a genuinely democratic local health
authority would be a front runner in promoting the ways decent health can be attained. It
may well be asserted, indeed it frequently is, that village people are apt to make mistakes
with their limited knowledge and that these can carry a heavy cost in terms of both money
and resources, mistakes which experts with their greater knowledge can avoid. this of
course is only too true. Inadequate supervision of local building operations may prompt a
contractor to install drainage pipes of smaller than specified dimensions, or to use substandard construction materials and so on, practices which only come to light after a lapse
of time and when invoices have been finally processed.
The centralization of power inevitably trades off with local power and results in gross
inefficiency and a destruction of the value of life, turning case. Papworth 1 Senior
Editor of the Ecologist and Founder of Fourth World Review, (John, Common
Sense, Afterword
http://www.cesc.net/radicalweb/scholars/papworth/afterword.html )
And the damage the boardroom brigands have done to work is reflected in what the
politicians have done to our social structures. Local government once involved the
energies, dedication, commitment and genuinely altruistic spirit of service to the
community of a high proportion of local people. Today a kind of Fabian fascism has
brushed all this aside as being of no account. Instead of members of a local community
hospital or welfare committee being involved in the day-to-day running of local
institutions, organising fetes and celebrations to raise funds and keeping the show on the
road; doing it in ways which gave their lives meaning, status and, again that word,
fulfilment, they are now relegated to the role of voting fodder in the mass political
charade. We now have 'national' schemes and ministries for health, education, welfare
and other essentially local matters. The evidence abounds and grows that these bodies
are increasingly wasteful and inefficient, where they are not indeed riddled with the
maggot of corruption, and not least of course they operate on organisational parameters
which make a mockery of democratic principle. Somehow the illusion has been fostered,
for example, that people who have devoted their lives to clambering to the top of the
greasy pole are better qualified to ordain how children should be educated than are the
parents and their local committees. So our public prints are loaded with otiose

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speculation about 'national' examination standards and results, and about the content of
'national' educational curricula; meanwhile, in rural areas, large numbers of children are
bussed to giant 'comprehensive' schools where they learn about computers and nothing
about how to grow food. Local government, instead of being a power in its own right but
working in tandem, where necessary, with national government, is now the pawn of the
latter, which is making a mess of the whole works.

The concentration of power makes populism inevitableall social

movements will regress to ineffectiveness because of their demands for
universality

Papworth 6 Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker and founder of the Fourth
World Review (John, The Fourth World Review, The ABC's of Politics III,No 138139, pg 4 http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwrp138%26.pdf)
A tennis club member can communicate on the clubs concerns with his fellow club
member, perhaps in the club room bar or on its notice board; multi-million members of
an electorate are dependent on communicating on their common concerns, if at all,
through mass newspapers or TV programmes. But the power of such communication is
not in the members hands, it is in the hands of those who own or control such means.
On the basis of the personal nature of the relationships that prevail, the club member is
in a position to exercise a significant measure of influence on its policies and
programmes, the ordinary member of a mass electorate has none: If, by excessive
wealth or talents, or of oratory or authorship, he can exercise significant influence he is
not an ordinary member. In the tennis club the natural leaders and spokespersons
communicate with their fellow members by the ordinary force of moral suasion, the
member the mass is not a communicator to any significant degree at all, he is a
recipient. This means that the moral force of his views inevitably becomes at a discount
since they are subservient to the governing, determining and manipulating forces at the
centre. These forces control the levers of power in the pursuit of money or power
concerns which may be, as commonly they are, at variance with the interests of the
citizen or indeed the basic moral concerns of civilisation. The moral implications of this,
however carefully disregarded, are frightening; such moral force as may be given
leadership in the tennis club will naturally appeal to what is best in people. Where mass
leadership may be at stake it can only do so successfully by appealing to the most
general propensity; the proportion of the highest common factor gives way to the
promotion of the lowest common denominator. The mass society becomes inevitably an
embodiment of institutionalised vulgarity. The aff can't solve without the alternative. All
reform movements are doomed fail so long as governmental power remains centralizaed.
Papworth 5 ( John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the Fourth World
Review, Village Democracy) For generations the reformist agenda of policy change has held
the stage on the assumption that if enough support can be garnered it will impel the
necessary policy changes, meanwhile the general crisis of our civilisation has continued
to deepen until today it overshadows the entire human adventure. The reformist agenda,
whether for peace, for economic sanity or for much needed changes on many pressing
problems is simply a diversion from the guts of the problem. That agenda has failed, and
that failure stems from a single cause, that the scale of government or of economic
activity has become so large as to be beyond any citizen capacity to exercise the control
needed to make it work for the general interest. If we are serious about the need for
change we need to recognise the sheer irrelevance of postulating high-minded moral
goals when there is no form of power available to achieve them. We need to create those
new forms of power, forms which put power where in democratic terms it belongs, in the
hands of concerned citizens. The modern experience, and much ancient wisdom, is

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eloquent that for democratic power to be effective it must be locally based in local
community hands. To that goal all serious political effort needs to be directed if moves for change are to have
any prospect of success.

Decentralization of power is key to solving the population crisis.

Papworth, Albery, and Sale 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the
Fourth World Review, Director of the Middlebury Institute, Founder of the
institute for Social Inventions(John, Kirpatrick, Nicholas, Common Sense,
http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf)
The largely unconscious biological mechanisms, which control numbers in the animal
world were also operative in human societies until quite recent times. They operated on
the basis of decisions made consensually (and frequently instinctively) in small
groupings. Today there is a need for those responses to be reinforced by a conscious
process of reasoning; instead we have largely destroyed the small communities, which
were their basis. This is the real cause of the population crisis. No small self-governing
community threatened to be swamped by its own numbers would fail to do something to
prevent it if it had the power to do so. We declare that the need for base power in our
village societies is imperative if the crisis in human numbers is to be resolved. No
government of a mass society can solve this problem except by means, which are
totalitarian and an assault on human dignity. Community responsibility for community
affairs is a precondition for the control of community numbers. It follows that community
power is a precondition for community survival.

We can't provide a blueprint for the world of the alternative. Doing so would
only further the domination of centralized power.
Papworth, Albery, and Sale 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the
Fourth World Review, Director of the Middlebury Institute, Founder of the
institute for Social Inventions (John, Kirpatrick, Nicholas, Common Sense,
http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/commonsense2008.pdf)
To draw up a plan or a blueprint for the creation of a humanscale non-centralised global
order would be as foolish as it would be futile. If the principle of the human scale is
accepted then clearly each human scale community will be concerned to work out its
own way of life, in accordance with its own judgements. Any suggestion of acting in
accordance with a centralised plan would be the extension of a disease rather than the
application of a remedy. People will only act in accordance with a principle if they
understand and accept the principle itself and to that end a major and multifaceted drive
to educate and to generally promote the principle of the human scale is now a task of the
utmost urgency.
While small communities might take sometimes take reprehensible
action, their limited size ensures that the scope of negative action will be limited, but the
positive action's is not. Papworth 1 Senior editor of the Ecologist and founder of the
Fourth World Review (John, The Fourth World Review, The Community Revolution. Nos
109 &110, http://www.williamfranklin.com/4thworld/adobe/fwr109%26.pdf )
There is a tragic failure here to grasp some quite elementary factors relating to the
political process; that, for example, affairs conducted on a small scale may well produce
small-scale horrors, whereas when conducted on a giant scale they produce giant
horrors. There is an equal failure to grasp that when affairs are conducted on a small,
local scale they are capable of producing, as indeed they have done, glory unlimited in
every sphere of human creativity, whereas on a giant, mass scale, the chief orientation
of modern life of the last century or more, we have produced the first ugly civilisation in
the human record.

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Their evidence is biased- the media will use it's control of information to
maintain its hold on power
Papworth 5 ( John, Senior editor of the Ecologist, baker, and founder of the Fourth
World Review, Village Democracy)

Two questions arise here; how can the media avoid using its immense power to cultivate
and project the values which sustain its overall quest? How can it avoid conditioning the
public consciousness to accept the mores of profit-seeking as a supreme social objective?
Life in modern so called developed societies is dominated by the continuous and highly
skilled propaganda of advertising in its promotion of an exaggerated emphasis on the
acquisition of material goods, and the use of such services as travel, as an ultimate
purpose of living. It does this regardless of the social consequences or indeed of any
other consequences except its own enrichment. So the non-stop promotion of car
ownership will ignore the effects on global warming, its effects on distorting and often
destroying social relationships and community structures, on family life, on the
deliberate run-down of finite resources such as oil and the consequent impoverishment
of future generations, on the high rate of accidents;2 on the distortion of priorities in
relation to public rail services, the extension of the working day by car commuting, with
its concomitant of stress of mind and body and, not least, the perpetual ordeal of noise,
stink and poisoned air suffered by millions who live alongside busy urban roads.

Centralization is being broken down in the status quo-technology allows

individuals to reach large audiences
Lee 07 Affiliate of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University
[Timothy B. Yochai Benkler and the Libertarian Center. The Cato Institute. 7-19-07.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2007/07/19/yochai-benkler-and-the-libertariancenter/]
I found Jonah Goldbergs follow-up contribution particularly interesting. He points out that
much of what was wrong with the progressive movement of the early 20th century was
due to its infatuation with centralizing institutions that were ascendant at the time: the
army, heavy industry, and later, large-scale scientific endeavors like the Manhattan
Project. Bigness and centralization were in, and intellectuals believed that the entire
country should be governed in a similarly hierarchical fashion. Goldberg thinks liberals
will just discard the economic argument for central planning and move on to another
one: public health, the environment, whatever. But I wanted to point out that there are
also some liberals who are adopting a more appropriately skeptical attitude toward
central planning itself. One reason to think the 21st century is going to be more
libertarian than the 20th is that the defining technology of our generation, the Internet, is
radically decentralizing. After a century in which our cultural and economic lives were
dominated by large, vertically-integrated corporations, were entering an era in which
decentralization and disintermediation are the dominant trends. Instead of producing
components in house, they develop networks of independent suppliers, knit together by
sophisticated supply chains. And instead of vertically-integrated media companies like
the New York Times and NBC, were increasingly moving toward a world in which writers,
musicians, and other creators can reach their audiences directly.

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**Centralization Good / States Bad**

Furthering the neoliberal agenda justifies genocide and extinction.
Santos, Director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, 20 03
(Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Collective Suicide?, Publicado na Folha de Sao Paulo em 28 de
Marco de 2003, NM, http://www.ces.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php)
According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save
humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of
the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality
over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of

indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which
caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism,
with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with
the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war
against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and
what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the

radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of
saving it
Federal devolution to the states exacerbates neoliberalism
Boyer, Clinical Assistant Professor of Dept. of Science and Technology Studies at Resselaer
Polytechnic, 2006
(Kate Boyer, Editorial Board of Antipode, Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space, Scale
and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform, NM)
Welfare reform has been marked by a downward transfer of decisionmaking power regarding the content

and administration of welfare policy from federal, to state and local governments as well as the private sector
(devolution). With this change has also come a shift in the level at which services themselves are provided,
such that for- and not-for-profit organizations as well as faith-based groups now compete with the public
sector for funds (Boyer, Lawrence and Wilson 2001). Devolution expresses the goals of a broader
neoliberal agenda by enabling both inter-locality competition and, especially, privatization . By transferring
some of the responsibilities that were once under the auspices of the federal government downward and
outward to the private sector, devolution can be seen as an expression of hollowing out some of the
responsibilities of the federal government under neoliberalism described by Jessop (1999).
Devolutionary policies can lead to a full blown neoliberal shift
Williams and Mooney, Prof of Social Justice at Keele University and Senior Social Policy Lecturer
at the Open University in Scotland, 2008.
(Charlotte Williams, Decentring Social Policy? Devolution and the Discipline of Social Policy: A
Commentary,
NM,
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?
type=1&fid=1897768&jid=JSP&volumeId=37&issueId=03&aid=1897760)

We are nonetheless faced with considering both the tensions and possibilities
devolution portends for the discipline: to reflect it uncritically as an exercise in the
technocratic pragmatism of the neo-liberal agenda is one possibility, or to engage with it
as part of the expanding the social policy imaginary approach (Lewis, 2000). We contend that

devolution represents a potential paradigmatic shift for the discipline if we engage with it as a new
dimension in the rethinking story of contestation, conflicts and struggles over welfare arrangements,
delivery and outcomes, through the forging of new arenas of analysis, new methodologies and concepts
in a multi-nation, neo-liberal UK.

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Policies passed to the state reinforce neoliberal ideologies

UAAR, Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, 1997
(Volume 48, State Devolution in America: Implications For a Diverse Society edited by Lynn A. Staeheli, Janet E.
Kodras, and Colin Flint, NM)

local states are left with less control to position themselves within a volatile global economy, even
as the national stale passes off additional responsibility for them to attempt this (Peck & Tickell, 1994>.
Devolution of the national state does open new "regulatory spates" for local initiative, and the
geographic consequences of this particular mode of restructuring will reflect the relative capacities of
local states to respond, as discussed above. But these regulatory spaces will be constrained in all places
by competitive pressures imposed by global capital and reinforced by neoliberalism in the national slate
First,

(Peck, 1993). The accelerating global mobility of capital accentuates fine distinctions between place* (Harvey. 1989) and
exerts "economic discipline- on locale* to conform to its demands (Harvey. 1985). The ensuing rivalry for investment among
local states will require reducing the regulatory role previously played by government, while the taxes that underwrite
governmental assistance will he kept to a minimum to ensure the area's boundaries. National stales increasingly operate
within a global economy that they are unable to control (Clark & Dear, 1984) as nation-based fordist production, regulated
by the Keynesian welfare stale, yields to globally extensive posttordisr production, emancipated through deregulation by the
neoliberal state (Jessop. 13; Peck & Tickell, 1994). The neoliberal restructuring of the national slate, taking the particular
forms of devolution and privatization in the United Slates, passes greater responsibility onto heal states, which are even less
capable of exerting power within a globalized economy. Finally, despite the prospect of migration for some individuals, civil
society remains the most place-bound and locally dependent- due to material, familial, and emotional tics to community
(Bey non & Hudson, 1993; Cox & Mair. 1988). David Harvey (1989) nails the point; "Labor power has to go home every

interconnected trendsglobalization of capital, devolution and privatization of the

state, and localization of civil societyshift power increasingly toward capital (Offe. 1985; Peck, 1995;
night" (p. 19) These

Storper & Walker, 1989), an asymmetrical power relation termed "glo-calization" by Swyngcdouw
(1992).

Devolution to the states reinforces low-income disparities

Boyer, Clinical Assistant Professor of Dept. of Science and Technology Studies at Resselaer
Polytechnic, 2006
(Kate Boyer, Editorial Board of Antipode, Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space, Scale
and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform, NM)

In spite of the benefits devolution might offer as a laboratory for policy innovation at
the state level, there are concerns about the potential for the downward transfer of
decision-making power to intensify inequality of access to opportunity between
different places (Cashin 1999; Karger 1991). Benefit levels vary widely between states, and are not
calibrated to cost-of-living differences between states or between different areas within a state . We also find
considerable unevenness in what it means to be on welfare from state to state. As research from
the Applied Research Center suggests, as of 2001 welfare recipients in Minnesota were allowed to earn

wages to supplement cash benefits, while clients in California were sanctioned and even imprisoned for
doing the same (Gordon 2001). In this sense devolution is of a piece with neoliberal polices and practices
which work to fix disenfranchised peoples in place to their detriment. According to Andrew Herod and
Melissa Wright, such policies: localize poor peoples at a supposed time of growing planetary spatial
integration of capital flows, goods and services, information, and wealthy people. Apparently, despite the
one-world rhetoric of neoliberalism, some people face tremendous obstacles in linking their worlds and
becoming fully-fledged citizens of the global village about which we hear so much (Herod and Wright
2002:12) These critiques suggest that devolution has the potential to exacerbate, rather than redress,
gendered, racialized, and place-based disparities in access to social and economic opportunity.
Devolution to the states destroys political influence for the low-income
Winston, 2003
(Pamela Winston, Welfare Policymaking in the States The Devil in Devolution, NM, p. 3)
The 1996 welfare law raises additional questions about our commitment to political selfdetermination. Devolution of welfare policy also may be making it more difficult for poor families

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or groups that represent them to have a role in shaping the policies that most affect them if, in
fact, it is harder for them to participate effectively in the states and localities than in the
nation's capital. Americans commonly support the idea that parents should have a voice in

education policy, old people should have influence on the shape of Medicare and Social Security,
and business organizations should effectively express their views about regulation. These groups
may not always get what they want, but it is regarded as entirely legitimatein fact, necessary
that they have a role in the policymaking process in our pluralist system. If the effect of

devolution, however, is to send welfare policymaking to political spheres where representatives of

poor families are weakest, it will further diminish their political voice.
Passing jurisdiction to the states increases governmental control over
individuals
Peck, phD at University of Manchester, 2001
(Jamie Peck, Workfare States, NM, Guilford Press)

The political implications of this are nontrivial. While the politics of workfare advocacy have assumed an
increasingly aggressive, generic, and transnational form, for the most part anti-workfare politics remain defensive,
particularized, and localized. Indeed, explicit objectives around the weakening, division, and localization of sources
of political opposition are often reflected in welfare-restructuring strategies. It seems that once the national

defenses of welfarism have been breached, the path is opened decisively to downscale residual welfare and
emergent workfare functions. This involves reregulation not only at the state and local scales but also at that
of the individual bodies of welfare recipientsgiven the preoccupation in U.S. reforms, for example, with
regulating the reproductive as well as the productive lives of welfare recipients, through such measures as the
denial of aid to teen parents, "man in the house" rules, leamfare, family caps, and so forth. This downloading of
risks and regulator)' responsibilities to the level of the individual is also evident in workfares laborregulatory functions, because as the epitome of supply-side policymaking it seeks to make a virtue of
individualized, "flexible" labor relations. The ideology that frames these programs, indeed, is rooted in the
notion of independence through wage labor.
Devolutionary policies increase the stigmatization placed on the poor
Winston, 2003
(Pamela Winston, Welfare Policymaking in the States The Devil in Devolution, NM, p. 3)
The 1996 welfare law raises additional questions about our commitment to political self-determination.
Devolution of welfare policy also may be making it more difficult for poor familiesor groups that
represent them to have a role in shaping the policies that most affect them if, in fact, it is harder for
them to participate effectively in the states and localities than in the nation's capital. Americans
commonly support the idea that parents should have a voice in education policy, old people should
have influence on the shape of Medicare and Social Security, and business organizations should
effectively express their views about regulation. These groups may not always get what they want, but
it is regarded as entirely legitimatein fact, necessarythat they have a role in the policymaking
process in our pluralist system. If the effect of devolution, however, is to send welfare policymaking to

political spheres where representatives of poor families are weakest, it will further diminish their political
voice. Certainly poor people are no longer regarded as a group with legitimate political grievances , as they
were briefly during the New Deal and the Great Society. Most Americans do not appear to think a great
deal about poor people, and when they do, it often is with pity or disapproval. Neither, however, are
Americans in general likely to be entirely comfortable with the prospect that in a range of jurisdictions
the perspectives of low-income families may have virtually no influence on the design of policies that
are vital to their well-being."

Devolutionary policies inherently bring destabilization and kills solvency

Peck, phD at University of Manchester, 2001

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(Jamie Peck, Workfare States, NM, Guilford Press)

The mainsireaming of workfarist discourse and practice, of course, hardly ever occurs by way of quantum
shifts in policy. Instead, change is typically more incremental and more complex. The course of workfare
politics has run differently in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as powerful legacies of
path-dependency remain alongside revealing convergences in rhetoric and practice. So this is not, nor is it
ever likely to be, a story of simple convergence toward a unitary workfarist model, but an uneven process
of mutually referential adjustment. In this context, PRWORA retains a talismanic significance, as a truly
radical moment of reform. As Rodgers (2000: 5) puts it, " PRWORA completely changes the philosophy

of welfare policy." While this may understate some important continuities with past U.S. practice, it
quite correctly draws attention to the potentially phase-shifting consequences of work enforcement
by way of devolution to the states . The variegated and competitive local reform dynamic that this
entails threatens to leave the postwelfare United States in a perpetual state of destabilization and ex perimentation. This, in turn, facilitates a continuation of the cafeteria-style reform process
established under the waiver regime, broadening and deepening the workfarist repertoire and
creating the basis for further rounds of fast-policy transfers . Facilitated by an increasingly technocratic
and essentialist evaluation literature, plus the earnest endeavors of consultants, this fast-policy regime
has taken on an internationaland in an important sense interlocalcharacter (see Jessop and Peck,
2000; Peck and Theodore, 2001).

State policies are inefficient implementation differences

Peck, phD at University of Manchester, 2001
(Jamie Peck, Workfare States, NM, Guilford Press)

local political struggles usually reflectthough are not

determined bythe local form of work-fare strategies . Where workfare slots are located in the public
There is an important sense, then, in which

sector, the strategy is exposed to the threat of unionization; where workfare relies on nonprofit-sector
placements, then the obvious line of resistance is to choke off the supply of places through social-sector
campaigning and lobbying; where workfare is oriented to wage employment in the exter nal labor marketin
many ways its tendential formresistance is rendered difficult due to the diffuse and individualized nature of
this strategy, but may take the form of boycotts, unionization drives, or research-based campaigns. At the very
least, different workfare strategies call for different forms of local political response; they are also

differentially vulnerable to disruption, reform, and implementation failure at the local level, depending
on their (inherently unpredictable) interactions with local political, economic, and institutional
structures. And, of course, the geography of oppositional politics also reflects the uneven terrain of
preexising political forces and resources at the local level . In Baltimore, for example, responses to workfare
have been shaped by previous patterns of activism around the city's "Living Wage" campaign.

Devolution inherently makes policies less equal

UAAR, Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, 1997
(Volume 48, State Devolution in America: Implications For a Diverse Society edited by Lynn A. Staeheli, Janet E.
Kodras, and Colin Flint, NM)

Devolution refers to the transfer, or decentralization, of government functions from

higher to lower levels of the federal hierarchy. As a transformation internal to the state that alters the scale of
activities, devolution redefines government responsibilities for regulating civil society, transfers authority across levels and administrative units
of government, redraws the map of government costs and benefits, and changes accessibility and entitlement to government services. In shift ing
responsibilities and resources to lower tiers in the federal hierarchy, the national government still retains authority to set the direction for change,
as "this complex subnational reconstitution of state power and regulatory structures is occurring within a set of political, discursive, and
institutional parameters established by (or mediated by) the nation-state" (Peck, 1996, p. 3). Devolution is an inherently spatial

process of state changefirst, because the American federal structure is a hierar chical organization of
territorially demarcated governments, and second, because the uneven development of different local states
generates dissimilar initiatives in response to devolution according to local needs, perceptions, and abilities.

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Enforcing neoliberalism causes endless wars

Hardt and Negri, Professor of Comp. Lit. at Duke and Anarchist Intellectual,
2004,
(Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, NM, p.176-178

Big government actually never went away, but certainly it has become 'more clearly
evident in recent years, especially since September 11, 2001 .' The various military and
legal projects for global security led primarily by the United States since that date, for
example, are oriented in part toward stabilizing and guaranteeing the global economic
order. In some respects, after September 11 the private forms of authority over the global economy,
such as the new Lex mercatona, along with all the mechanisms or international trade and the
macroeconomic equilibria that.make them possi-, J>le, went into crisis. The dominant nation-

states had to intervene to guarantee all levels of economic interactionsfinancial

transactions, insurance relationships, air transportation, and so forth . The crisis gave a
quick reminder of just how much capital needs a sovereign authority standing behind it, a truth that
rises up into view every time there are serious cracks in the market order and hierarchy. The big

government that guarantees market order must be in pan a military power. Capital
occasionally has to call on an army to force open unwilling markets and stabilize
existing ones. In the early nineteenth century, for example, British capital needed the British military
to open up the Chinese market with its victory in the Opium 'War. This is not to say, however, that all
military actions are explained by specific economic interests. It is not adequate to think, for example,
that the U.S.-led military ac-i dons in recent decadesAfghanistan and Iraq, much less Somalia, Haiti,
and Panamawere primarily directed at a specific economic advantage, such as access to cheap oil.
Such specific goals are secondary. The primary link between military action and economic

interest exists only at a much more general level of analysis, abstract from any
particular national interest. Military force must guarantee the conditions for the
functioning of the world market, guaranteeing, that is, the divisions of labor and power
of the global political body. This effort is paradoxical, however, because the relationship between
security and profits cuts two ways. On one hand, the deployment of state military power is
necessary to guarantee the security of the global markets but, on the other hand, the
security regimes tend to raise national borders and obstruct the global circuits of
production and trade that had been the basis of some of the greatest profits . The United
States and other military powers must discover a way to make the interests of security and economic
profits compatible and complementary. We should be clear that the newly prominent need for a big
government to support the economy, especially since September 11, does not represent in any way a
return to Keyncsianism. Under Keynesianism the nation-state supported the stability and growth of the
economy by providing mechanisms to mediate the conflicts and interests of the working class and in
the process expanded the social demand for production. The forms of sovereignty we see now, on the
contrary, reside completely on the side of capital without any mediatory mechanisms to negotiate its
conflictual relationship with labor. It is interesting in this regard how ambivalent the position of capital is
when risk is the dominant characteristic of economic activity and development, and indeed of all social
interaction. The world is a dangerous place, and the role of big government and military

intervention is to reduce risks and provide security while maintaining the pres ent
order.> / W ? 8
Neoliberalism makes poverty inevitable
Hardt and Negri, Professor of Comp. Lit. at Duke and Anarchist Intellectual,
2004,
(Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, NM, p.277-280)

After recognizing the extent of poverty in the world today, one has to recognize also
its uneven geographical distribution. In each nation-state, poverty is distributed

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unequally along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. In many countries throughout the
world, for example, there are significantly higher rates of poverty among women than
men, and many ethnic minorities, such as the indigenous populations throughout the
Americas, have significantly higher rates of poverty. Local and national variations in the rate of
poverty, however, are dwarfed by the inequalities of wealth and Dovcrtv on a global scale. South Asia
and Sub-Saharan Africa account for about 70 percent of the global population living on less than a dollar
a day, up from about 60 percent ten yean ago. The average income of the richest 20 countries is thirtyseven times greater than the average in the poorest twentya gap that has doubled in the past forty
years.68 Even when these figures are adjusted for purchasing powersince some basic commodities
cost more in rich countries than in poorthe gap is astonishing. The construction of the global market

and the global integration of the national economies has not brought us together but driven us apart,
exacerbating the plight of the poor. There are millions of specific expressions across the world of indignation and generosity with respect to die poor, often through courageous ^crs of charity and self-sacrifice.
Nonprofit, and religious charity organizations provide enormous assistance for those in need, but they
cannot change the system that produces and reproduces poverty. It is impressive, in fact, how so
many people who begin in volunteer charity work pass to activism and protest against the economic
system.fry. Some protests against the systemic reproduction of poverty, such as the Jubilee Movement
International, focus on the fact that foreign debt obligations serve as a mechanism that keeps the poor
countries poor and their populations hungry.69 It is clear that no matter what economic policies they
enact the poorest countries cannot repay their current foreign debts or even keep up with interest
payments, perpetuating an inescapable cycle of misery. Furthermore, many claim that these debts
were incurred originally through dubious or illegitimate means. It is always the same story: debt serves
as a legal mechanism of enslavement.70 The difference here is that this logic of bondage is applied
not merely to the individual indentured worker or even to a specific racial group or indigenous
population (where the assumption of a civilizing mission is the basis of debt) but rather to entire
nations. ; In more general terms many economic grievances against the global system arc based on the
assumption that the inequalities and injustices of the global economy result primarily from the fact that
political powers are less and less able to regulate economic activity. Global capital, the argument goes,
since its movement and reach extend well beyond the limits of national space, cannot be effectively
controlled by states. Many labor unions, particularly in the dominant countries, protest the fact that the
mere threat of the mobility of capitaldie threat, for example, of moving production and jobs to another
country where state regulations anoVor labor costs are lower and more favorablecan convince states
to abandon or temper their own regulatory powers. States conform to and even anticipate the needs of

capital for fear of being subordinated in the global economic system. This creates a son of race to the bottom
among nation-states in which the interests of labor and society as a whole take a backseat to those of capital.
Neoliberalisrn is generally the name given to this form of state economic policy. Neoliberalism, as we
claimed in part 2, is not really a regime of unregulated capital but rather a form of state regulator that best
facilitates the global movements and profit of capital. Once again in the era of neoliberalism, it might be
helpful to think of the state as the executive committee assigned the task of guaranteeing the long-term wellbring of "collective capital The fundamental task of the neoliberal state, fron this perspective, like all forms
of the capitalist state, Is to regulate "capitalist development in the interest of global capital itself.
Even single policies risk a huge ideological shift empirically proven
Williams and Mooney, Prof of Social Justice at Keele University and Senior Social Policy Lecturer
at the Open University in Scotland, 2008.
(Charlotte Williams, Decentring Social Policy? Devolution and the Discipline of Social Policy: A
Commentary,
NM,
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?
type=1&fid=1897768&jid=JSP&volumeId=37&issueId=03&aid=1897760)

There may be considerable disagreement as to the extent to which devolution

represents a significant departure in terms of divergent policymaking . It is a simple
enough task to point to policy differences such as free personal care for the sick and elderly or the
student fees policy in Scotland, or free prescriptions and the abolition of school league tables in
Wales. Some would argue the differences are marginal to the overarching continuities ensured by
Labour-dominated administrations (at least prior to the May 2007 elections) across the devolved

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polities, and the quiet manipulation of the policy strings by civil servants in Whitehall (Hudson and
Lowe, 2004). It is clearly important to view devolution within the context of the New Labour
modernising project and as a product of its wider socio-economic and neo-liberal agendas. The
devolved Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland are part of this mission. However, it can be

argued that the devolved nations open up new sites of struggle and contestation,
new processes and practices which challenge the ideological and geo-political
boundaries of the British Welfare State, and this encapsulates a significant shift which
impacts on the central concerns of the discipline . Interestingly, Clarke, writing within a
transnational frame, draws our attention to these very limits of neo-liberalism in practice as it forms
an interface with particular geopolitical and cultural entities, when he says this philosophy may
encounter diverse forms of resistance and refusals to go with the flow(2004: 9).

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**Separation of Powers**
Collapse of constitutional balance of power risks tyranny and reckless
warmongering
Redish Professor of Law and Public Policy and Cisar Law Clerk 1991 Martin, at
Northwestern, Elizabeth, at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, 41 Duke L.J. 449, p. 472-3
In any event, the political history of which the Framers were aware tends to confirm that quite often
concentration of political power ultimately leads to the loss of liberty. Indeed, if we have begun to take
the value of separation of powers for granted, we need only look to modern American history to remind
ourselves about both the general vulnerability of representative government, and the direct correlation
between the concentration of political power and the threat to individual liberty. The widespread
violations of individual rights that took place when President Lincoln assumed an inordinate level of
power, for example, are well documented. Arguably as egregious were the threats to basic freedoms
that arose during the Nixon administration, when the power of the executive branch reached what are
widely deemed to have been intolerable levels. Although in neither instance did the executive's
usurpations of power ultimately degenerate into complete and irreversible tyranny, the reason for that
may well have been the resilience of our political traditions, among the most important of which is
separation of powers itself. In any event, it would be political folly to be overly smug about the security
of either representative government or individual liberty. Although it would be all but impossible to
create an empirical proof to demonstrate that our constitutional tradition of separation of powers has
been an essential catalyst in the avoidance of tyranny, common sense should tell us that the
simultaneous division of power and the creation of interbranch checking play important roles toward
that end. To underscore the point, one need imagine only a limited modification of the actual scenario
surrounding the recent Persian Gulf War. In actuality, the war was an extremely popular endeavor,
thought by many to be a politically and morally justified exercise. But imagine a situation in which a
President, concerned about his failure to resolve significant social and economic problems at home, has
callously decided to engage the nation in war, simply to defer public attention from his domestic
failures. To be sure, the President was presumably elected by a majority of the electorate, and may
have to stand for reelection in the future. However, at this particular point in time, but for the system
established by separation of powers, his authority as Commander in Chief to engage the nation in war
would be effectively dictatorial. Because the Constitution reserves to the arguably even more
representative and accountable Congress the authority to declare war, the Constitution has attempted
to prevent such misuses of power by the executive. It remains unproven whether any governmental
structure other than one based on a system of separation of powers could avoid such harmful results. In
summary, no defender of separation of powers can prove with certitude that, but for the existence of
separation of powers, tyranny would be the inevitable outcome. But the question is whether we wish to
take that risk, given the obvious severity of the harm that might result. Given both the relatively limited
cost imposed by use of separation of powers and the great severity of the harm sought to be avoided,
one should not demand a great showing of the likelihood that the feared harm would result. For just as
in the case of the threat of nuclear war, no one wants to be forced into the position of saying, "I told you
so."

Lack of separation of powers causes nuclear war

Forrester Professor @ Hastings College of the Law Ray, 1989 University of
California August The George Washington Law Review 57 Geo. Wash. L. Rev.
1636 Presidential Wars in the Nuclear Age: An Unresolved Problem.
Abramson, Wherever President Goes, the Nuclear War 'Football' is Beside Him, Los Angeles Times, April
3, 1981, at 10, col. 1 (copyright, 1981, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by permission). On the basis of
this report, the startling fact is that one man [person] alone has the ability to start a nuclear war. A
basic theory--if not the basic theory of our Constitution--is that concentration of power in any one
person, or one group, is dangerous to [humankind]mankind. The Constitution, therefore, contains a
strong system of checks and balances, starting with the separation of powers between the President,
Congress, and the Supreme Court. The message is that no one of them is safe with unchecked power.

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Yet, in what is probably the most dangerous governmental power ever possessed, we find the potential
for world destruction lodged in the discretion of one person. As a result of public indignation aroused by
the Vietnam disaster, in which tens of thousands lost their lives in military actions initiated by a
succession of Presidents, Congress in 1973 adopted, despite presidential veto, the War Powers
Resolution. Congress finally asserted its checking and balancing duties in relation to the making of
presidential wars.

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