I be smoking dope and you know Backwoods what I roll

CeddyWap 2k16

Ayer NC
Interpretations
First, presumption flows neg: a) Statements are more likely false than true because proving any part of a claim as
untrue renders the whole statement false. b) Just as we dont evaluate claims without warrants, we dont presume the
resolution true without proof. c) Resolutional action demands temporal and physical resources, which requires some
sort of justification. d) Your foremost role as a judge is to vote for the better debater in this round. The affs structural
advantages mean that if there is no offense on either side, I did the better debating. She gets to speak first and last and
gets three months to prep out and frontline her aff, whereas I have four minutes to throw together an NC. And, both
sides get 13 minutes to speak, so aff appeals to time skew are nonunique. e) The term resolved in the resolution
implies strong support for the resolution and places the burden of proof on the aff. Absent strong, resolved justification,
you negate. f) The affirmatives justifications for her ethical framework are premised upon the existence of morality,
and denying this assumption makes all of her conclusions untrue.
Second, permissibility flows neg: a) ought is the evaluative term is the resolution, and is

auxiliary verb 1. (used

to express

duty or moral obligation): Every citizen ought to help. . Absent an obligation to affirm, you negate. b) Obligated is the antonym
1

of prohibited, which is synonymous with impermissible. Thus, permissible and obligated are synonymous. Even if the
affirmative succeeds in proving an obligation to affirm, you still negate on permissibility.
Third, negate means verb (used with object), negated, negating. 1. to deny the existence, evidence, or truth of : an investigation tending to
negate any supernatural influences. 2.

This has two implications: a) If I deny the truth of the resolution, then you can negate. The

offense in this NC should be evaluated under a truth-testing paradigm. b) You can vote neg on prohibition or
permissibility because they both deny the truth of the resolution. Nothing can constrain how I reach a negative ballot on
pain of textual disregard.
And, semantics hold logical priority over pragmatic justifications. For example, the semantic approach would
unconditionally agree that the statement bachelors are married is false. But a pragmatic approach would agree that
bachelors are married when presented with benefits of doing so. The pragmatic approach offers reasons to want the
interpretation to be true, not an actual reason for it to be true. Semantics are a prerequisite to debate itself; without a
1 Random House Dictionary. Most popular online dictionary in the U.S. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ought?
s=t

2 Random House Dictionary. Most popular online dictionary in the U.S. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/negate?
s=t
_____________________________
Little can conquer a man who can withstand himself. Louis XV
note: I do not endorse the gendered language in this card

mutual agreement to be truthful and logical, we cant argue for or against anything and the round devolves into
presumption.
Now, onto the

NC Proper
I value morality. Moral statements are expressions of our emotive state in describing our feelings toward a particular
issue.
Ayer 13: We begin by admitting that the fundamental ethical concepts are unanalyzable, inasmuch as there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judgments in
which they occur. So far we are in agreement with the absolutists. But, unlike the absolutists, we are able to give an explanation of this fact about ethical [ethics] concepts. We say
that the reason why they are unanalyzable is that they are mere pseudo-concepts.

nothing to its factual content.

stating anything more than
addition of some special

Thus

The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds

if I say to someone, You acted wrongly in stealing that money, I am not

if I had simply said,

exclamation marks.

You stole that money, in a peculiar tone of horror, or

written it

with the

The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that

the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker . If now I generalize my previous statement and say, Stealing money is wrong,
I produce

[producing] a statement which has no factual meaning that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is if I had

written Stealing money!!where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which
is being expressed. It is clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or false.

Another man may disagree with me about the wrongness of stealing, in the

sense that he may not have the same feelings about stealing as I have, and he may quarrel with me on account of my moral sentiments.

But [s]he cannot, strictly speaking,

contradict me. For in saying that a certain type of action is right or wrong , I am not making any factual statement, not even a statement
about my own state of mind.

I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments . And the man who is ostensibly contradicting me is merely expressing

his moral sentiments. So that there is plainly no sense in asking which of us is in the right. For neither of us is asserting a general proposition. What we have just been saying about
the symbol wrong applies to all normative ethical symbols. Sometimes they occur in sentences which record ordinary empirical facts besides expressing ethical feeling about
those facts: sometimes they occur in sentences which simply express ethical feeling about a certain type of action, or situation, without making any statement of fact. But

in

every case [of] in which one would commonly be said to be making an ethical judgment, the function of the relevant ethical word is
purely emotive. It is used to express feeling about certain objects, but not to make any assertion about them.
Thus, ethical judgments are only reflective of our emotions at the time. This means that morality escapes notions of
truth and falsity as an unanalyzable concept.
Ayer 2: We can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion for determining the validity of ethical judgments.
because they have an absolute validity which is mysteriously independent of ordinary sense-experience, but

It is not

because they have no objective validity

whatsoever. If a sentence makes no statement at all, there is obviously no sense in asking whether what it says is
3 Ayer, Alfred Jules. Language, Truth, and Logic: Critique of Ethics and Theology, p. 107-112, 1946 [props2
CypressWoodsJD]

true or false. And we have seen that sentences which simply express moral judgments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come
under the category of truth and falsehood. They

are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is

unverifiablebecause they do not express genuine propositions.

The value criterion is moral anti-realism an acceptance of the void.
Leiter 14: With respect to very particularized moral disagreements e.g., about questions of economic or social policy which often trade on obvious factual ignorance or
disagreement about complicated empirical questions, this seems a plausible retort. But

for over two hundred years, Kantians and utilitarians

have been developing increasingly systematic versions of their respective positions. The Aristotelian tradition in moral philosophy has an
even longer history. Utilitarians have become particularly adept at explaining how they can accommodate Kantian and Aristotelian intuitions about particular cases and
issues, though in ways that are usually found to be systematically unpersuasive to the competing traditions and which, in any case, do nothing to dissolve the disagreement about
the underlying moral criteria and categories. Philosophers in each tradition increasingly talk only to each other, without even trying to convince those in the other traditions. And
while there may well be progress within traditions e.g., most utilitarians regard Mill as an improvement on Bentham there

does not appear to be any

progress in moral theory, in the sense of a consensus that particular fundamental theories of right action and the good life are deemed better than their predecessors.
What we find now are simply the competing traditions Kantian, Humean, Millian, Aristotelian, Thomist, perhaps now even Nietzschean who often
view their competitors as unintelligible or morally obtuse, but dont have any actual arguments against the foundational principles of their competitors. There is, in short, no sign
I can think of none that we are heading towards any epistemic rapprochement between these competing moral traditions. Are

we really to believe that hyper-

rational and reflective moral philosophers, whose lives, in most cases, are devoted to systematic reflection on philosophical questions, many of
(historically) were independently wealthy (or indifferent to material success) and so immune to crass considerations of livelihood and material self-interest, and most of
in the modern era,

whom

whom,

spend professional careers refining their positions, and have been doing so as a professional class in university settings for well over a

century are we really supposed to believe that they

have reached no

substantial

agreement

on any foundational moral principle

because of

ignorance, irrationality, or partiality?

Moral anti-realism best explains moral disagreement We cant reach a consensus because morality is not an objective
truth.
Leiter 2:

Heres how the Nietzschean explanation might go. The existence of incompatible moral philosophies providing dialectical justifications for moral propositions is

best explained as follows: (1) there are no objective facts about fundamental moral propositions, such that (2) it is possible to construct apparent dialectical justifications for moral
propositions, even though (3)

the best explanation for these theories is not that their dialectical justifications are sound but that they answer to

the psychological needs of philosophers. And the

reason it is possible to construct apparent dialectical

justification for differing

moral propositions is because, given the diversity of psychological needs of persons (including philosophers), it is always possible to find people
for whom the premises of these dialectical justifications are acceptable.
incompatible philosophical theories about morality is

The alternative, moral realist explanation for the datathe data being the existence of

both less simple and less consilient. First, of course, it posits the existence of moral

facts which, according to the more familiar best-explanation argument I have defended elsewhere (Moral Facts and Best Explanations in E.F. Paul et al. (eds.), Moral
4 Leiter, Brian (Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School). Moral Skepticism and Moral
Disagreement: Developing an Argument from Nietzsche. On the Human, sponsored by the National Humanities Center. March 25th, 2010.
http://onthehuman.org/2010/03/moral-skepticism-and-moral-disagreement-developing-an-argument-from-nietzsche/

Knowledge [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001]),

are not part of the best explanation of other phenomena. Second, the moral realist must suppose

that this class of explanatorily narrow

moral facts are undetected by

large number of

philosophers who are otherwise

deemed to be

rational and epistemically informed. Third, the moral realist must explain why there is a failure of convergence under what
appear (and purport) to be

epistemically ideal conditions of sustained philosophical inquiry

and reflective contemplation

across

millennia. We can agree with Peter Railton that we lack canons of induction so powerful that experience would, in the limit, produce convergence on matters of fact among
all epistemic agents, no matter what their starting points (Moral Realism, Philosophical Review [1986]), and still note that there exists a remarkable cross-cultural consensus
among theorists about fundamental physical laws, principles of chemistry, and biological explanations, as well as mathematical truths, while moral philosophers, to this very day,
find no common ground on foundational principles even within the West, let alone cross-culturally.