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Deontology, values, ramblings....

Blah. Yeah, it basically runs like this. Someone says 'X is the most
important thing in the world'. Then they say 'You ain't X' or 'You go
against X'. Then they say 'You lose'. And you say 'Why is that so
important?' and they say 'You trying to censor me! Evil jerk. You lose
worse now. X is most important because it just intrinsically is!'. Blah.
Value talk garbage nonsense yuck, I say. 

Ok. Here's something more useful than me saying 'yuck, blah'.

"So the questions remain: What is the ontological status of values in
any given context? What is performative role of values in any given
context? In one sense, one would think that these questions would be of
interest to those who are concerned with the moral efficacy of their own
value-talk...But value-talk--whether in analytical moral philosophy or
American jurisprudence--does not and cannot answer these questions. It
cannot answer these questions because the very practice, the very
plausability, of value-talk already presupposes an answer to these
questions. What value-talk presupposes is that it is already constituted
as an intellectually serious and morally efficacious enterprise (and so
too, therefore, are its posited creations-values). Before one can
indulge in such optimistic and self-congratulatory presuppositions,
however, it is necessary to understand what value and value-talk are and
how they are related in any given instance to social and legal
practices." 
[Ye ole Pierre Schlag, in the infamous Yale Journal o' Law in the year
of our lord nineteen-hundred and ninety-four.]

The debate about values and morality is one of the places where
real-world policy making diverges from contemporary policy making
debate. Debate usually ends up being Body Count x Probability.
Ok, maybe you've seen a round like this...

Team X runs Circle of Poison. Besides claiming to save lives they also
claim that it's a moral thing to do. They also say it's  illegitimate to
use people as a means to an end outside of themselves. That is, it just
ain't right to let people get screwed up by nasty chemicals for the sake
of forestalling a catastrophe or another impact. People are getting hurt
and dying, plan can stop it, it's morally correct to do so no matter
what extraneous consequences arise.

Team Z ends up winning a disad that ends in a big nasty nuclear war. The
2NR story is 'If you vote for the plan, you save 100,000 people from
dying from these chemicals. But, you cause 100 million deaths because
the plan action causes the unintended consequence of sparking a nuclear
war. We outweight, vote neg.'

Team X argues 'You have still have a moral imperative to vote for the
plan because the value of JUSTICE is the most important thing.'

---
Well, here we go - how do you evaluate a Value? A value is a concept
(well, it can also be other things but...). Well.. who conceptualized
it? Where does it come from? WHY is justice important if people have to
die to uphold it? And there are all sorts of other questions you can ask
yourself. 
It's much easier to deal with Values in daily life because we have them
figured into our thought processes. Most people have a sense of 'right'
and 'wrong', etc, and their actions reflect those concepts. However, in
the debate round the decision making process is artificial. And not many
people have really figured out how to incorporate values into that
process.

It's REALLY easy to look at the above round and say 1 million lives is
more important than the 100,000 saved, therefore vote neg. It's really
easy to ignore the value consideration of 'is it RIGHT to let those
100,000 people suffer and die?' when you just compare numbers. It's
DIFFICULT to articulate why a value consideration is more important than
lives. What would congress do? Well they'd probably vote for the
proposal. Why? Because they wouldn't consider a remote possibility of
China and the US going to war over the US changing its chemical export
policy. The members of congress would probably laugh at anyone raising
that possibility. If the members of Congress had to answer the charge,
they would offer up non-intrinsic responses to the internal links of the
disad and then vote on the policy. They would only consider the
immediate ramifications of the policy proposal. If they were feeling
particularly fluffypuffy they might talk about the values of the US as
embodied in our governing documents and how we have to do things like
stop injustice. 

I think I've probably rambled enough. So I'll leave you with this:

Concepts like 'fairness' and 'justice' came to be valued by people at
some point. The concepts came to be valued because they were useful.
Maybe they helped maintain quality of life or something. Most people
don't make decisions based solely on (remote) risk of death. You get in
a plane and fly to a tournament to debate even though the risk of death
exists. You calculate that the probability of death is outweighed by the
advantage of going to the tournament and debating. I don't know how to
quantify 'fun' or 'enjoyment' or 'pleasure' in the activity, but I know
I value it and I know it's worth the van ride or the plane trip. I don't
know how to quantify justice. I don't know how to quantify the concept
of 'what's morally correct'. But I do, somehow, and I make decisions
based on those concepts. 

In a debate round, someone expresses a desire that the judge vote for
something because it's morally correct or the judge is morally obligated
to do so. Where that context-trancendent value popped up from or why it
makes a claim on the judge and the debaters, I don't know. It's the
debaters responsibility to explain why a decision can be made using that
calculus. It's a hard thing to do in such an artificial decision making
framework. It seems easy to make all decisions based on body count and
probability. Should it be? Maybe. But that's why it's debate.

Joey Boyle
Assistant Rambler and Typer of Long Things
Fort Hays State University


 > Does anyone know deontology well enough to share your insights with
me?
> > Beyond the "moral imperative outweighs all utilitarian concerns," anybody
> > know what it's saying? If you have any cites or insights, I'd appreciate
> > any help. 
> > Thanks, 
> > Patrick McEachern
> > Loyola Debate 
>
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