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The Meaning of Competition

Domenic Battistella writes:
> Whet Jeff means is that if a counterplan is mutually exclusive it still
> is not competative with the plan if the counterplan is less net
> benificial than the plan

Okay.  Enough.  After everyone on the listserv being confused by everyone 
else's definition of the word competition, here's a thread to discuss just 
that.  In the context of opportunity costs such as counterplans, 
anti-counters, etc...

Competition: The requirement that choice is forced between two courses of 
action, either by the impossibility or inadvisability of doing both.

This is the original meaning of competition, and it is one that has some 
benefit to its use even in an age of net benefits comparison.  And it 
doesn't involve a counterplan being superior to the plan.

Several others on the list recently have used the term to mean that the 
counterplan wins the debate for the negative... that is that it is both 
competitive (in the real sense) and superior.  But there really is somet  
hing lost in using the term in that manner.

a) Less Modularized.  Sorry, I'm not going to outline the five hundred 
reasons why we should modularize.  In a very large number of fields, the 
value of modularization has been discovered.  An excellent example is 
software design (something that I have worked closely with, so I am best 
prepared to testify to the importance of the idea).

The same applies to debate theory.  Instead of learning a bunch of 
enthymemes that help us win debates, our goals in the activity should be to 
learn effective tools of policy analysis and how they interact.  Towards 
this goal, there is no reason to ignore a perfectly valid separate idea -- 
competition -- and merge it into the set of criteria by which a counterplan 
wins.  Evaluating competition between options has plenty of uses in the 
world, and it is something that we cannot afford to push out of debate 
theory by eliminating it as a separate concept.  Learn to evaluate 
competition, learn to weigh impacts, and learn how the two relate to form 
an opportunity cost.

b) Less natural.  Has anyone really thought about what they are saying when 
they say that it's a "simple" question of whether the counterplan is better 
than the perm *and* the plan.  Notice how that sentence divides naturally 
into two parts: is the counterplan COMPETITIVE and is the counterplan NET 
BENEFICIAL.  They are two separate tests.  Unfortunately, the fact that one 
form of competition is called "net benefits competition" has made a bunch 
of people think that competitive and net beneficial are really the same 
thing.  You can invent the words to make that statement true, but it just 
doesn't make sense to do so.

c) Confuses justification for opp cost.  Opportunity cost exists because we 
have a forced choice and because the counterplan is better.  This 
justification involves competition and net benefits.  Why throw away the 
words and redefine competition to mean both.  We just lose the linguistic 
ability to really talk about the theory.

d) Oversimplifies interaction of issues.  If we look at the counterplan and 
decide it "doesn't compete" because the opportunity lost doesn't outweigh 
advantages, we have forgotten about the counterplan before we realize that 
solvency takeouts cause the opportunity costs to outweigh.  Okay, so maybe 
you can get around that by looking at the opportunity cost argument last. 
 What about when there are mutiple opportunity costs in the round?  Do you 
reject one before you look at the other?  Deciding the counterplan on a 
yes/no answer to a question means that you forget it because it doesn't 
outweigh, then look at the next opp cost and decide it doesn't, but you 
don't realize that both together warrant rejection of plan.  Okay, so you 
think you can recognize that case and reject plan?  What if I have two 
opportunity costs, and aff wins a perm with two thirds of one and half the 
other.  How do you weigh the opportunity costs remaining with a simple 
yes/no question of "competition"?

Sooner or later, the truth is apparent.  I can keep inventing more and more 
complex scenarios.  The only way that rational policy analysis is 
guaranteed is to look at opportunity cost as analogous to direct cost, and 
see that competition (be it MX competition or net benefits competition) is 
analogous to the link.  No one can sum up a DA with the question "Does it 
link and does it outweigh?" because there are plenty of complex 
interactions of DA's that require better tools of policy analysis.  Same 
with counterplans.  If we change the meaning of competition now to a 
general test of a single counterplan versus plan, sooner or later we'll be 
inventing a new word to express the analogous concept to the link of a 
direct cost.  Why not keep the meaning of competition as it is now?

e) People, it's just what the word means!  Webster's (full cite upon 
request) defines competition as "the act of seeking or endeavoring to gain 
that for which another is also striving."  Notice that winning wasn't in 
that definition.  Competition just means that the counterplan is competing 
against the plan for support of the judge.  That is, the judge must choose 
between plan and counterplan.  I can compete in tennis without winning in 
tennis.  As long as I play the game (we don't just walk away without the 
choice ever happening -- forced choice), then I have competed.  I don't 
need to win to have competed in the game.

Hope that makes sense,

Chris Smith
Woodland Park HS Debate

"Love is apparently killed by time, only because it transcends time; and 
its spiritual and infinite essence cannot be contained with the limitations 
of a material and finite world."
	- Caroline Spurgeon, on Shakespeare's philosophy of love
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