Voting closes this week on the proposed NCFCA LD resolutions. Though I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet about this year’s options, I have plenty of thoughts to share. Better late than never…
Resolution #1: Rationalism should be valued above empiricism.
Frankly – and please forgive my abrasive tone – this is one of the worst resolutions I have ever seen, and I had hoped it would not return to the roster after being rejected in 2018.
Resolution #1 is superficially appealing, since it was highly controversial during the Enlightenment period and is familiar to anyone who has studied modern philosophy. (By “modern,” I mean the period spanning the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.) Rationalists, like Rene Descartes, believed that all knowledge comes from reason. Empiricists, like David Hume, believed that all knowledge comes from sense experience.
Unfortunately, the debate between rationalists and empiricists has been over for several decades, or perhaps even centuries. The verdict was a double loss. As it turns out, we need both reason and experience to know almost anything. Pretty much everyone agrees that Descartes’ and Hume’s attempts to reduce all knowledge to one or the other were catastrophically wrong.
I cannot think of a single living philosopher who would call him- or herself a rationalist in the classical sense. There are still a few self-described “empiricists” around, but none of them would claim that we get everything we know from the senses. In fact, I can all but guarantee that every professional epistemologist alive today would brand Resolution #1 as a false dichotomy, or at least as a very, very bad way to divide up the philosophical territory. The last philosophers to think that all knowledge comes from either reason or sense experience were probably Nicholas Malebranche (on the rationalist side) and A. J. Ayer (on the empiricist side). There is absolutely no reason, in my view, for debaters to waste an academic year beating this long-dead horse.
The only live debate among contemporary philosophers that bears a remote resemblance to the debates between the rationalists and empiricists of the 17th and 18th centuries is the debate about whether any of our ideas or concepts are innate (that is, hard-wired from birth, as opposed to learned). “Resolved: The mind is a blank slate,” or “Resolved: All knowledge is learned,” or “Resolved: Some of our ideas are innate” would have made interesting resolutions. But Resolution #1 is highly unlikely to narrow down to questions about innate ideas. (If debaters are defining their terms correctly and doing a decent job of analyzing the resolution, it certainly won’t narrow down that way.)
Here is a more practical reason to reject Resolution #1: If it is selected, most rounds next year will be settled by definitions debates. “Rationalism” and “empiricism” can be given endlessly more technical definitions, and since both views are utterly untenable in their early-modern forms (the forms from which all standard dictionaries take their cues), debaters would be forced to comb through technical philosophical literature to find definitions benign enough to defend. That would be a nightmare.
As a published philosopher (yes, I’m playing that card), I sympathize with the desire to focus on more traditional kinds of philosophical questions in Lincoln-Douglas. But such questions must be chosen carefully, ideally with input from living philosophers. (I am fairly confident that no such input was sought in this case, even though it’s pretty easy to get.) Here are several alternative resolutions focused on traditional philosophical questions:
- Resolved: Meritocracy is the best social system.
- Resolved: Scientific realism ought to be valued above scientific instrumentalism.
- Resolved: Consciousness is a physical phenomenon.
- Resolved: Utilitarianism is true.
- Resolved: The wellbeing of the current generation ought to be valued above the wellbeing of future generations.
- Resolved: Machines can have minds.
- Resolved: Collective punishment can be just.
- Resolved: All representation in a democracy ought to be proportional.
- Resolved: All beliefs should be based on evidence.
- Resolved: The future is determined.
- Resolved: Machines can have rights.
- Resolved: Animals can have rights.
- Resolved: Human beings are partly immaterial.
- Resolved: There is probably extraterrestrial life. (Okay, that’s not a traditional philosophical question. But it would make a great resolution.)
I just made all of these up on the spot. Maybe I’m not as good at generating interesting resolutions as I think I am, but I am absolutely certain that any of the above topics would be better than Resolution #1. If you’re an LD purist with a hankering for philosophical resolutions, please don’t succumb to the temptation to vote for Resolution #1. Wait until next year, and then bombard the committee with your favorite options from this list, or come up with your own.
Resolution #2: Ongoing law enforcement investigations and judicial proceedings should not be published.
I like this resolution. It is clear, well-worded, and highly relevant to recent events in American politics. Think of the leak of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, the highly publicized trail of Derek Chauvin, the leaked memo from the Department of Justice singling out concerned parents as domestic terrorists, and the Nashville Police Department’s refusal to release the manifesto of the mass shooter who took the lives of six Christians in Nashville, TN earlier this month.
Resolution #2 bears some similarity to the NCFCA’s 2021 resolution, which pitted the public’s right to know against candidates’ right to privacy. Many of the arguments that worked under that resolution will work under this one. But this resolution is broader, in a good way. There is room to run frameworks that have nothing to do with the rights of the public or of individuals.
Some have voiced concerns that this resolution might turn into a policy issue as the season progresses. I will admit, there is a significant risk that this will happen in some rounds. However, the resolution is broad enough that I doubt most debaters will stake their cases on specific policy positions.
More likely, debate rounds will center on policy-centric philosophical questions like the following:
- Does the right to privacy extend to legal proceedings?
- Is institutional transparency more important than institutional effectiveness?
- Does the public have a right to know what its government is doing?
- Which leads to greater abuse, secrecy or publicization?
These are really interesting questions. Just to give a sampling of answers to the fourth question, AFF might argue that publicizing the activities of the justice system allows political parties and other groups to weaponize information in a distorting way. Justice should be impartial; making judicial proceedings and investigations public will lead to propagandizing on a scale so great that it is likely to endanger the impartiality of the legal process. On the other hand, NEG might argue that it is easier for those in the justice system to abuse their power if they are allowed to act under the cloak of confidentiality. In a democracy like ours, it may actually be more difficult to weaponize the justice system when that weaponization has to be done in broad daylight.
If that last paragraph sounded interesting, I suspect you’ll like Resolution #2. Personally, I am planning to vote for this option.
Resolution #3: Stability is more important than turnover in government.
This resolution has the potential to catalyze interesting conversations about the nature of democracy, the importance of popular sovereignty (rule by the people), and the concept of checks and balances in government.
However, I am not a fan of Resolution #3, for three reasons. (If you’re in a rush, skip to the third. It’s the most important.)
- First, I think this resolution is even more likely to devolve into policy debates than Resolution #2, if only because practically every NEG debater will bring up proposals for imposing term limits on members of Congress or Supreme Court Justices.
- Second, it’s not clear to me that “turnover” is the right word to express what I suspect the committee members were aiming for here. “Turnover” implies that representatives are being removed from office more frequently, not just put up for reelection more frequently. Maybe that is what the committee is aiming for, but I don’t think very many people would argue that removing government officials often is good in and of itself. If someone in the House of Representatives were doing an all-things-considered fantastic job on all fronts, then most of us would want him or her to stay, even those of us who think that holding elected representatives accountable is supremely important. What we really want is the ability to replace corrupt or incompetent officials easily, should the need arise. But this ability doesn’t necessarily correlate with high turnover. In an ideal world, our government officials would enjoy long elected tenures because they were faithfully serving the interests of the people.
Side note- If anyone on the resolution committee is reading this, I propose that you replace the word “turnover” with “accountability” or “flexibility.” Accountability and flexibility are, like stability, uncontroversially good things. This wording would spark similar conversations without giving the impression that the NEG position reduces to firing more people more often.
- Here is my third, and most important, problem with Resolution #3: It is probably a false dichotomy. That was the verdict reached by the signatories to the American Constitution. The founders recognized that both stability and accountability were essential to just and effective government, so they divided Congress into two houses, one with more accountability (the House of Representatives) and one with more stability (the Senate). This gave us the best of both worlds: the task of legislating is divided between the House and the Senate in a way that is calculated to capitalize on the advantages of accountability and stability while avoiding many of the disadvantages.
Since Resolution #3 is probably a false dichotomy (or, at the very least, oversimplified and overgeneral), it is probably not worth debating about for a whole competitive season.
Conclusion
Here is my ranking:
1st Choice: Resolution #2
2nd Choice: Resolution #3
3rd Choice: Switch to Team Policy
4th Choice: Resolution #1
I would encourage all competitors who are on the fence to vote for Resolution #2. I predict that this topic will make for the most interesting, most substantive, and most balanced debate rounds.
Noah McKay is an NCFCA alumnus and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Purdue University, as well as a Lasting Impact! Coach. He has been coaching Lincoln Douglas debate and writing sourcebook materials for six years. Schedule a coaching call with him today!