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I made it a habit this summer, when I was teaching at a number of debate camps, to stop students who mentioned the affirmative’s “burden of proof” and ask them to define the concept. I received a number of different answers, none of them the same. This small experiment has led me to suspect that debaters don’t really understand the concept at all, even though they use it frequently in their rounds…
This is backed up by what I hear in rounds, which typically takes the form of a half-hearted remark about how the affirmative team hasn’t provided “enough evidence” and has therefore failed to meet their “burden of proof”. This raises all sorts of questions, like: what constitutes enough evidence? Does the definition of “enough evidence” change depending on the claim? What is the nature of the burden of proof? What is proof? What are the implications for all of this to how the judge ought to vote?
But I also heard some interesting answers for what the burden of proof is in my travels this summer. Among them:
-That the affirmative team must overcome the judge’s preconceived notions of the topic and actually persuade the judge to believe their case
-If the negative team can instill any doubt about the affirmative plan, the burden hasn’t been met
-The burden of proof is the affirmative burden to prove their case
-The affirmative must be able to answer all questions that come their way about their case
I also perused a couple of debate resources. Rhetoric Through Policy Debate, written by my high school coaches Mike and Mary Winther, talks about the burden to uphold all four stock issues. The Ethos blog seems to rally around the simple idea that “he who asserts must prove.” Let’s address all of these briefly, in order.
-Must overcome judge’s biases
If this is true, the activity of debate is a hollow shell of what it could be. If this is true, the best strategy for the affirmative would be to do their best to predict what most judges will already agree with so they don’t have to overcome anything at all. Then the activity would become a sad game of preaching to the choir, propagating confirmation bias and leading to extremely skewed aff/neg splits in favor of the affirmative.
If we believe the value of debate to be in the way it trains us to think critically, we should cultivate that by judging arguments in how they are presented, not in how they align with our own opinions on the topic. We should judge the round in order to provide a fair contest, not to reward those who happen to guess our biases best. If you judge assuming that a team has to actually, in real life, convince you their policy position is correct, you’re making the whole thing arbitrary and frustrating.
Debaters, in turn, should not have to think so much about what their judge’s personal opinions are, but what the best, most well-reasoned arguments are. Thinking about the judge’s personal viewpoint will only lead to frustration. If they’re judging in this manner the round’s probably over after the 1AC anyways, so don’t worry about it and try to debate well.
-Must overcome doubt
What does doubt mean? In law, we have the concept of “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Is that a fair standard to hold the status quo and the affirmative plan? Is that a reasonable way to make policy decisions in real life—to default to no action unless it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the proposed plan will be beneficial? I think it’s complicated.
We, of course, get the idea of a burden of proof from law, but there are many different standards for different circumstances: some evidence, reasonable suspicion, probable cause, preponderance of evidence, clear and convincing evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, and others. Which should be used for policy decision making? I don’t think even the most stalwart conservatives would hold to the most strict burden in most cases, though the most progressive person would demand an extremely high standard if the risk of failure was severe. In short, I think there’s a good case to be made for “it depends”. What are the risks we’re playing with? Is this about something potentially catastrophic like nuclear safety, or a relatively minor policy?
On a practical level, it’s all risk analysis, and risk analysis is complex and messy. That doesn’t mean it can’t be debated, but it does mean that it should be debated rigorously. Simply saying “any doubt” means a vote for the negative without giving any reasons why is weak argumentation.
-The burden of proof is the burden to prove
First of all, if you’re going to define something, try not to use the word itself in your definition. This explanation is a straight-up tautology, but it does raise an interesting question about what it means to prove something. Almost nothing you will argue in a debate round will be proven in an absolute a priori manner. Policy debate is about what is likely to happen with a given policy change, and the arguments you will make will lend support to your interpretation but will not “prove” it in a strict sense. This isn’t geometry class, it’s the messy matter of trying to understand complex systems run and affecting complex humans.
So what do we mean by “prove”? Surely not the kind of proof required in logic or math class. “Support” might be a better word for it, as “prove” (to me, at least) implies a binary—it’s either proven or not. That doesn’t fit my experience of how public policy works. The idea that arguments can be supported in better or worse ways better fits my understanding.
-The aff must be able to answer all questions
Some teams turn this into an entire strategy. They’ll ask questions in cross-x, then provide a giant list of questions in the 1NC, poorly phrased, and complain when the aff doesn’t answer them to their satisfaction. Then they make more questions out of the answers they did get, and send the aff team on an impossible quest to answer an endless number of questions in a very limited amount of time.
What’s left out of this strategy is why any of the questions actually matter. In other words, nothing is impacted. Nothing is applied back to the judge’s decision other than a vague notion that “all questions must be answered to our liking”, without defining what constitutes an adequate answer beforehand. Clearly a burden to answer all questions is sisyphean by design. As an alternative, let’s tell the judge exactly why this question needs to be answered for the affirmative to win the round. Let’s explain how this inadequacy to clarify results in a policy that potentially has horrible outcomes, and how the affirmative team, by being dodgy when we first asked them in cross-x, is attempting to use vagueness to avoid connecting their plan to this disadvantage. If they continue to not answer the question to avoid the DA, you should also vote against them, because we should not sanction that sort of cagey, anti-rational, anti-debate by rewarding it with a win.
What I just described is how to run a specification (sometimes shortened to “spec”) argument. Notice how it’s clear, well-reasoned, and fully impacted to the judge’s ballot decision. Also notice how it doesn’t require you to explain anything about the burden of proof at all.
-The burden to uphold the stock issues
This concept is more or less an expression of the stock issue paradigm generally than a statement about levels of proof. Insofar as that’s the case, I’ll leave my thoughts about the stock issues paradigm for another article.
-He who asserts must prove
This standard is interesting because it doesn’t exclusively apply to the affirmative team. It’s also fairly benign, a sort of “no, duh” statement. Of course you need to support your arguments. But this is the concept of the burden of proof that I find most reasonable. Debate, at its core, is simple. The details quickly make it complicated, but that doesn’t take away from the simplicity of the core. Policy debate asks the question: should this policy be enacted? That’s it. Debate theory asks some questions about what kinds of things are acceptable in the debate round, but only in service of the core question. Theory is only a means by which we can have fantastic, engaging debates about policy. Everything you learn in club, all of the jargon and concepts, are in service to that core question.
So what sort of burden should we apply? The same kind of one we’d apply in real life: that the people making an argument should back up that argument with support. Why should the affirmative have a unique burden of proof? Don’t the negative debaters also need to support their assertions? Once we conceptualize the idea of the burden of proof not as some sort of magic bullet but as a basic statement about reasoning, we can rid ourselves of its function as a crutch. We can move past un-warranted statements like “the aff hasn’t met their burden of proof” and into better argumentation.
A Note On Presumption
I’m sure some of you have been shouting (internally, I hope) that there is a unique burden for the affirmative because of “presumption”. For the uninitiated, the idea of presumption is that we ought to default towards the status quo when we’re uncertain about the benefits of a policy. I believe there’s some wisdom behind this idea, but it fails in a couple of ways.
1. What if the status quo is dire? One can easily imagine a scenario where disaster is impending and an imperfect, somewhat uncertain solution will certainly be better than the status quo. I suppose you could say that, in such a scenario, presumption has been adequately overcome, but at that point I don’t think it’s any different than normal risk analysis.
2. What if the status quo is unprincipled? Suppose you, rightly, have a pro-market bias. You believe that generally markets result in better outcomes than government intervention. It makes sense, in that case, for you to have a strong “presumptive” threshold that must be overcome before you buy into a policy of government intervention into the marketplace. But what if the status quo is intervention and the policy up for debate is getting rid of it? Should your status quo bias be the same? That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
In summary, I think there are often great arguments in favor of a status quo bias, but they should actually be made in the debate round as full arguments. Just mentioning “presumption” or “burden of proof” is lazy, uncritical debating. It’s leaning on the names of concepts rather than the concepts themselves, because when you pry open these concepts, you find that they’re full of fascinating, rich ideas that ought to be up for debate! How should we weigh risk? How much should base principles affect that calculation? What constitutes better or worse support for an argument? These are the kinds of meaty, nutrient-rich questions that fuel great debates and push debaters from adequacy to excellence.
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