Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate I’ve gotten the chance to judge at a few Wyoming high school tournaments this year, and I’ve loved every second of it. When it comes to the LD rounds I’ve been lucky enough to judge, one thing stands out to me: that value criterion debates seem to be shaped more by rote habit than actual in-round strategic utility. My soul read of many of the debates that I’ve judged is that debaters have been told that the V/C debate matters, that they should spend non-insignificant amounts time on it, and they should win that theirs is better; however, many debaters don’t know why it matters or how it will shape the outcome of the round. This is not to say I haven’t heard good warrants about why pragmatism is preferable to the social contract, etc, but rather that it oftentimes seems like the V/C debating is not connected to a win condition. If you zoom out, it’s unclear why winning the V/C means winning the round. The thesis of this article will be that your V/C should either give you a win condition or you should drastically reduce the amount of time you’re spending debating it. Read the complete article below the fold. This is not the first time WDR will have opined about the state of V/C debating. This excellent series on the value criterion by Lawrence Zhou should be required reading for LD debaters (seriously, I know it’s three posts, but it’s worth it to read the entire thing). Given the importance of the issue, I’d like to return to it – with a little Nov/Dec ’23 topic-specific analysis as a treat.
First the basics: what is the value / criterion debate? According to Lawrence, the V/C debate is about what matters more: “[t]he role of the value criterion is to settle the question of which impact(s) matter more when there is disagreement over what ought to take priority.” The language of value/criterion is virtually interchangeable with “weighing standard,” “impact calculus,” or “framework.” I think “weighing standard” is probably more common language in local LD, but in this article I will inevitably slip into using the language of impact calculus as I find it to be a little more useful. Still, all of these examples of jargon get to the same idea: what matters most? The V/C debate is about what impacts matter more, and the contentions are about how the resolution relates to those impacts (i.e., whether the aff or neg best solves the impacts). Does winning the V/C debate mean you win the round? No! If you win that human life is the most important value, but your opponent wins that prohibiting fossil fuel extraction from public lands more negatively impacts human life, your opponent has won their case under your value criterion. That means they win! How can the V/C debate be strategic? According to Lawrence, “the function of a criterion is to include or inflate the relevance of certain impacts and to exclude or deflate the relevance of certain impacts. A good criterion should inflate your impacts while simultaneously deflating your opponent’s impacts.” A lot of the time, however, the V/C debate does not meaningfully distinguish the impacts in the debate. There may very well be meaningful differences between utilitarianism and societal welfare, between prioritizing human life and pragmatism, between human welfare and the social contract; however, the differences between those six concepts do not explain a meaningful reason to prioritize the environment over the economy (or vice versa), which is the core controversy of the current topic. Both the environment and the state of the economy implicate societal welfare, a pragmatist would want to care about both of those things, human lives are affected by both, etc. The most common V/C do not meaningfully contrast environmental and economic impacts, which means they are not functioning as useful weighing standards, impact calc, or frameworks for evaluating most rounds on this topic. In these instances, the time spent on the V/C debate is not achieving a win condition: debaters are spinning their wheels but the time spent on the V/C is not meaningfully shaping the outcome of the round. Environmental Justice: A Case Study in V/C Debating Over the last few weekends, I did hear one value that I thought had a lot of potential to meaningfully distinguish aff and neg contentions and function as a strategic framework: environmental justice. Environmental justice is a social movement that focuses on the way that environmental harms disproportionately impact marginalized communities. This value immediately struck me as having potential to be a useful V/C because it has two useful features: (1) It meaningfully distinguishes between aff and neg impacts. Environmental justice intuitively prioritizes redressing environmental harms (like those caused by fossil fuel extraction) over economic growth, and, (2) There are smart warrants available to prioritize environmental justice even in the face of potential catastrophe. One way debaters can say that environmental justice should come first is by advancing an argument that it corrects for implicit or subconscious biases. There is very good evidence that most actors have unconscious biases that affect their judgements and even policymaking when it comes to how issues affect marginalized communities. If it’s true that our implicit biases will lead us to making decisions biased against marginalized communities, erring towards environmental justice even when there’s a possibility it may lead to catastrophe might be the right decision because we might be biased to exaggerate the negative consequences of adopting a more just policy. I also think there is a good subject formation argument for prioritizing environmental justice. To make this argument, you advance a thesis-level claim that society by-and-large devalues marginalized communities. The fact that fossil fuel extraction disproportionately impacts indigenous land is just one of hundreds of examples of this, for example. If that’s true, maybe the value of debate is not in comparing impacts, but in shaping the subject formation of its participants. There can be a debate tech-centric element to this argument. Many debaters will say because debate impacts “aren’t real” and we “don’t have our hands on the actual levers of power,” that the question of what impact is the biggest is irrelevant, and the only real utility of debate is shaping us to be better humans that care more about marginalized people. You can advance the argument that prioritizing environmental justice does this; that it pushes the “Overton window” to the left by asking us to prioritize marginalized communities even in the face of catastrophe. Is this value strategic? Yes, I think so. If the aff wins that (1) environmental justice outweighs and (2) that fossil fuel extraction disproportionately hurts marginalized communities, they win. My hope is this example demonstrates how the V/C debate can help you win. That said, I think exploring how the neg can win this debate is very helpful for thinking about the limits of the V/C debate. In this debate, the neg has two pathways to victory: First, they can win that an alternative V/C is preferable. If the neg wins util (or, my preference, consequentialism), then they could win that their econ contention (etc) outweighs environmental justice. In this case the neg needs to win that some suffering of the marginalized is not more important than a greater amount of suffering by a larger amount of people (whether they are marginalized or not). In this instance, the neg is trying to win that all life has equal value. This is a highly defensible proposition, a pathway the negative could easily win – in other words, a good debate. However, the neg has a second way to win. The neg can lose the V/C debate and still win the debate. If the neg wins that their econ DA (etc) is worse for marginalized communities than climate change / environmental injustice, than they win that their contention outweighs within the affirmative value. For example, the neg could read from this article from Ronald Bailey handily titled “Energy Poverty Is Much Worse for the Poor Than Climate Change.” That’s a pretty slam dunk “we win within your framework” piece of scholarship right there. I like this case study and I think it demonstrates the strategic potential of a V/C debate as impact calc, but it also demonstrates the limits of the V/C debate and how contentions can trump the V/C. Conclusion The V/C debate can be useful. At its heart, V/C is impact calc, and impact calc is the heart of winning debates. The traditional V/C structure is also sometimes an easy and useful way to express that impact calc. However, just because the V/C can be useful sometimes does not mean it always is. Recall our six V/C phrases from earlier: utilitarianism, societal welfare, prioritizing human life, pragmatism, human welfare, and the social contract. These are all V/Cs I heard over the last few weeks. Are you tilting at windmills to try and figure out a reason why V/C combo A outweighs V/C combo B, when they’re all so close as to be meaningfully indistinguishable in the context of comparing contentions? Then perhaps the V/C debate is not the most useful place to spend your time. To be clear, I think in these instances you should radically reduce or virtually eliminate the time you spend on the V/C debate. Very, very often, I think a debater is best served by a single quick line that the V/C debate is moot because they are indistinguishable or because the neg contentions better address the aff value (or vice-versa). So where should that time go? Winning your contention, beating your opponent’s contentions, and especially doing more useful, particularized impact calculus. Consider these two NRs: NR 1: The V/C Focus Pragmatism is the value that should be prioritized in your ballot. Pragmatism is the best value because it helps ensure that society arrives at reasonable solutions that compare the costs and benefits of different approaches. That guarantees that whatever the stakes of a controversy are, the pros and cons are carefully weighed and the right decision is made. Human life is not the best value because there's no method to ensure that it's protected without pragmatism. Pragmatism also accesses my opponent’s value of prioritizing human life because pragmatists prioritize human life. Ensuring economic growth allows a prosperous society, which ensures human life is protected. NR 2: Econ Turns the Environment Economic growth solves the environment better than the affirmative- that means even if they win their value, fossil fuel extraction is better for it. Fossil fuels ensure growth which better remedies climate change for three reasons: 1. Technological innovation: growth fosters tech innovation that redresses environmental harm. This is the only way to solve climate change- we’re already past climate tipping points like melting permafrost, which means that a 5 degree temperature increase is locked-in even with zero emissions unless we innovate new ways to extract carbon from the atmosphere. 2. The Kuznets Curve: environmentalism is a luxury good- people are only willing to focus on the environment when they have a certain level of income. If you’re struggling to put food on the table for your family, you don’t have the time or resources to care about the destruction of the rainforest. Economists have modeled this empirical effect and call it the Kuznets curve, and empirical examples from forest cover to fisheries to climate change prove that rising incomes are the best shot in the arm for environmentalism. 3. Only the neg solves: reducing extraction on public lands reduces only a percent of a percent of emissions- it ignores private land and every other country. The aff can’t solve climate change because they can’t solve that China and India are building 400 new coal power plants every year- BUT- technological innovation that makes clean energy cost competitive is a top-down, holistic, and global solution- it solves all of climate change- meaning the neg solves the aff better than the aff. You might find some value in both NR overviews; however, the true flaw with the first NR is that it's protected from "capture" by the neg. If the neg wins their contention(s) and defense to the aff contention, then voting neg is the pragmatic thing to do. On the other hand, the second NR can make more specific arguments that cannot be captured as easily because the impact calculus is catered to a particular contention, and is directly comparative to the aff contention. I think this demonstrates that although smart debaters should identify V/C that inflate their impacts (or deflate their opponent’s impacts), the smartest debaters know that the V/C debate is just one form of impact calculus, and not always the best form. [Note that the best impact calculus should center external offense, putting that first, and then "turns case" arguments are icing on the cake (though sometimes very, very effective icing!). If you're interested in doing some research that supports the claims I made, you could check out this article and this article.] If you can’t (1) meaningfully distinguish your V/C and your opponent’s, (2) win that your V/C is preferable, and (3) win that your V/C is best addressed via your contentions (all 3 steps are required to win the debate through the V/C), then you should jettison the V/C debate and focus on the contentions or more modularized impact calc. One final caveat: judge adaption. Judge adaptation trumps everything else. If your judge believes that V/C debate is an intrinsically necessary part of LD debate and must be a significant part of the debate, then by all means, V/C away! You should keep a squad judge book on a google doc that helps you keep up with judge idiosyncrasies. That said, by and large, I do not think judges are ideologues, and I think the better arg most often wins. That means in most debates, I think rather than erring toward rotely debating the V/C and spinning your wheels, you should only focus on the V/C if it strategically matters, and otherwise you should spend your time on arguments that have more bang for their buck.
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