animal soldiers affirmative

J(E)DI 2010 1 Lab CaCa Animal Soldiers Affirmative

Index

Index............................................................................................................................................... 1

1AC................................................................................................................................................. 3

Case 2AC's Inherency Ext. ........................................................................................................................ 17 Harms Ext............................................................................................................................... 18 Solvency 2AC's A2: Plan Costs To Much ....................................................................................................... 20 A2: No Alternatives For Demining....................................................................................... 21

A2: Military Dogs Have Nowhere To Go............................................................................. 22 Ethics 2AC's A2: Non-Speciest Util Is Possible.......................................................................................... 23

A2: Consequentialism Inevitable.......................................................................................... 24 A2: DA Proves The Plan Unethical ...................................................................................... 26 A2: Dirty Hands ..................................................................................................................... 28

A2: Predictions Good............................................................................................................. 29 2AC/1AR Morality Cards ..................................................................................................... 33

Counterplan 2AC's A2: Counterplan Solves Ethics ............................................................................................. 37 A2: Conditional/Consultation Counterplans....................................................................... 40

A2: Animal Welfare/Suffering Counterplans ..................................................................... 41 A2: Word PICs....................................................................................................................... 43


Index

Kritik 2AC's / Animal Rights Advantage Ext. Perm - Solvency...................................................................................................................... 44

A2: Alternative Solves The Case .......................................................................................... 48 A2: Alt Solves The Case ........................................................................................................ 51

A2: Policymaking/Using The State Bad............................................................................... 52 A2: Biopower.......................................................................................................................... 54

A2: Psychoanalysis................................................................................................................. 55 A2: Must Break Down The Subject ..................................................................................... 56

A2: Ethics Bad........................................................................................................................ 57 A2: Topicality Topicality Cards..................................................................................................................... 60


1AC

Observation 1: Inherency The U.S. military is exploiting thousands of animals a year forcing them to work in some of the most dangerous combat situations seen by the military.

Plourde 2004, (Shawn is a writer and animal rights activist, ‘What Did You Do in the War Fido?’, http://www.thenausea.com/elements/special%20topics/crimesagainstanimals/animals%20in%20warfare/animals%20in%20warfare.html) The list of animals placed in harm’s way during combat is depressingly long. Besides the many beasts of burden deployed during many conflicts, there has also been an incredible variety of combat tasks where animals were—and are—being put to use in ways that may result in their death. For example, dogs were utilized in Vietnam by American troops to clear Vietcong tunnels and caves and to sniff out land mines and booby-traps. At any given time there were 4,000 dogs employed in Vietnam for military purposes. All but 200 were left to the Vietcong, many of whom were tortured: The Vietcong intensely disliked U.S. scout dogs—so much so that they often placed bounties on the dogs’ heads. It is estimated that these scout dogs probably saved 10,000 servicemen’s lives as a result of their work in Vietnam.[4] Dogs have also been used in just about every war as sentries, guarding forts, military bases and individual soldiers. In WWI, dogs were used in and around no-man’s land to deliver messages and supplies. They were also appropriated to lay copper telephone wire around no-man's land for telephone service, with the wire placed on rolls strapped on their backs. Many were of course shot at. Their history of service received very little gratitude and recognition. To this day, dogs in the U.S. military do not retire. Military working dogs are considered equipment, no different from a shell casing or a rifle. Unlike aircraft and ships, dogs are not sold as surplus, nor are they retired. They are simply terminated as humanely as possible.[5] Cats were used in the trenches of WWI to help eradicate the hordes of rats that were plaguing the troops, with thousands of them succumbing to mustard gas and daily shellfire. One can argue that thousands of cats and dogs are euthanised in this country alone each year. However, animals that are euthanised meet their death painlessly, unlike most animals involved in wars. Dolphins, sea lions—even whales—have been and still are used to spot sea mines by the many navies around the world. In the past, the U.S and Soviet military have employed dolphins to retrieve sea mines. Currently, there are 75 dolphins and 20 sea lions that have been trained and employed exclusively to spot sea mines in the Persian Gulf. Once the mines have been detected, the animals leave a buoyant tag that is visible to the navy personnel on ship.[6] Elephants have been employed in battle in great numbers in Africa, Asia and Europe. Their role was more or less synonymous to that of a modern day tank. Elephants would plow through towards the enemy, causing mayhem in their ranks. Elephants were quite difficult to disable due to their size and thick skin, which could be afflicted with several wounds and still maintain battle readiness. Pigeons have been used throughout the history of warfare. Information such as the conquest of Gaul by Caesar was relayed to Rome by pigeons, as was the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The pigeon’s finest hour, however, came during the siege of Paris in 1870. With the aid of photography, messages were copied on collodian, a primitive form of microfilm, thus allowing more messages to be carried per flight by the carrier pigeons. During the four months of the siege, pigeons brought 150,000 official letters and a million private letters into Paris[7]. As expected, a great many of these pigeons were shot at by the Prussian and pro-Prussian French Army surrounding Paris. Pigeons as well as Parakeets have been used as warning devices against chemical and biological weapons in several 20th century wars. Pigeons and parakeets are currently being utilized by British troops in the Persian Gulf to warn against possible nerve and chemical agents that might be employed by anti-coalition forces.[8] Monkeys have served in different conflicts in different ways. In the current war in Iraq, Morocco has offered the U.S. military 2000 specially trained monkeys whose sole purpose is to detonate land mines.[9] Whether the U.S. military accepted the offer is unclear. Animals operating in harm’s way in combat mostly have one thing in common: although some of them were chosen because of abilities superior to humans, most were deployed because the duties that they carried out were considered too dangerous for human combatants. Thus the job fell to them, their lives amounting to less than that of humans.


1AC

Military exploitation of animals is grounded in widely held beliefs that animals are property and only exist as disposable tools of war.

Plourde 2004, (Shawn is a writer and animal rights activist, ‘What Did You Do in the War Fido?’, http://www.thenausea.com/elements/special%20topics/crimesagainstanimals/animals%20in%20warfare/animals%20in%20warfare.html) The single greatest factor that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our unsurpassed intellect. Our intellect has afforded us the ability to display an incredible degree of ingenuity, which has been used for both malevolent as well as benevolent purposes. We have thought up such inventive ways to reach sublime heights of love and beauty, and thought up such ingenious ways to hate and destroy ourselves, other animals and the environment. This analysis will consider how we, as a species, have, with maniacal ingenuity, utilized animals in conflict, why this abuse of animals is detrimental to humanity, and, in the end, what it says about human nature. A variety of solutions to rectify this horrendous phenomenon will also be advanced. If we can see the humanity in other species, then maybe—just maybe—we might be able to see the common humanity in our fellow human beings. This perspective could itself frame a path that leads away from war and its destructive consequences. One may ask, “Why choose to examine the history of animals in warfare at all?” Millions of men and women are killed, raped, maimed or mutilated through warfare every year, not to mention the emotional and psychological damage. There is certainly no shortage of pain on the human side of conflict and war. Many might say, “Really, what is the life of an animal compared to that of a human? Can one really compare the suffering of an animal to that of a human?” First of all, let me clarify that I am not an animal rights activist. I do not belong to any animal rights organizations; I do not break into research labs in the middle of the night to liberate research animals from enslavement nor do I engage in any other activity that might label me as an animal rights activist. That acknowledged, I still believe that there is something to be said against using animals in warfare. With the exception of children, all humans with sound minds have a say as to whether or not they join a conflict—even if they are conscripted against their will. It is true that by resisting conscription, they may risk jail, torture—even death. In the end, however, it is still their choice. Animals do not choose to join a conflict. They do not have a voice in the matter. They do not understand the basic geopolitical reasons why humans fight, nor can they differentiate between humans of different ideological persuasions; yet they suffer the same destructive fate that many human combatants suffer. Animals are seen – by many combatants -- simply as tools to wage war on their enemies; they are not seen as living, breathing creatures with a mind who can feel pain.[1]When human beings ignore this, it can lead to grave consequences. To see a living being simply as a tool is to dehumanize that living creature. To dehumanize an animal is, in a sense, to dehumanize all human life. According to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, people who abuse their pets are five times as likely to commit a violent act against another person. This research has been corroborated by many other organizations, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Child Study Center at New York University. Immanuel Kant seems to have said it best: “He who is cruel to animals becomes hard in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”


1AC

Animal soldiers are not a relic of the past. Troop surges in Afghanistan and de-mining missions in Kuwait, Iraq, and South Korea have lead to a substantial increase in the presence of military dogs.

LA Times 2010, (‘Along with troop surge in Afghanistan, a dog surge. Along with dog surge, a dog food dilemma’, January 25th) http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/unleashed/2010/01/along-with-troop-surge-in-afghanistan-a-dog-surge-along-with-dog-surge-a-dogfood-dilemma.html KANDAHAR AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan has led to a dog surge -- and unexpected problems in procuring high-quality dog food with enough protein and nutrients for hundreds of canines used to find explosives and perform other energy-intensive missions. Along with about 37,000 U.S. and NATO troops, the number of military working dogs being brought into the country to search for mines, explosives and to accompany soldiers on patrol is increasing substantially, according to Nick Guidas, the American K-9 project manager for Afghanistan. Guidas, a civilian contractor who primarily oversees dog operations in southern Afghanistan, said he has 50 dogs on operational teams and about 20 more awaiting missions. He expects that number to go up to 219 by July. "It may go as high as 315 dogs in Afghanistan," he said Saturday at a crowded kennel full of highly trained German and Dutch shepherds, Belgian Malinois and Labradors on this air base, the hub of U.S. and international security forces' operations in the volatile Kandahar area. "Because of the surge there is more need for working dogs. But one of my main problems is getting dog food," he said. "It's hard to convince people sometimes that it's a priority, but it's a necessity if we are to keep these dogs working." Guidas said because of the energy-intensive demands of their missions, the dogs require special food and can't just eat scraps. The dog food, which is made commercially in the United States and has extra protein and nutrients to keep the dogs healthy while working in the heat and cold, must be shipped to Pakistan and then trucked to Kandahar. But space on trucks is limited and prioritized. Food and supplies for humans come first, and logistics planners are still adjusting for the eating needs of the bigger pack of dogs to be put to work. "It doesn't get a higher priority than a Coke or some potato chips," Guidas said of the dog food. "It moves when it moves." Even so, the dogs have become an essential component of many units because of their versatility. They can be trained to search for a wide variety of explosives and parts used in making improvised bombs. In the last month alone, military dogs in southern Afghanistan have made 20 finds of unexploded devices, weapon caches and other materiel. The U.S. has about 2,800 military dogs, the largest canine force in the world. It has used dogs in combat since World War I. The dogs don't come cheap. It costs about $40,000 per dog a year, and each goes through about five months of training. This year, Guidas expects the cost of the dog food that he needs to reach $200,000, up from about $80,000 last year. He said each dog can work for five or six years, but the demands of the terrain and of the mission are harsh, particularly on the dogs' joints. If a dog is injured or sick, it is not sent out on operations. Only two military dogs have been lost in southern Afghanistan in the last five years, Guidas said. "We take very good care of these dogs," he said. "In some cases they are treated better than us."


1AC

Thus we present the following plan: The United States federal government should end the military deployment of animals in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, and South Korea.


1AC

Advantage 1: Animal Rights Actions like the plan are vital to the success of the animal rights movement. Enacting legislation attacking specific forms of animal exploitation like military use strikes at the heart of institutionalized animal exploitation.

Francione 1996, (Gary is a professor at The Rutgers University School of Law, ‘Animal Rights: The Future’, World Prat Assembly, DLD: June 24th 2010, http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2005/04/animal_rights_t.html) But there are signs that the pendulum may, as a general matter, be swinging back. People are starting to realize that democracy has been hijacked by corporate special interests. People are getting tired of the resurgence of racism and anti-semitism. People are getting tired of the rampant and disempowering sexism that has pervades our culture. People are becoming increasingly aware that our "representatives" in Congress are nothing but pawns of the highest bidder, and are so devoid of integrity that they will attack "welfare mothers" as a financial drain on an economy that spends more money on a few new war toys than it spends on the entire system of welfare on a yearly basis. People want change. More and more people are becoming concerned about matters of social justice and nonviolence generally. Many people opposed the Gulf War; we just were not told about them by media that just happened to be controlled by the same corporations that make the bombs that we dropped on a lot of people and animals. Change will come, sooner or later. We can only hope that it will be sooner rather than later. We can only hope that it will be nonviolent. We must ask ourselves, however, whether that hope is itself morally justifiable in light of the violence that we have caused and tolerated to be caused by others who claim to act on our behalf. If the animal rights movement is to survive the backlash of animal exploiters, and if the movement is going to harness both its own internal energy and the general level of political dissatisfaction, the movement needs to re-strategize and re-organize in light of the New World Order. Now is the time to develop a radical--nonviolent but radical--approach to animal rights as part of an overall program of social justice. The solution will not be simple, but we must make a start. Consider the following suggestions: We must recognize that if animal rights means anything, it means that there is no moral justification for any institutionalized animal exploitation. Many people believe that as long as a person "cares" about animals, that caring makes someone an advocate of animal "rights." But that is no more the case than merely "caring" for women makes one a feminist. Feminism requires justice for women, and justice means, at the very least, the recognition that women have certain interests that cannot be sacrificed. Rape is prohibited; it is not left to whether or not a potential rapist "cares" about women. Similarly, if animals have rights, then the interests protected by those rights must receive protection and cannot be sacrificed merely because humans believe that the beneficial consequences for humans of such sacrifice outweigh the detriment for animals. We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the "humane" slaughter of animals. We need to reshape the movement as one of grassroots activists, and not "professional activists" who populate the seemingly endless number of national animal rights groups. For many people, activism has become writing a check to a national group that is very pleased to have you leave it to them. Although it is important to give financial support to worthy efforts, giving money is not enough and giving to the wrong groups can actually do more harm than good. For the most part, support local groups that you work with or that operate in your area. Significant social change has to occur on a local level. We need to recognize that activism can come in many forms. Many people think that they cannot be good activists if they cannot afford to have big, splashy campaigns, often involving the promotion of legislation or big lawsuits. There are many forms of activism, and one of the most potent is education. We were all educated, and we need to educate others--one by one. If each of us succeeded in educating five people per year about the need for personal and social nonviolence, the results multiplied over ten years (including the people educated by those with whom we have contact, etc.) would be staggering. Those of us inclined should reach out to greater audiences--on radio or television talk shows, in print media, in the classroom, or in the context of peaceful demonstration--to teach about nonviolence as a paradigm of justice. But it is important to realize that these issues are too important to leave to anyone else. We--each of us--has an obligation to seek justice for all persons, human and nonhuman. And we--each of us--can help effect that justice on a daily basis by sharing our ideas with those with whom we come in contact. Never underestimate the power of the individual and of small groups: Fidel Castro liberated Cuba with literally a handful of comrades. If we decide to pursue legislation, we should stop pursuing welfarist solutions to the problem. Animal welfare seeks to regulate atrocity by making cages bigger or by adding additional layers of bureaucratic review to ensure that the atrocity is "humane." We should pursue legislation that seeks to abolish particular forms of exploitation. For example, a carefully focused campaign to end federal funding for animal use in psychological experiments, or for military purposes, may very well be received sympathetically by a public increasingly skeptical of continued public funding of animal use. And any campaign should be accompanied by the political message of ultimate abolition of all institutionalized exploitation. Animal advocates should always be up-front about their ultimate objective, and use all campaigns as an opportunity to teach about nonviolence and the rejection of all institutionalized animal exploitation. We should recognize that there is a necessary connection between the animal rights movement and other movements for social justice. Animal exploitation involves species bias or speciesism, and is as morally unacceptable as other irrelevant criteria such as race, sex, sexual orientation, or class, in determining membership in the moral universe. But if we maintain that speciesism is bad because it is like racism, sexism, or homophobia, then we have necessarily taken a stand on those other forms of discrimination. And anyone who maintains that speciesism is morally wrong but that sexism or racism or homophobia are not, deserves the title of

misanthrope. We need to recognize that the movement to achieve animal rights is a movement that is related to, but different from, the political left. The animal movement is related to the left because it necessarily supports other progressive and nonviolent struggles for human liberation. The animal movement is different because it emphasizes the concept of nonviolence. Animal advocates should stop worrying about being "mainstream." How long will it take us to understand that the mainstream is irreversibly polluted.


Animal advocates--indeed, many progressives--are afraid to be labeled as "extremists." But what does it mean to be an "extremist" when people like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh are revered by millions? When a man of color in Harlem has a lower life expectancy than a man living in the poorest of nations? When millions go without health care or even minimal shelter or adequate food in the wealthiest nation on earth? When billions of animals are slaughtered yearly for absolutely no reason other than "it tastes good."? Perhaps it is time that animal advocates learned to be proud to be called "extremists." Perhaps we all need to be a bit more "extremist." In closing, I emphasize that the most important point is that we can no longer look to others to solve the enormous problems that we confront. We must work with other like-minded people, but we can never ignore or underestimate the ability--or the responsibility--of each person to affect significant change on a personal and social level. And we cannot wait any longer for "moderation" to work. Time is running out for us, for nonhuman animals, and for the planet.


1AC

This makes animal liberation a moral imperative, because a free and peaceful will never be possible until we demand the end of human domination over animals.

Steven Best, Chair of Philosophy at UT-EP, no date given [http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/ARNewEnlightenment.htm] During this turbulent period of social strife, riots, mass demonstrations against the U.S. war in Vietnam, and worsening problems with poverty, homelessness, and class inequality, Martin Luther King formulated a vision of a "world house." In this cosmopolitan utopia, all peoples around the globe would live in peace and harmony, with both their spiritual and material needs met by the fecundity of the modern world. But to whatever degree this dream might be realized, King's world house is still a damn slaughterhouse, because humanism doesn't challenge the needless confinement, torture, and killing of billions of animals. The humanist non-violent utopia will always remain a hypocritical lie until so-called "enlightened" and "progressive" human beings extend nonviolence, equality, and rights to the animals with whom we share this planet. The next logical step in human moral evolution is to embrace animal rights and accept its profound implications. Animal rights builds on the most progressive ethical and political advances human beings have made in the last two hundred years. Simply put, the argument for animal rights states that if humans have rights, animals have rights for the same reasons. Moral significance lies not in our differences as species but rather our commonalities as subjects of a life. This is the challenge of animal rights: can human beings become truly enlightened and overcome one of the last remaining prejudices enshrined in democratic legal systems? Can they reorganize their economic systems, retool their technologies, and transform their cultural traditions? Above all, can they construct new sensibilities, values, worldviews, and identities? The animal rights movement poses a fundamental evolutionary challenge to human beings in the midst of severe crises in the social and natural worlds. Can we recognize that the animal question is central to the human question? Can we grasp how the exploitation of animals is implicated in every aspect of the crisis in our relation to one another and the natural world? Animal rights is an assault on human species identity. It smashes the compass of speciesism and calls into question the cosmological maps whereby humans define their place in the world. Animal rights demands that human beings give up their sense of superiority over other animals. It challenges people to realize that power demands responsibility, that might is not right, and that an enlarged neocortex is no excuse to rape and plunder the natural world. These profound changes in worldview demand revolutionizing one's daily life and recognizing just how personal the political is. I teach many radical philosophies, but only animal rights has the power to upset and transform daily rituals and social relations. "Radical" philosophies such as anarchism or Marxism uncritically reproduce speciesism. After the Marxist seminar, students can talk at the dinner table about revolution while dining on the bodies of murdered farmed animals. After the animal rights seminar, they often find themselves staring at their plates, questioning their most basic behaviors, and feeling alienated from their carping friends and family. The message rings true and stirs the soul. Let's be clear: we are fighting for a revolution, not for reforms, for the end of slavery, not for humane slavemasters. Animal rights advances the most radical idea to ever land on human ears: animals are not food, clothing, resources, or objects of entertainment. Our goal is nothing less than to change entrenched attitudes, sedimented practices, and powerful institutions that profit from animal exploitation. Indeed, the state has demonized us as "eco-terrorists" and is criminalizing our fight for what is right. Our task is especially difficult because we must transcend the comfortable boundaries of humanism and urge a qualitative leap in moral consideration. We are insisting that people not only change their views of one another within the species they share, but rather realize that species boundaries are as arbitrary as those of race and sex. Our task is to provoke humanity to move the moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity. We must not only educate, we must become a social movement. The challenge of animal rights also is our challenge, for animal rights must not only be an idea but a social movement for the liberation of the world's most oppressed beings, both in terms of numbers and in the severity of their pain. As with all revolutions, animals will not gain rights because oppressors suddenly see the light, but rather because enough people become enlightened and learn how rock the structures of power, to shake them until new social arrangements emerge. Are we asking for too much? Justice requires only what is right, and is never excessive. Is the revolution remotely possible? In a thousand ways, the revolution is gaining ground. From the near nation-wide ban on cockfighting to making animal abuse a felony crime in 37 states, from eliminating the use of animals to train doctors in two thirds of U.S. medical schools to teaching animal rights and the law seminars at over two dozen universities, from increasing media coverage of animal welfare/rights issues to a 2003 Gallup Poll finding that 96% of Americans say that animals deserve some protection from abuse and 25% say that animals deserve "the exact same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation" it is clear that human beings are beginning to change their views about other species. Human beings simply will have to reinvent their identities and find ways to define humanity and culture apart from cruelty. Whether people realize it or not, this is not a burden but a liberation. One no longer has to live the lie of separation and the opening of the heart can bring a profound healing. Animal rights is the next stage in the development of the highest values modern humanity has devised96 those of equality, democracy, and rights. Our distorted conceptions of ourselves as demigods who command the planet must be replaced with the far more humble and holistic notion that we belong to and are dependent upon vast networks of living relationships. Dominionist and speciesist identities are steering us down the path of disaster. If humanity and the living world as a whole is to have a future, human beings must embrace a universal ethics that respects all life. Growth is difficult and painful, and the human species is morally immature and psychologically crippled. Human beings need to learn that they are citizens in the biocommunity, and not conquerors; as citizens, they have distinct responsibilities to the entire biocommunity. The meaning of Enlightenment is changing. In the eighteenth century it meant overcoming religious dogma and tyranny; in the late twentieth century, it demanded overcoming racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices; now, in the twenty-first century, it requires overcoming speciesism and embracing a universal ethics that honors all life. We can change; we must. The message of nature is evolve or die.


1AC

Only the animal liberation movement is capable of overcoming the worst aspects of the capitalist and ecological crisis.

Steven Best, Chair Philosophy at UT-EP 2006 [The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, vol.2, no.3, (June 2006)] From the perspective of ID, one could support animal liberation as a dynamic social movement that challenges large sectors of the capitalist growth economy by attacking food and medical research sectors. The ALM is perhaps today the most vocal critic of capitalist logic and economies, drawing strong connections between the pursuit of profit and destruction of the social and natural worlds. It is a leading global, anti-capitalist force. If the ALM could gain wider public support, it could provoke a capitalist monetary crisis, as it works to bring about improved human health and medical care. Most generally, the ALM has the potential to affect a cultural paradigm shift, one that broadens ethical horizons to include nonhuman animals and leads human species identity away from the dominator paradigm so directly implicated in the ecological crisis. One could argue that animal liberation makes its strongest contributions to the extent that it rejects single-issue politics and becomes part of a broader anti-capitalist movement. This is certainly not the present case for the overall AAM, which might be viewed as a kind of “popular front” organization that seeks unity around basic values on which people from all political orientations ―from apolitical, conservative, and liberal persuasions to radical anarchists― could agree. “But, to my mind,” argues Takis Fotopoulous, “this is exactly its fundamental weakness which might make the development of an antisystemic consciousness out of a philosophy of “rights,” etc. almost impossible.” Animal liberation is by no means a sufficient condition for democracy and ecology, but it is for many reasons a necessary condition of economic, social, cultural, and psychological change. Animal welfare/rights people promote compassionate relations toward animals, but their general politics and worldview can otherwise be capitalist, exploitative, sexist, racist, or captive to any other psychological fallacy. Uncritical of the capitalist economy and state, they hardly promote the broader kinds of critical consciousness that needs to take root far and wide. Just as Leftists rarely acknowledge their own speciesism, so many animal advocates reproduce capitalist and statist ideologies. It seems clear, however, that all aspects of the AAM – welfare, rights, and liberationist – are contributing to a profound sea-change in human thought and culture, in the countless ways that animal interests are now protected or respected. Just as the civil rights struggles sparked moral progress and moved vast numbers of people to overcome the prejudices and discrimination of racism, so for decades the AAM is persuading increasing numbers of people to transcend the fallacies of speciesism and discard prejudices toward animals. Given the profound relation between the human domination of animals and the crisis – social, ethical, and environmental – in the human world and its relation to the natural world, groups such as the ALF is in a unique position to articulate the importance of new relations between human and human, human and animal, and human and nature. The fight for animal liberation demands radical transformations in the habits, practices, values, and mindset of all human beings as it also entails a fundamental restructuring of social institutions and economic systems predicated on exploitative practices. The goal of ecological democracy is inconceivable so long as billions of animals remain under the grip of despotic human beings. The philosophy of animal liberation assaults the identities and worldviews that portray humans as conquering Lords and Masters of nature, and it requires entirely new ways of relating to animals and the earth. Animal liberation is a direct attack on the power human beings—whether in pre-modern or modern, non-Western or Western societies— have claimed over animals since Homo sapiens began hunting them over two million years ago and which grew into a pathology of domination with the emergence of agricultural society. The new struggle seeking freedom for other species has the potential to advance rights, democratic consciousness, psychological growth, and awareness of biological interconnectedness to higher levels than previously achieved in history. The next great step in moral evolution is to abolish the last acceptable form of slavery that subjugates the vast majority of species on this planet to the violent whim of one. Moral advance today involves sending human supremacy to the same refuse bin that society earlier discarded much male supremacy and white supremacy. Animal liberation requires that people transcend the complacent boundaries of humanism in order to make a qualitative leap in ethical consideration, thereby moving the moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity. Animal liberation is the culmination of a vast historical learning process whereby human beings gradually realize that arguments justifying hierarchy, inequality, and discrimination of any kind are arbitrary, baseless, and fallacious. Moral progress occurs in the process of demystifying and deconstructing all myths ―from ancient patriarchy and the divine right of kings to Social Darwinism and speciesism― that attempt to legitimate the domination of one group over another. Moral progress advances through the dynamic of replacing hierarchical visions with egalitarian visions and developing a broader and more inclusive ethical community. Having recognized the illogical and unjustifiable rationales used to oppress blacks, women, and other disadvantaged groups, society is beginning to grasp that speciesism is another unsubstantiated form of oppression and discrimination. The gross inconsistency of Leftists who champion democracy and rights while supporting a system that enslaves billions of other sentient and intelligent life forms is on par with the hypocrisy of American colonists protesting British tyranny while enslaving millions of blacks. The commonalities of oppression help us to narrativize the history of human moral consciousness, and to map the emergence of moral progress in our culture. This trajectory can be traced through the gradual universalization of rights. By grasping the similarities of experience and oppression, we gain insight into the nature of power, we discern the expansive boundaries of the moral community, and we acquire a new vision of progress and civilization, one based upon ecological and non-speciesist principles and universal justice. Articulating connections among human, animal, and earth liberation movements no doubt will be incredibly difficult, but it is a major task that needs to be undertaken from all sides. Just as Left humanists may never overcome speciesism, grasp the validity and significance of animal liberation, or become ethical vegans, so the animal rights movement at large may never situate the struggle for animal liberation in the larger context of global capitalism.The human/animal liberation movements have much to learn from one another, although will be profound differences. Just as those in the Inclusive Democracy camp have much to teach many in the animal liberation movement about capital logic and global capitalism


domination, so they have much to learn from animal liberation ethics and politics. Whereas Left radicals can help temper antihumanist elements in the ALM, so the ALM can help the Left overcome speciesist prejudices and move toward a more compassionate, cruelty-free, and environmentally sound mode of living. One common ground and point of department can be the critique of instrumentalism and relation between the domination of humans over animals – as an integral part of the domination of nature in general – and the domination of humans over one another. Such a conversation, dialogue, or new politics of alliance, of course, is dependent upon the Left overcoming the shackles of humanism, moving from an attitude of ridicule to a position of respect, and grasping the significance of animal rights/liberation


1AC

Advantage 2: Ethics Viewing animals as property is intrinsically wrong and must be rejected because animals are not objects lacking dignity or feelings.

Bartlett 2002, (Steven J. completed his undergraduate work at the University of Santa Clara, received his master's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his doctorate from the Université de Paris.,‘Roots of Human Resistance to Animal Rights: Psychological and Conceptual Blocks’ http://www.animallaw.info/articles/arussbartlett2002.htm) Animals are property. These three words--and their legal implications and practical ramifications--define the most significant doctrines and cases . . . and the realities for current practitioners of animal law. [FN1] For many people in our society, the concept of legal rights for other animals is quite "unthinkable." That is because our relationship with the majority of animals is one in which we exploit them: we eat them, hunt them and use them in a variety of ways that are harmful to the animals. The idea that these animals feel pain and that they have interests which call out for recognition is too close for comfort. . . . [A]s long as animals are property, we will face severe limitations in our ability to protect them and their interests. . . . In all legally relevant ways, other animals possess the qualities that compel us to put aside convention and convenience, and realize that we have ignored and violated their rights for far too long. Animals are not "things" and a legal system which treats them as mere property is intrinsically flawed. [FN2] Advocates of animal rights and of change in the legal status of animals have been eloquent on animals' behalf, but they have tended almost universally to ignore the most fundamental forces that tend to compromise or block the realization of their goals. Efforts on behalf of change that remain blind in this way are handicapped from the outset. They are likely to be ineffectual because they fail to confront, engage, and defeat the realities that define the experience and outlook of those who oppose these efforts. As will be made clear in this comment, these realities are deeply rooted both in the psychological mindset of the human majority and in the conceptual system that the majority accepts unquestioningly. [FN3] To date, discussions of the legal status of nonhuman animals have focused on such issues as property and standing, but none has centered attention squarely upon the human psychological and conceptual frameworks that frequently are brought into play, as though by an automatic and uncontrollable reflex. Legislation and the common law are the products of human activity, and they bear the unavoidable imprint of human mentality. One author has recently written that "[t]o label something property, is, for all intents and purposes, to conclude that the entity so labeled possesses no interests that merit protection and that the entity is solely a means to the end determined by the property owner." [FN4] Such a point of view brings attention to the issues of property and, ultimately, of legal personhood. However, we need to ask, are these issues the most basic if we wish to understand the difficulty of the struggle experienced by advocates of animal rights? Another author recently has urged that legal discourse take shape around three concerns: "recognition of the social value of nonhuman animals through tort litigation, recognition in statutory language of nonhuman animals' self-interest in their own lives and breaking down the species barrier by challenging and restructuring standing doctrines." [FN5] Here, the perspective is widened further, but it is still not sufficiently basic in focus to be cognizant of the obstacles that often frustrate animal rights advocates. What is at stake, according to another writer, is "one of the most urgent moral issues of our time." [FN6] It is an issue that certainly deserves our attention and care, and a deeper level of analysis. There are, as readers of these pages are well aware, legal and moral consequences that follow from a view that judges nonhuman animals to be no more than inanimate, disposable things. While many of the legal consequences have been articulately summarized, the fundamental problem has yet to be brought to light. [FN7] A problem may be defined as a gap between a present state and a desired goal state. [FN8] For advocates of animal rights, the desired goal state is articulately expressed by Joyce Tischler, Executive Director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, writing: Those of us at the heart of the animal law movement envision a world in which the lives and interests of all sentient beings are respected within the legal system, where companion animals have good, loving homes for a lifetime, where wild animals can live out their natural lives according to their instincts in an environment that supports their needs--a world in which animals are not exploited, terrorized, tortured or controlled to serve frivolous or greedy human purposes. [FN9] This goal stands at some distance from the present state of affairs, and so a gap is identified and a problem defined. It is imperative that we understand what forces define the present state if we are to construct a bridge to the future described by Tischler. The present state of affairs is inadequately understood because it has only partially been grasped in terms that have become familiar: the property status of nonhuman animals, the concept of juristic personhood, standing doctrines, and so on. [FN10]


1AC

You have an ethical obligation to vote for the plan. The logic reducing animals to objects is the same logic that has justified the slaughter of millions of humans. Earth is doomed until we stop viewing living beings as property. Rejecting the militaries use of animals rejects the utilitarian logic driving animal exploitation in the status quo.

Bartlett 2002, (Steven J. completed his undergraduate work at the University of Santa Clara, received his master's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his doctorate from the Université de Paris.,‘Roots of Human Resistance to Animal Rights: Psychological and Conceptual Blocks’ http://www.animallaw.info/articles/arussbartlett2002.htm) In the traditional homocentric view, the rational and affective value of a nonhuman animal is nothing more than its value to human beings. [FN65] Among homocentric theorists, it is common to value the life of a nonhuman animal by means of a cost-benefit analysis "heavily weighted in favor of even the most frivolous human benefit." [FN66] Certainly, utilitarian seeing-eye dogs and military and police dogs are often deeply mourned by their owners/handlers at least in part because of their usefulness--but seldom, one must admit, solely because of it. Certainly, for many people, the emotional value of a nonhuman animal is inversely proportional to its human utilitarian value: the deaths of farm animals and barn cats are seldom mourned with extreme sorrow. The utilitarian valuation of nonhuman animals, built on what one author calls "the rhetoric of human specialness," [FN67] characteristically leads to moral atrocities toward those animals to whom there is generally little to no empathetic human response. Some authors have found parallels to this psychically numbed outlook in the unaffected emotional response of bystanders to the Holocaust. One author has suggested, "[o]ur treatment of animals is, in disturbing ways, like the treatment of Jews in the Holocaust, particularly with respect to the capacity of normal, good people to rationalize and deny that suffering is taking place." [FN68] Another author has likewise remarked: What do they know--all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world--about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with goods, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka. [FN69] Hannah Arendt called the response of ordinary people to moral atrocity "the banality of human evil." [FN70] Ordinary people do in fact tolerate, avert their eyes, comply with, or deny atrocities of which they are aware. Psychologically oriented Holocaust studies make this normal though morally repugnant human characteristic compellingly evident. [FN71] Similarly, and without recourse to metaphor, there is an unmistakable banality of human evil in the relationship of the human species toward other species. Even the most morally thick-skinned will find it hard to read firsthand accounts of the meat industry's treatment of animals. [FN72] The whole creation groans under the weight of the evil we humans visit upon these mute, powerless creatures. It is our hearts, not just our heads, that call for an end to it all, that demand of us that we overcome, for them, the habits and forces behind their systematic oppression. [FN73] These descriptions of human atrocity toward other species provide some of the hardest evidence of the ordinary person's willingness to treat other creatures with unalloyed cruelty and disdain for their sentience, and of the emotional numbing that dulls compassion, which habitual atrocity produces. [FN74] Nothing will be found in these accounts that points to the existence of particular difficulties that the meat industry encounters in recruiting individuals willing to carry out their orders, or of psychological injury claims made by slaughterhouse workers and meat packers. [FN75] The situation is entirely similar with respect both to the ease with which ordinary human beings can be inducted into the armed forces and ordered to commit acts of barbarity, or the absence of difficulty with which human executioners can be found to do their socially appointed work in prisons. What needs to be called into question are these very phenomena that involve ordinary humanity's willingness to engage in acts of barbarism and cruelty, to which the majority has become psychologically habituated and deadened. The study of such phenomena is the focus of the psychology of human destructiveness, about which there is now a considerable body of literature. [FN76] However, to my knowledge none of the psychologists who have studied human destructiveness has extended the research conclusions in this field to our species' exploitation and abuse that result from humanity's diet, animal experimentation, fashion, sport, and religious practice. Much of humanity's destructive psychological attitude toward animals is found in its purely utilitarian point of view, as expressed by the blind or dumb belief that "animals do not experience pain.


1AC

You are not voting for the plan, because it magically solves every instance of animal exploitation. Instead, vote for our policy, because it is intrinsically good. Reject the negatives future based disadvantages, because their utilitarian and consequential rational will always recreate human domination over the non-human.

Eric Katz, Director of Science, Technology, and Society Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 1997 [Nature as Subject p. 3-10] At the end of his analysis of arguments for' the preservation of the irreplaceable,' John N. Martin discovers that he is puzzled by the peculiar two-sided use of utilitarian reasoning in debates over the environment. His conclusion is that 'the vast majority of preservationist cases can be explained by a version of utilitarianism," and by the term explained he seems to mean "justified." However, he continues, "Given that the major foes of preservation are utilitarians, this consequence is surprising. It looks as if the foes may be defeated by turning their own theory against them and using it more carefully." Martin is thus proposing that with more careful philosophical groundwork, a complete utilitarian justification of the environmentalist-preservationist position can be formulated, routing once and for all the anti-environmentalist forces of development. I argue that Martin's view is wrong, that utilitarianism in its most basic forms cannot explain or justify the preservationist position in the preservation vs. development debate although it often appears to do so. In fact, the widespread use of utilitarian arguments to justify policy decisions about the protection of the environment is detrimental to preservation. The essential elements of utilitarianism only provide a justification for the satisfaction of human need, for this satisfaction is the standard by which utilitarianism measures goodness or moral worth. But human needs and the needs of the natural environment are not necessarily similar or in harmony; thus, any ethical theory-such as utilitarianism-which tries to explain the preservation of the natural environment by means of the satisfaction of human wants, need, and desires will be only contingently true: It will depend on the factual circumstances, the actual desires of the human community at any given time. This empirical limitation does not bode well for the security of the preservationist argument. What then is the preservationist position? Essentially, we can define it as an argument for the protection and presentation of some object or state-of-affairs in an unaltered condition. Martin himself is concerned with irreplaceable entities, but environmentalists do not always restrict themselves to that class of objects. Generally, they use the argument to justify the preservation of plants, wildlife, rock formations, the land, ecological systems, wilderness areas, etc. Martin believes that the major problem in the application of utilitar-ian ethical theory to this preservationist position lies in the justification of the importance of genetic properties. Any worthwhile argument for preservation would have to explain why a perfect reproduction of a work of art or an artificially produced Yosemite Valley is not as valuable as the original. The reason-of course is that the historical genetic properties of the object-the process by which it was created cannot be separated from the nongenetic properties in a determination of the worth of the object. Martin, however, claims that utilitarianism is unable to evaluate the genetic properties of an object because of its "blindness to the past."3 When evaluating the consequences of an action in order to determine its moral worth, the utilitarian has his "eyes [directed] towards the future." The sole concern of the utilitarian is whether a world in which a certain entity is presented will be a better world than one in which the entity will not be preserved. According to Martin, the utilitarian is not interested in the historical properties that the entity may possess, and thus how the entity came into being is a fact which is irrelevant to the moral calculation. The utilitarian is forward-looking: the measurement of future utility is the criterion of goodness or moral value. Martin admits to being troubled by this apparent inability of utilitarian moral theory to evaluate entities on the basis of genetic properties. As he notes, it creates numerous instances in which preservationist intuitions are in conflict with utilitarian calculations. "The utilitarian counts astroturf as the equal to grass; he allows roads and motels within the boundaries of national parks; he dams rivers and lumbers forests. In all cases he is unswayed by genetic considerations." In order to alleviate this problem with utilitarianism, Martin proposes a method by which genetic considerations are indirectly introduced into the utilitarian calculation of benefit and harm. Since it is an obvious truth that people have special attitudes towards objects based on genetic considerations," the utilitarian ought to consider these attitudes when calculating the utility of an act of preservation. Thus Martin concludes that preservation may be a better policy of action, not because of any intrinsic worth of the object being preserved, but because preservation-given present attitudes produces a more satisfied popula-Hon.6 This indirect calculation of genetic properties of objects by means of an evaluation of the population's attitudes-yields a number of problems. Martin notes three areas of possible controversy. The first is the "contingency of [aJ preservationist obligation" which is based on human attitudes. Because the utilitarian bases his policy of preservation on the satisfaction of certain human attitudes, the policy will be justified only as long as these attitudes remain in effect. As Martin comments: "If people did not now and in the fixture care about Yosemite Valley, arguments for its preservation based on genetic properties would not seem to carry any force. 117 Arguments for environmental preservation, then, depend for their validity on the contingent existence of certain human attitudes. This reliance on contingent human attitudes creates a second problem: the "possibility of deception." [IF the utilitarian argument for pres-ervation rests on the satisfaction of human attitudes and feelings, then actual objects considered important need not be preserved as long as people believe that they are. The belief that a certain object is "natural" or "real" will satisfy human needs and increase social utility. As long as the population continues to be deceived, there will be no decease in the levels of satisfaction. What is preserved, then, is the belief that objects with important genetic properties continue to exist-the


actual objects need not be preserved. Tourists to Paris, for example, do not have to know that the original Mona Lisa was slashed by a knife-wielding intruder. Martin does not approve of this conclusion: "What we see here is that serving people's feelings is sometimes not enough.,"' As traditional arguments against utilitarianism have stressed, there are some values—such as truth and justice-which are important regardless of consequences. The prima faciae value of truth would thus seem to override a utilitarian calculation about the benefits of deception in actual cases of preservation. Martin thus calls for a further elaboration of utilitarian theory. Finally, Martin notes the actual "unpopularity of preservation." People seem to get more satisfaction from using motor boats on lakes, damming rivers for hydroelectric power, and building access roads into national parks than they would by preserving these natural resources in a pristine state. Thus it seems that "the utility derived from serving the attitudes of those favoring preservation is an insignificant part of total utility." Given the actual state of contemporary society, utilitarian arguments concerning preservation appear to dash with the intuitive judgments of environmentalists. This analysis of certain problems in an indirect utilitarian argument for the preservation of objects with important genetic or historical properties is the key point of Martin's essay. It is therefore surprising to discover that despite these problems, his conclusion is that a more careful use of utilitarian arguments can buttress the environmental cause. I believe that the contrary conclusion is much more obvious: these problems reveal the complete failure of utilitarian arguments to explain the subtlety and crucial importance of the environmentalist position on preservation. Martin employs a standard version of utilitarianism in his analysis. In his argument a given world is better than an alternative if and I if it possesses more social utility, and utility "is identified with satisfaction of citizen preferences.''~° The significant fact about such ethical theory is that the criterion of moral value is the satisfaction human preferences--the satisfaction of human needs, wants, and sires. Any natural resource, object, or ecological area will only be served, therefore, if its preservation satisfies some obvious human need. Moreover, because of the utilitarian calculus, the satisfaction rived from the act of preservation will have to outweigh any o satisfactions produced by the development or nonpreservation of resource, object; or area. Basing moral value or goodness on the satisfaction, of human n and desires can only harm. the environmentalist goal of preserving natural entities. A result of this theory is that the preservation of nature a policy of action has only secondary and contingent value. The primary value is the production of greater amounts of social ut the satisfaction of human preferences and needs. The promulgatic environmentalist or preservafionist policy will thus depend upoi contingent existence of relevant preservationist needs of the hu community. To use one of Martin's examples: the chincona t~ee wi presented only as long as the human community needs the qui which is produced from it.n But this act of preservation is only a tingent moral obligation: if no human need is satisfied by the 1 preservation, if, for example, an artificial source of quinine is di~ ered, there will be no moral reason to preserve the spedes. Thu best result which an environmentalist can achieve by the use of a tarian argument is an unstable, contingent justification of preserv~ Preservation will be the acceptable moral position only when ht beings want it as a social policy. The problems associated with contingency which Martin rais, his discussion of the indirect utilitarian argument forcibly demon,, the precarious nature of a utilitarian justification of environm preservation. I have noted these problems in the previous sectio~ need not repeat them here. What Martin fails to see, however, is that even his "safe," nongenetic cases of preservation--those involve conservation, cost-benefit analyses, externalities, and ecology"--are not sufficiently explained or justified by a direct utilitarian approach. A good counterexample is the preservation of endangered species which are of little or no importance to humanity or the world ecological system. The preservation of the snail darter, a freshwater fish whose protected status has halted the completion of the Tellico dam, 13 cannot be explained rationally by the concept of utility. No cost-benefit analysis could favor the preservation of the fish: the loss in dollars spent and energy unused is staggering. Nor can the presentation of the snail darter be justified in terms of ecology: except for the interest of scholars in the field, the fish has no known beneficial effects on the human community or environment. If utilitarian arguments are presented to fortify the environmentalist-preservationist position, absurd claims have to be made. The environmentalist is forced to argue that the existence of a fish (or a plant, or a wilderness area) which is not utilized by the human community has more social utility than the obvious economic gains resulting from the nonpreservation of the fish (or plant or wilderness area) and the development of the affected region It seems clear that this kind of utilitarian argument for preservation will rarely justify the environmentalist position. This point has been amply demonstrated by Martin 1-I. Krieger in an article entitled "What's Wrong with Plastic Trees?" 14 described by Mark Sagoff as "a reductia ad absurdum of contemporary 'utilitarian' arguments for preserving the environment."' 5 Krieger states that "Artificial prairies and wildernesses have been created, and there is no reason to believe that these artificial environments need be unsatisfactory for those who experience them?' In fact, since "the way in which we experience nature is conditioned by our society,' public choice and desire can be manipulated so that "people learn to use and want environments that are likely to be available at low cost" Here then is the ultimate utilitarian position: environments artificially created to produce the most human satisfaction, and human minds conditioned to enjoy the artificial environments. Surely no greater amount of social utility could be imagined! Unfortunately, the effect of this theory on environmental policy would be disastrous. Any or all natural objects and environments could be destroyed to further the interests, to increase the satisfaction, of the human community. An artificial but satisfying utilitarian world clearly demonstrates the flaw in Martin's analysis and the danger that analysis holds for the policy of preservation. Utilitarianism, as Martin conceives it, only measures the moral worth or goodness of an action by the satisfaction of human preferences and needs which is produced. These human ne are connected only contingently with the preservation of any given natural object, resource, or ecological system. Humanity could even create an artificial, plasticized world which produces more social utility than a world filled with natural objects and resources. As our space program has demonstrated, humans can even survive in an artificial environment. The simple fact of the matter is that the interests of humans are not necessarily connected with the preservation of the natural environment. Any ethical theory which places its emphasis on the satisfaction of human needs can support a policy of preservation only on a contingent basis. Obligations to preserve natural objects and resources are overridden whenever a greater amount of human satisfaction be attained by nonpreservation. There is no danger then, as Martin believes, for the foes of enviromental preservation from who use utilitarian arguments. On their side it essential premise of utilitarian theory that the satisfaction of human desires and needs is the sole criterion of goodness or moral worth. No real danger lies in the use of utilitarian arguments by preservation Basing arguments for environmental preservation on the premise utilitarian moral theory will only reveal the precarious relationship which exists between the satisfaction of human needs and the preservation of natural objects. Once it is accepted that the satisfaction human needs is the primary measure of value, the continued exist~ of the natural world is reduced to a mere contingency. In conclusion, I would like to note two different approaches which preservationist might take to avoid Martin's "more careful" formation of utilitarian arguments. These observations are not meant as fiished theories of environmental obligation, but as


suggestions for other work. (1) Utilitarianism might be salvaged for use in the environmental debate if it is stripped of its bias towards the satisfaction of human needs and preferences. Bentham, it should be remembered, considered the pains and pleasures of the animal kingdom to be of important to a utilitarian calculation. According to this kind of position, the wants and desires of the wildlife in a given area would have to be considered prior to any development or destruction for the purpose of human betterment. Unfortunately, the problems with this kind of broad utilitarianism appear insurmountable, How does the satisfaction of animal needs compare in utility with the satisfaction of human needs? Can we bring plant life into the calculation? What about nonliving entities, such as rock formations (e.g., the Grand Canyon) or entire ecological areas? Does a marsh have an interest in not being drained and turned into a golf course, a need or desire to continue a natural existence? It is clear that difficult-if not impossible-problems arise when we begin to consider utility for nonhuman and nonsentient entities. (2) A second alternative, highly tentative, is a movement away from a "want-oriented perspective" in ethical theory.2° Rather than evaluating the moral worth of an action by the consequences which satisfy needs and desires in the human (or even nonhuman) world, we can look at the intrinsic qualities of the action, and determine what kind of values this action manifests. The question which the debate over environmental presentation raises is not "Does preservation of this particular natural object lead to a better world?" but rather "Do we want a world in which the preservation of natural objects is considered an important value?" The question is not whether the preservation of a certain entity increases the amount of satisfaction and pleasure in the world, but rather, whether these pleasures, satisfactions, and needs ought to be pursued. The question, in short, is about what kind of moral universe ought to be created.2' Only when the preservation of natural objects is seen to be an intrinsically good policy of action, rather than a means to some kind of satisfaction, will a policy of environmental protection be explained and justified. The development of an ethical theory which can accomplish this task will be a difficult undertaking, but it is the only choice open to preservationists who wish to avoid the easy, self-defeating trap of utilitarianism.


Inherency Ext.

The number of dogs in military is large and increasing Miles 4 [Donna, American Forces Press Service, United States Department of Defense,“ Military Working Dogs Protect Forces, Bases During Terror War,” Sept. 3, 2004, p. http://osd.dtic.mil/news/Sep2004/n09032004_2004090306.html] Today, "a couple hundred" working dogs are serving with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as patrol dogs and explosives and drug detectors, Rolfe said, adding that contractors use additional dogs in the theater. Nearly 2,000 more working dogs provide similar services at U.S. bases and operating posts around the world. Meanwhile, the military is increasing its reliance on working dogs. Before Sept. 11, 2001, Rolfe said Air Force security forces trained about 200 working dogs a year for the Defense Department. That number is up to more than 500, with the vast majority of dogs being trained as sentries and bomb-sniffers

The number of military dogs is going up.

Lyle 2009, [Air Force Tech. Sgt. Amaani Lyle, Special to American Forces Press Service, American Forces Press Service, United States Department of Defense, “Adoption Program Lets Working Dogs Become Pets” August 31, p. http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=55678] The stateside and overseas demand for military working dogs, especially explosive-detector dogs, has spiked since Sept. 11, 2001, and the average retirement age has dropped from 10 and a half to 8 and a half due to the rigors of the their jobs, Jordan said. The military has added combat-tracker and off-leash specialized search dog capabilities to the program. Most field dogs have deployed at least once, often multiple times, while dogs adopted from the schoolhouse rarely have deployed, Jordan said. She added that any given dog’s experiences warrant a thorough assessment of their temperament and acclimation back into a home.

Military dogs are either trained for detection or for patrol.

Foliente 2009 [Army Sgt. Rodney Foliente, Special to American Forces Press Service, United States Department of Defense, “‘Battle Buddies’ Provide Companionship, Security in Iraq” January 27, 2009, p. http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=52819] Establishing a dedicated working dog takes hours of hard work; the selection process is a lengthy one. Hand picked, these dogs undergo several tests before being chosen to join the U.S. military. They receive between 110 and 120 days' training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, and become either explosive-detection/drug dogs or patrol dogs. They go through several certifications once they reach their installations, where they'll remain throughout their career.


Harms Ext.

Dog deployments to Middle East are up

Davenport 2009, [ Christian, Washington Post Staff Writer, Washington Post, “Recruited to Serve and Sniff -- Again; Ace Bomb and Weapons Detectives, More Military Dogs Being Sent Overseas,” March 29, 2009, p. Lexis] The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't just forcing thousands of soldiers and Marines to deploy for two and three tours. The sacrifice is being shared by a key, and growing, part of the U.S. military: highly trained German shepherds and Belgian Malinois. In a war with no front lines, they have become valuable at sniffing out makeshift bombs, which cause most U.S. casualties. The use of dogs in war, whether as scouts, sentries or trackers, goes back hundreds of years. But since Sept. 11, 2001, the Defense Department has increased the number of military dogs from 1,320 to 2,025, and many have served multiple tours.

Dogs have been killed in the field

Davenport 2009, [ Christian, Washington Post Staff Writer, Washington Post, “Recruited to Serve and Sniff -- Again; Ace Bomb and Weapons Detectives, More Military Dogs Being Sent Overseas,” March 29, 2009, p. Lexis] At Andrews Air Force Base, which has the largest K-9 unit in the region, two dog teams recently deployed. In addition to military dogs, 38 contractor dog teams are in Afghanistan and about 140 dogs across Iraq. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, 11 military dogs have been killed in combat, Tremmel said.

Dogs cannot handle psychological stress of combat

Davenport 2009, [ Christian, Washington Post Staff Writer, Washington Post, “Recruited to Serve and Sniff -- Again; Ace Bomb and Weapons Detectives, More Military Dogs Being Sent Overseas,” March 29, 2009, p. Lexis] During his six-month tour in Iraq last year, Timi, a 5-year-old German shepherd, found about 100 pounds of explosive material, Evans said, including a 130mm shell full of homemade explosives. Timi "is all business," he said. "A real foot soldier." Tough and no-nonsense, he has always been more reserved than the other dogs. He took his time eating. He seemed to look at people out of the corners of his eyes, Evans said, following them. "He's calculating." But a few months into the deployment, Timi started thrashing about in his sleep, Evans said. "It was almost like he was having a seizure in his sleep," Evans said. "This was not like he was chasing a little bunny rabbit. He was kicking the . . . kennel down. . . . When I got him out of it, he'd have that bewildered look, and it would take him a minute to know where he was. Then he'd fall back asleep, and it would happen again and again." For two years, Walter Burghardt, chief of behavioral medicine at the Department of Defense Military Working Dog Veterinary Service, has been studying the effects of combat on dogs. Although he doesn't like to use the term post-traumatic stress disorder with dogs, war can affect them emotionally, he said. In some cases, antidepressants have worked, he said, as have more playtime and more time performing the tasks they were trained to do.


Harms Ext.

Dogs are suffering from lack of food. Associated Press 2005 [“Army Capt.: Iraqi Police Dogs Need Food”, January 05, 2005, p. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,143410,00.html] The commander of an Army Reserve detachment in Iraq is begging friends back home to send food for Iraqi police dogs. Captain Gabriella Cook says in e-mails that the 13 dogs at the Iraqi Police Academy (search) in Baghdad are living on table scraps and garbage. She says some of the dogs are sick — and there's no way to get real dog food. Cook's unit — the 313th Military Police Detachment (search), based in Las Vegas — arrived in the Iraqi capital last month. A Nevada veterinarian estimates that each of the police dogs needs 40 pounds or more of dry food per month.

Military Dogs Abused by Trainers

Reilly 2010, [Corinne Reilly, journalist for the Virginian-Pilot, 3/6/2010, http://hamptonroads.com/2010/03/emails-navy-dogs-deplorable-conditions-contractor] The task probably seemed innocuous enough when a small team of U.S. Navy personnel accepted it last fall. They would trek out to a private security contractor in Chicago to pick up 49 dogs, then transport them to a nearby military base. But what they found when they arrived was shocking, according to internal Navy e-mails: dirty, weak animals so thin that their ribs and hip bones jutted out.The dogs were supposed to have begun working months earlier to sniff out explosives at Navy installations across the country, including several in Hampton Roads. At least that was the plan when, for the first time, the Navy decided to hire an outside contractor to supply K-9s and handlers to help protect dozens of its bases and ships. But when the dog-handler teams showed up for work last spring, they couldn't find planted explosives during military certification tests, according to the Navy. So the bases sent them back to the contractor, Securitas Security Services USA. The Navy decided to cut its losses and ended the contract in July, eventually agreeing to buy the 49 Securitas dogs and train and handle them on its own. It sent its team to get the K-9s on Oct. 5. The Navy declined to discuss what its personnel discovered that day, but according to e-mails obtained by The Virginian-Pilot, the animals appeared starved, neglected and dramatically different from three months earlier, when they failed the military's certification tests. The e-mails say the Navy picked the dogs up at a warehouse. In one message, a civilian official described their condition as "deplorable." In another, he wrote that he feared the dogs would have died if the military hadn't come to get them. In fact, the Navy said later, at least two of the dogs did not survive. Several others were deemed too sick to ever be of use. Nearly a year after they were supposed to have begun working, the remaining K-9s still are not patrolling Navy installations as intended.


A2: Plan Costs To Much

We have new highly effective mine detecting technologies that can be mass produces at a price of around $10,000

Woollacott ‘10 [Emma Woollacott, degree from university of New York in Psycology had been doing freelance reporting for over 3 years, TG Daily, Team turns to eBay to build low-cost land mine detector, Wed 16th Jun 2010 8:12 am, (http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/50231-team-turns-to-ebay-to-build-low-cost-land-mine-detector)] US Army-sponsored researchers have built a land mine detection system for a hundredth of the cost of traditional systems - using parts they bought in online auctions. A team at the Colorado School of Mines has built a system using microwave-based sensors to detect vibrations in the ground. unlike most current detection systems, the microwave device can see through foliage. Made from off-the-shelf parts - including some obtained through online auctions - the system costs about $10,000. This compares to $1 million or more for standard laser-based Doppler remote detection systems. "Land mines are an enormous problem around the world for both military personnel and civilians," says physics professor John Scales. "We've developed an ultrasound technique to first shake the ground and then a microwave component to detect ground motion that indicates location of the land mine. We hope that the two components together enable us to detect the land mines in a safe fashion, from a distance." Other low-cost techniques for detecting land mines have included training dogs and even rats to detect chemicals within the explosives. Another approach has even involved the development of biosensor plants that change color when growing in contaminated soil. "The reason so many people are working on this problem from so many angles," says Scales, "is there is no one scheme that works well all the time. You need an arsenal of tools."

Bomb-detecting dogs expensive; robots a viable alternative Madhani ‘10 [Aamer Madhani, USA Today Baghdad correspondent, “Dogs take a lead in Iraq’s terror war,” 3/22/2010, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2010-03-22-iraqdogs_N.htm] The recent embrace by Iraqi security officials has been welcomed by the U.S. military, which is paying $12,000 for each dog. For years, U.S. military commanders have been urging the Iraqi forces to incorporate more dogs into their security program. The Iraqi security forces first formed a K-9 unit in the 1970s, but it was scarcely used. "We were there, but we only had a few dogs and we did little more than train," said Hajea, who joined the police in 1986 after being trained as a veterinarian. The American advice to bulk up the K-9 units was initially met with resistance. Instead of using dogs, Iraq's Interior Ministry instead invested tens of millions of dollars in the ADE-651, a British-manufactured bomb detection device that is ubiquitous at checkpoints throughout the country.


A2: No Alternatives For Demining

A new Laser that detects landmines has been developed and is being used in the NATO force in Afghanistan

Wade ‘10 [Mike Wade, prize-winning history graduate of Edinburgh University and freelance journalist for over 5 years, Times Online, Remote-controlled laser ‘nose’ to detect IED’s is developed by scientists, June 10, 2010, ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article7147032.ece)]

A remotely-controlled “sniffer dog” that can detect improvised explosive devices — the deadly IEDs that have caused high casualties among Nato troops in Afghanistan — has been developed by scientists. The technology, which utilises cheap plastic materials to create a laser beam, is described as an artificial nose and is able to detect the microscopic vapors emitted by explosives, enabling landmines and IEDs to be identified and neutralised. Scientists at the University of St Andrews believe that the new system could be used as a screening device at airports, as well as playing a key role on the battlefield. “If the gold standard in detection is a sniffer dog, this essentially creates an artificial nose that can sniff out the smells that hang around hidden explosives,” Dr Graham Turnbull, a lecturer in physics and astronomy, said. Using a thin film of polyfluorene — a special kind of light-emitting plastic — the team created a laser beam that absorbs ultraviolet light and re-emits it as a green or blue beam. “By controlling the light emissions — rather than being fluorescence, which is light emitted in all directions — you can engineer laser light in a well-defined output beam,” Dr Turnbull added. The St Andrews team found that the laser light dims within seconds when the beam comes into contact with even the tiniest explosives vapor. The laser sensor can be reset by a blast of nitrogen gas. “Floating above a landmine in Iraq or Afghanistan, there is a very weak, dilute plume of vapours of explosive molecules that gives off the smell of a bomb,” Dr Turnbull said. “When the light-emitting laser comes into contact with this very low concentration of explosive vapours, the output power of the laser drops, reporting the presence of the explosive molecule. The lasers can rapidly sense these TNT-like molecules at extremely low concentrations, as low as a few parts per billion. “On a dusty road in Afghanistan there are relatively few things that might affect the laser output and it certainly could have potential in that area.” Other bomb detection systems have utilised fluorescence as a means of identifying explosive materials. “There is a higher sensitivity in laser light to a smaller number of explosive molecules, and these molecules have a significant effect on the output of the polymer,” said Dr Turnbull, who co-authored the work with Professor Ifor Samuel and Dr Ying Yang, of the Organic Semi-Conductor Centre at the university. The Ministry of Defence currently deploys a number of robotic bomb disposal devices including the Dragon Runner, a machine that resemble Pixar’s Wall-E animation. It has been devised to enabled trained bomb disposal personnel to remotely disable explosive devices without placing them in danger. About 100 of the devices were ordered by the MoD this year for £12 million. Another robotic land-mine method, the Talisman Route Proving and Clearance System is currently being introduced at a cost £96 million, and requires heavily armoured Mastiff2 and Buffalo vehicles. The St Andrew detection system, though it would require an investment in remotely-controlled vehicles, is built around inexpensive plastics, widely used in the electronics industry, and Dr Turnbull said he had no doubt that there was “scope for such a viable system”. The MoD would not comment on the St Andrews research but a spokesman said: “We continue to invest in counter-IED equipment and will always seek to take advantage of any developments in technology.”

Low- cost Demining robots ready for use

Space Daily 2004, (Newsletters :: SpaceDaily Express June 10, 2004, Low-Cost Robot Could Locate Land Mines In Rugged Terrain http://www.spacedaily.com/news/robot-04p.html) Four Johns Hopkins undergraduate engineering students have designed and built a remote-controlled robotic vehicle to find deadly land mines in rugged terrain and mark their location with a spray of paint. The prototype has been given to professional explosive detection researchers as a model for a low-cost robot that humanitarian groups and military troops could use to prevent mine-related deaths and injuries. The four undergraduate inventors, all seniors, were Edoardo Biancheri, 22, of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; Dan Hake, 21, from Wilton, Conn.; Dat Truong, 22, from Methuen, Mass.; and Landon Unninayar, 22, from Columbia, Md. Hake, Truong and Unnimayar were mechanical engineering majors who graduated from Johns Hopkins last month. Biancheri plans to complete his undergraduate studies in December with a double major in mechanical engineering and economics. Working within a sponsored budget of $8,000, the students spent about $5,000 to design and build their prototype. They estimate the vehicle could be mass-produced for $1,000 or less, not including the cost of more sophisticated detection sensors.


A2: Military Dogs Have Nowhere To Go

AFTER DOGS SERVE, THEY ARE GIVEN TO LAW ENFORCEMENT OR ADOPTED

Military Working Dog Foundation, Inc. ‘10 Military Working Dog Foundation, Military Working Dog Foundation, Inc. - Adoptions, Information, Resources, 2010, http://www.militaryworkingdogs.com/ Periodically, these military working dogs become available for distribution to law enforcement agencies and local police departments. Some working dogs are made available for adoption to the public because they are no longer capable of performing their military duties

Once the dog becomes a pet it is no longer part of the military.

Lyle 2009 [Air Force Tech. Sgt. Amaani Lyle, Special to American Forces Press Service, American Forces Press Service, United States Department of Defense, “Adoption Program Lets Working Dogs Become Pets” August 31, p. http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=55678] Although the program will expedite processing for dogs out of the state and country, the general clarified why adopters must bear the brunt of transport for adopted dogs returning from overseas. "Once that dog is adopted, it becomes a pet, and therefore loses its [military working dog] status," she explained, so it would be inappropriate for the Defense Department to transport that pet.

Military dog adoption is a quick and effective process.

Lyle 2009, [Air Force Tech. Sgt. Amaani Lyle, Special to American Forces Press Service, American Forces Press Service, United States Department of Defense, “Adoption Program Lets Working Dogs Become Pets” August 31, p. http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=55678] Although the adoption process at the Military Working Dog schoolhouse at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, is rigorous and contingent on demand and eligibility, families can adopt dogs somewhat quickly, said Air Force Maj. Gen. Mary Kay Hertog, the Pentagon-based executive agent of the military working dog program. "Families can normally complete the adoption process in less than 30 days if they and the dogs meet the eligibility requirements," Hertog said. "The Robby Law changed the way the [Defense Department] does business, and we go to extraordinary lengths to make sure dogs are adopted out."


A2: Non-Speciest Util Is Possible Utilitarianism undermines the case for animal liberation—it allows specieism to come through the back door

Tom Regan, Professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University,, 2001 [Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology p. 46-48] Singer's argument has a further deficiency, which involves the principle of utility. First, Singer does not show that the differential treatment of animals runs counter to the utilitarian objective of bringing about the greatest possible balance of good over evil. To show this Singer would have to give an elaborate, detailed description, not only of how animals are treated, a part of the task which he does complete with great skill, but an analysis of what, all considered, are the consequences for everyone involved. He would have to inquire how the world's economy depends on present levels of productivity in the animal industry, how many people's lives are directly and indirectly involved with the maintenance or growth of this industry, etc. Even more, he would have to show in detail what would probably be the consequences of a collapse or slowdown of the animal industry's productivity. Secondly, Singer needs to make a compelling case for the view that not raising animals intensively or not using them routinely in research leads to better consequences, all considered, than those which now result from treating animals in these ways. Singer is required to show that better consequences would result, or at least that it is very probable that they would. Showing that it is possible or conceivable that they might is insufficient. It comes as a disappointment, therefore, that we do not find anything approaching this kind of required empirical data. What we find, instead, a passages, where he bemoans (rightly, I believe) the fact that animals are fed protein-rich grains which could be fed to malnourished human beings. The point, however, is not whether these grains could be fed to the malnourished it is whether we have solid empirical grounds for believing that they would l made available to and eaten by these people, if they were not fed to anima and that the consequences resulting from this shift would be better, all things considered. I hope I am not unfair to Singer in observing that these calculations are missing, not only here, but, to my knowledge, throughout the bulk of his published writings. This, then, is the first thing to note regarding Singer and the principle utility: he fails to show, with reference to this principle, that it is wrong to treat animals as they are now being treated in modern farming and scientific research. The second thing to note is that, for all we know and so long as we rely on the principle of utility, the present treatment of animals might actually be justified. The grounds for thinking so are as follows. On the face of it, utilitarianism seems to be the fairest, least prejudiced view available. Everyone's interests count, and no one's counts for more or less than the equal interests of anyone else. The trouble is, as we have seen, that there is no necessary connection, no preestablished harmony between respect for the equality of interests principle and promoting the utilitarian objective of maximizing the balance of good over bad. On the contrary, the principle of utility might be used to justify the most radical kinds of differential treatment between individuals or groups of individuals, and thus it might justify forms of racism and sexism, for these prejudices can take different forms and find expression in different ways. One form consists in not even taking the interest of a given race or sex into account at all; another takes these interests into account but does not count them equally with those of the equal interests of the favored group. Another does take their interests into account equally, but adopts laws and policies, engages in practices and customs which give greater opportunities to the members of the favored group, because doing so promotes the greatest balance of good over evil, all considered. Thus, forms of racism or sexism, which seem to be eliminated by the utilitarian principle of equality of interests, could well be resurrected and justified by the principle of utility. If a utilitarian here replies that denying certain humans an equal opportunity to satisfy or promote their equal interests on racist or sexual grounds must violate the equality of interests principle and so, on his position, is wrong, we must remind him that differential treatment is not the same as, and does not entail, violating the equality of interests principle. It is quite possible, for example, to count the equal interests of blacks and whites the same (and thus to honor the equality principle) and still discriminate between races when it comes to what members of each race are permitted to do to pursue those interests, on the grounds that such discrimination promotes the utilitarian objective. So, utilitarianism, despite initial appearances, does not provide us with solid grounds on which to exclude all forms of racism or sexism.'


A2: Consequentialism Inevitable Cost-benefit analysis is NOT inevitable—we can make judgments without reducing nature to calculation

Steven Kelman, Professor of Public Management at Harvard, 2002 [Environmental Ethics p. 455-458] In situations involving things that are not expressed in a common measure, advocates of cost benefit analysis argue that people making judgments "in effect" perform cost-benefit calculations anyway. If government regulators promulgate a regulation that saves 100 lives at a cost of $1 billion, they are "in effect" valuing a life at (a minimum of) S10 million, whether or not they say that they are willing to place a dollar value on a human life. Since, in this view, cost-benefit analysis "in effect" is inevitable, it might as well be made specific.This argument misconstrues the real difference in the reasoning processes involved. In cost-benefit analysis, equivalencies are established in advance as one of the raw materials for the calculation. One determines costs and benefits, one determines equivalencies (to be able to put various costs and benefits into a common measure), and then one sets to toting things up-waiting, as it were, with bated breath for the results of the calculation to come out. The outcome is determined by the arithmetic; if the outcome is a close call or if one is not good at long division, one does not know how it will turn out until the cal-

culation is finished. In the kind of deliberative judgment that is performed without a common measure, no establishment of equivalencies occurs in advance. Equivalencies are not aids to the decision process. In fact, the decision maker might not even be aware of what the "in effect" equivalencies were, at least before they are revealed to him afterwards by someone pointing out what he had "in effect" done. The decision maker would see himself as simply having made a deliberative judgment; the "in effect" equivalency number did not play a causal role in the decision but at most merely

reflects it. Given this, the argument against making the process explicit is the one discussed earlier in the discussion of problems with putting specific quantified values on things that are not normally quantified-that the very act of doing so may serve to reduce the value of those things.


A2: Non-Speciest Util Is Possible

Utilitarian calculus is mutually exclusive with an ethic that gives dignity to both “human” and “nonhuman” animals

Stephen Clark, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, 1999 ]The Political Animal p. 6-8] The catch with such 'utilitarian' calculation has been that once it aspires to count up the amount of good or evil, it is strictly incalculable. Once self-styled experts claim to have an 'objective' methodology for making decisions, the road to tyranny is open. Chesterton identified many of the evils implicit in appeals to the 'general" (which is no-one's) good. As he remarked, "nobody could pretend that the affectionate mother of a rather backward child deserves to be punished by having all the happiness taken out of her life [by removing her child to 'special care']. But anybody can pretend that the act is needed for the happiness of the community. One of his common themes is the misuse of medical judgement to incarcerate eccentrics: no-one who has attended to what has happened in this century can think this concern absurd. Canavan (1977), in her account of his radical populism, has identified one episode in particular, involving Cyril Burt (whom Chesterton criticised): in an article of 1950 Burt recalled how 'with the advent of compulsory education' there was medical concern about 'mental deficiency', which was perhaps attributable to small skull size. Burt remarks without comment or apology that of those children of the poor subjected to craniectomy to 'remedy' this 'fault' 25 per cent died and the rest showed no mental improvement.5 The reader, she goes on to say: can perhaps understand Chesterton's anger at a system of social reform that delivered the defenceless poor of the country into the hands of doctors who could try out their theories on these human guinea pigs and take children from their parents on grounds of arbitrarily assessed 'mental deficiency' - in order to subject them to appalling and futile operations as a result of which twenty-five per cent died and even those who survived showed no improvement. (Canavan 1977) The older ethical system urged us to live as decent human beings, and might easily have made the wider demand explicit: to allow or to help non-human creatures to live as decent a life according to their kind. The righteous man would have a care for his beasts, but would expect to see them suffer for good causes, ones that promoted virtuous living. The newer system denied that°anything should ever be made to suffer, except to reduce the sum total of suffering. That dangerous concession made it right, after all, to make animals suffer if human suffering could thereby be reduced (or a reduction expected). And moralists retained enough of the outlook of a status society to believe, without thinking much about it, that our suffering was of another order than theirs. Animal pains and pleasures must be merely physical. Humans would suffer agonies (it was implied) if they could not have their favourite foods, or watch their favourite sports, or find out fascinating truths about the world. Humans suffer (it was asserted) far more pain at bruises, wounds, infections, cancers. So though we might regret giving pain to 'animals', it must be better than allowing 'humans' to have those pains instead. An exactly similar piece of self-deception allows us to suppose that 'savages' and the poor don't feel as 'we' do. Even those who claim to be good democrats in fact exclude large numbers of their fellow subjects, reckoning them 'immature', 'insane' or 'imbecile'. In demanding that 'they' obey 'us' we expect a deference from them that they may be ill-disposed to give - an unwillingness that proves their imbecility, no doubt. 'The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god'6 -without, that is, anything to defer to (which more accurately defines a modem democracy). Good citizens like ourselves defer to no-one - but there are plenty of people whom we expect, half-consciously, to defer to us.


A2: DA Proves The Plan Unethical

You are only responsible for your action, not the indirect results of the alternative. That means their case impacts don’t matter if we win our ethic.

Alan Gewirth, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, 1982 [Human Rights p. 218-219, 225-230] It is a widely held opinion that there are no absolute rights. Consider what would be generally regarded as the most plausible candidate: the right to life. This right entails at least the negative duty to refrain from killing any human being. But it is contended that this duty may be overridden, that a person may be justifiably killed if this is the only way to prevent him from killing some other, innocent person, or if he is engaged in combat in the army of an unjust aggressor nation with which one's own country is at war. It is also maintained that even an innocent person may justifiably be killed if failure to do so will lead to the deaths of other such persons. Thus an innocent person's right to life is held to be overridden when a fat man stuck in the mouth of a cave prevents the exit of speleologists who will otherwise drown, or when a child or some other guiltless person is strapped onto the front of an aggressor's tank, or when an explorer's choice to kill one among a group of harmless natives about to be executed is the necessary and sufficient condition of the others' being spared, or when the driver of a runaway trolley can avoid killing five persons on one track only by killing one person on another track. And topping all such tragic examples is the catastrophic situation where a nuclear war or some other unmitigated disaster can be avoided only by infringing some innocent person's right to life. Despite such cases, I shall argue that certain rights can be shown to be absolute. But first the concept of an absolute right must be clarified. Suppose a 'clandestine group of political extremists have obtained an arsenal of nuclear weapons; to prove that they have the weapons and know how to use them, they have kidnapped a leading scientist, shown him the weapons, and then released him to make a public corroborative statement. The terrorists have now announced that they will use the weapons against a designated large distant city unless a certain prominent resident of the city, a young politically active lawyer named Abrams, tortures his mother to death, this torturing to be carried out publicly in a certain way at a specified place and time in that city. Since the gang members have already murdered several other prominent residents of the city, their threat is quite credible. Their declared motive is to advance their cause by showing how powerful they are and by unmasking the moralistic pretensions of their political opponents. Ought Abrams to torture his mother to death in order to prevent the threatened nuclear catastrophe? Might he not merely pretend to torture his mother, so that she could then be safely hidden while the hunt for the gang members continued? Entirely apart from the fact that the gang could easily pierce this deception, the main objection to the very raising of such questions is the moral one that they seem to hold open the possibility Of acquiescing and participating in an unspeakably evil project. To inflict such extreme harm on one's mother would be an ultimate act of betrayal; in performing or even contemplating the performance of such an action the son would lose all self-respect and would regard his life as no longer worth having.~ A mother's right not to be tortured to death by her own son is beyond any compromise. It is absolute. This absoluteness may be analyzed in several different interrelated dimensions, all stemming from the supreme principle of morality: The principle requires respect for the rights of all persons to the necessary conditions of human action, and this includes respect for the persons themselves as having the rational capacity to reflect on their purposes and to control their behavior in the light of such reflection. The principle hence prohibits using any person merely as a means to the well-being of other persons. For a son to torture his mother to death even to protect the lives of others would be an extreme violation of this principle and hence of these rights, as would any attempt by others to force such an action. For this reason, the concept appropriate to it is not merely 'wrong' but such others as 'despicable', 'dis-honourable', 'base', 'monstrous'. In the scale of moral modalities, such concepts function as the contrary extremes of concepts like the supererogatory. What is supererogatory is not merely good or right but goes beyond these in various ways; it includes saintly and heroic actions whose moral merit surpasses what is strictly required of agents. In parallel fashion, what is base, dishonourable, or despicable is not merely bad or wrong but goes beyond these in moral demerit since it subverts even the minimal worth or dignity both of its agent and of its recipient and hence the basic presuppositions of morality itself. Just as the supererogatory is superlatively good, so the despicable is superlatively evil and diabolic, and its moral wrongness is so rotten that a morally decent person ~rill not even .consider doing it. This is but another way of saying that the rights it would violate must remain absolute. 6. There is, however, another side to this story. What of the thousands of innocent persons in the distant city whose lives are imperiled by the threatened nuclear explosion? Don't they too have rights to life which, because of their numbers, are far superior to the mother's right? May they not contend that while it is all very well for Abrams to preserve his moral purity by not killing his mother, he has no right to purchase this at the expense of their lives, thereby treating them as mere means to his ends and violating their own right~? Thus it may be argued that the morally correct description of the alternative confronting Abrams is not simply that it is one of not violating or violating an innocent person's right to life, but rather not violating one innocent person's right to life and thereby violating the right to life of thousands of other innocent persons through being partly responsible for their deaths, or violating one innocent person's right to life and thereby protecting or fulfilling the right to life of thousands of other innocent persons. We have here a tragic conflict of rights and an illustration of the heavy price exacted by moral absolutism. The aggregative consequentialist who holds that that action ought always to be performed which maximizes utility or minimizes disutility would maintain that in such a situation the lives of the thousands must be preferred. An initial answer may be that terrorists who make such demands issue such threats cannot be trusted to keep their word not to drop the bombs if the mother is tortured to death; and even if they now do keep their word, seceding in .this case would only lead to further escalated demands and threats. It may also be argued that it is irrational to perpetrate a sure evil in order to forestall what is so far only a possible or threatened evil. Philippa Foot has sagely commented on eases of this sort that if it is the son's duty to kill his mother in order to save the lives of the many other innocent residents of the city, then anyone who wants us to do something we think wrong has only to threaten that otherwise he himself will do something we think worse. Much depends, however, on the nature of the "wrong" and the "worse". If someone threatens to commit suicide or to kill innocent hostages if we do not break our promise to do some relatively


unimportant action, breaking the promise would be the obviously right course, by the criterion of degrees of necessity for action. The special difficulty of the present case stems from the fact that the conflicting rights are of the same supreme degree of importance. It may be contended, however, that this whole answer, focusing on the probable outcome of obeying the terrorists' demands, is a consequentialist argument and, as such, is not available to the absolutist who insists that Abrams must not torture his mother to death whatever the consequences. This contention imputes to the absolutist a kind of indifference or even callousness to the sufferings of others that is not warranted by a correct understanding of his position. He can be concerned about consequences so long as he does not regard them as possibly superseding or diminishing the right and duty he regards as absolute. It is a matter of priorities. So long as the mother's right not to be tortured to death by her son is unqualifiedly respected, the absolutist can seek ways to mitigate the threatened disastrous consequences and possibly to avert them altogether. A parallel case is found in " the theory of legal punishment: the retributivist, while asserting that punishment must be meted out only to the persons who deserve it because of the crimes they have committed, may also uphold punishment for its deterrent effect so long as the latter, consequentialist consideration is subordinated to and limited by the conditions of the former, antecedentalist consideration. Thus the absolutist can accommodate at least part of the consequentialist's substantive concerns within the limits of his own principle. Is any other answer available to the absolutist, one that reflects the core of his position? Various lines of argument may be used to show that in refusing to torture his mother to death Abrams is not violating the rights of the multitudes of other residents who may die as a result, because he: is not morally responsible for their deaths. Thus the absolutist can maintain that even if these others die they still have an absolute right to life because the infringement of their right is not justified by the argument he upholds. At least three different distinctions may be adduced for this purpose. In the unqualified form in which they have hitherto been presented, however, they are not successful in establishing the envisaged conclusion. One distinction is between direct and oblique intention. When Abrams refrains from torturing his mother to death, he does not directly intend the many ensuing deaths of the other inhabitants either as end or as means. These are only the foreseen but unintended side-effects of his action or, in this case, inaction, hence, he is not morally responsible for those deaths. Apart from other difficulties with the doctrine of double effect, this distinction as so far stated does not serve to exculpate Abrams. Consider some parallels. Industrialists who pollute the environment with poisonous chemicals and manufacturers who use carcinogenic food additives do not directly intend the resulting deaths; these are only the unintended but foreseen side-effects of what they do directly intend, namely, to provide profitable demand-fulfilling commodities. The entrepreneurs in question may even maintain that the enormous economic contributions they make. to the gross national product outweigh in importance the relatively few deaths that regrettably occur. Still, since they have good reason to believe that deaths will occur from causes under their control, the fact that they do not directly intend the deaths does not remove their causal and moral responsibility for them. Isn't this also true of Abrams's relation to the deaths of the city's residents? A second distinction drawn by some absolutists is between killing and letting die. This distinction is often merged with others with which it is not entirely identical, such as the distinctions between commission and omission, between harming and not helping, between strict duties and generosity or supererogation, for the present discussion, however, the subtle differences between these may be overlooked. The contention, then, is that in refraining from killing his mother, Abrams does not kill the many innocent persons who will die as a result; he only. lets them die. But one does not have the same strict moral duty to help persons or to prevent their dying as one has not to kill them; one is responsible only for what one does, not for what one merely allows to happen. Hence, Abrams is not morally responsible for the deaths he fails to prevent by letting the many innocent persons die, so that he does not violate their rights to life. The difficulty with this argument is that the duties bearing on the right to life include not only that one not kill innocent persons but also that one not le~ them die when one can prevent their dying a~ no comparable cost. If, for example, one can rescue a drowning man by throwing him a rope, one has a moral duty to throw him the rope. failure to do so is morally culpable. Hence, to this extent the son who lets the many residents die when he can prevent this by means within his power is morally responsible for their deaths. A third distinction is between respecting other persons and avoiding bad consequences, respect for persons is an obligation so fundamental that ~ cannot be overridden even to prevent evil consequences from befalling some~ persons. If such prevention requires an action whereby respect is withheld~ from persons, then that action must not be performed, whatever the conk sequences. One-of the difficulties with this important distinction is that it is unclear. May not respect be withheld, from a person by failing to avert from him some evil consequence? How can Abrams be held to respect the thousands of innocent persons or their rights if he lets them die when he could have prevented this? The distinction also fails to provide for degrees of moral urgency. One fails to respect a person if one lies to him or steals from him; but sometimes the only way to prevent the death of one innocent person may be by stealing from or telling a lie to some other innocent person. In such a case, respect for one person may lead to disrespect of a more serious kind for some other innocent person.. 7. None of the above distinctions, then, serves its intended purpose of defending the absolutist against the consequentialist. They do not show that the son's refusal to torture his mother to death does not violate the other persons' rights to life and that he is not morally responsible for their deaths. Nevertheless, the distinctions can be supplemented in a way that does serve to establish these conclusions. The required supplement is provided by the principle of the intervening action. According to this principle, when there is a causal connection between some person A's performing some action (or inaction) X and some other person C's incurring a certain harm Z, A's moral responsibility for Z is removed if, between X and Z, there intervenes some other action ¥ of some person B who knows the relevant circumstances of his action and who intends to produce Z or who produces Z through recklessness. The reason for this~ removal is that B's intervening action Y is the more direct or proximate cause of Z and, unlike A's action (or inaction), ¥ is the sufficient condition of Z as it actually occurs. X An example of this principle may help to show its connection with the absolutist thesis. Martin Luther King Jr. was repeatedly told that because he led demonstrations in support of civil rights, he was morally responsible for the disorders, riots, and deaths that ensued and that were shaking the American republic to its foundations. By the principle of the intervening action, however, it was King's opponents who were responsible because their intervention operated as the sufficient conditions of the riots and injuries. King might also have replied that the Republic would not be worth saving if the price that had to be paid was the violation of the civil rights of black Americans. As for the rights of the other Americans to peace ~and order, the reply would be that these rights cannot justifiably be secured at the price of the rights of blacks, It follows from the principle, of the intervening action that-it is not the son but rather the terrorists who are morally as well as causally responsible for the many deaths that do or may ensue in his refusal to torture his mother to death. The important point is not that he lets these persons die rather than kills them, or that he does not harm them but only fails to help them, or that he intends their deaths only obliquely but not directly. The point is rather that it is only through the intervening lethal actions of the terrorists that his refusal eventuates in the many deaths. Since the moral responsibility is not the son's, it does not affect his moral duty not to torture his mother to death, so that her correlative right remains absolute.


A2: Dirty Hands

Dirty hand thinking slips into rationalization for murder—subsidies kill animals “others” for our own good

Michael McDonald, Chair of Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia, 2000 [Cruelty & Deception: The Controversy Over Dirty Hans in Politics p. 195-196] Nevertheless, especially with bloody hands, it is important to distinguish between two cases. The first is one in which the blood on the hands politicians, business leaders, or others is the blood of those to whom they have a direct contractual or fiduciary relationship. That is, the blood is our blood, where our refers to us and our fellow citizens, employees, shareholders, partners, etc. The second is the case in which leaders get their hands bloody to benefit us; the blood on their hands is that of outsiders and not insiders. In the case in which the hands of leaders are covered with the blood their followers, I will assume that their power and authority as leader depends significantly on the trust given them by their followers. Now one possibility is that there is not a real, but only an apparent, betrayal of trust. On Baler's trust test, followers might not withdraw their trust even though they knew that the blood was literally their own or that of their fellow citizens, workers, comrades-in-arms, etc. Altruism, self-interest, or a combination of the two could motivate such a dirty-hands escape clause in t social contract between leaders and followers. Thus, in the event of a maritime disaster, passengers would want the ship's captain and crew to save least some of them rather than letting all perish. That is, there may be bu into some fiduciary relationships emergency or catastrophe clauses which allow a partial, albeit bloody, exit for some, but not all, of us. But this exit may well not be open. A leader might not have won, a: would not now retain, the allegiance of followers if these knew that the leader intended to sacrifice them or their comrades. Indeed, the evidence might be overwhelming that they gave no such license. What is to be s~ then? I don't think appeals to higher goods, or better overall consequence suffice. After all, such a leader's power is in large part constituted by trust. In this situation, bloody hands really are a betrayal of the trust relationship because the leader has no moral warrant for bloodying his hands. But what about the other case--the one in which the proposal is to let leaders cover their hands with the blood of others, i.e., of non-followers outsiders to the social unit in question? Let me assume that neither lead, nor followers collectively have a fight to the outsiders' blood (e.g., it is in self-defense or a just war). So if our leader does this, he acts wrongfully. It is not clear that this is an act of betrayal, for it is possible that the bloody deed may fulfill rather than betray the bonds between leader and followers. Alternatively, it may break these bonds. Followers as moral individuals might not have given their trust had they known that it was to be used such a bloody way--even though this may well be to their individual a collective advantage. So in order to decide if the blood of innocent others is on the heads hands of all or some of the people as well as on their leaders, we need to look at the nature of the trust relationship as it historically unfolds between leaders and followers. This case of bloody hands is genuinely unlike the other cases discussed in this paper. In them, the choice of a dirty-handed option by a leader at least raises the possibility of the abuse of trust or the destruction of reciprocity. However, when the blood on the hands of the leader is that of outsiders, for insiders it may well be the fulfillment of trust and reciprocity. The dark specter of ethnic, class, ideological, or religious warfare falls into this category when, for example, group solidarity manifests itself in the removal and murder of minorities. In this paper, I have expressed my disquiet with dirty- and bloody-handed leaders. Part of my disquiet is based on scepticism about the extent to which the dirty-handed option is the right thing to do, all things considered. I think it is all too easy to slip from the dirty-hands "dilemma" to the dirty-hands "rationalization." The main source of my disquiet is with the violtion of the reciprocity and trust that followers place in their leaders. In the case of bloody hands, my worries are, if anything, even greater, for the fulfillment of trust in the cause of evil must never be regarded as morally justifiable.


A2: Predictions Good

You should distrust scenarios because they weave complex and unstated variables into plausible-sounding stories. Tests involving thousands of forecasters prove that even professionals routinely ignore realistic probabilities for causal narratives when told a good story.

Tetlock, 2005 (Philip, Ph.D. (Psych), Yale, Professor of Leadership at Berkeley Haas School of Business, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? , pp. 190-4) Chapter 7 reports the first systematic studies of the impact of a widely deployed debiasing tool, scenario exercises, on the judgmental performance of political experts in real-world settings.1 Such exercises rest on an intuitively appealing premise: the value of breaking the tight grip of our preconceptions on our views of what could have been or might yet be. I am also convinced from personal experience that such exercises, skillfully done, have great practical value in contingency planning in business, government, and the military. But the data reported in this chapter make it difficult to argue that such exercises—standing alone—improve either the empirical accuracy or logical coherence of expert's predictions. For scenario exercises have no net effect on the empirical accuracy and logical coherence of the forecasts of roughly one-half of our sample (the hedgehogs) and an adverse net effect on the accuracy and coherence of the forecasts of the other half (the foxes). The more theory-driven hedgehogs find it easier to reject proliferating scenario branching points summarily, with a brusque "It just ain't gonna happen." The more open-minded foxes find it harder to resist invitations to consider strange or dissonant possibilities—and are thus in greater danger of being lured into wild goose chases in which they fritter away scarce resources contemplating possibilities they originally rightly dismissed. For the first time in this book, foxes become more susceptible than hedgehogs to a serious bias: the tendency to assign so much likelihood to so many possibilities that they become entangled in self-contradictions. THE POWER OF IMAGINATION In the last fifteen years, there has been an intriguing convergence between experimental efforts to correct judgmental biases and the entrepreneurial efforts of scenario consultants to improve contingency planning in business and government. Experimental psychologists have found that many judgmental shortcomings can be traced to a deeply ingrained feature of human nature: our tendency to apply more stringent standards to evidence that challenges our prejudices than to evidence that reinforces those prejudices. These psychologists have also stressed the value of busting up this cozy arrangement. And they have had some success in correcting overconfidence by asking people to look for reasons that cut against the grain of their current expectations,2 in correcting belief perseverance by highlighting double standards for evaluating evidence,3 and in correcting hindsight bias4 by asking people to imagine ways in which alternative outcomes could have come about. Of course, these demonstrations have all been in controlled laboratory conditions. The results tell us little about the mistakes people make in natural settings or about the adverse side effects of treatments. Reassuringly, scenario consultants—who cannot be quite so readily dismissed as detached from reality—hold strikingly similar views on the causes of, and cures for, bad judgments They appeal to clients to stretch their conceptions of the possible, to imagine a wider range of futures than they normally would, and then to construct full-fledged stories that spell out the "drivers" that, under the right conditions, could propel our world into each alternative future. Scenario writers know that it is not enough to enumerate pallid possibilities. They must make it easy "to transport" ourselves into possible worlds, to get a feeling for the challenges we would face. They urge us to abandon the illusion of certainty: to adopt the stance "I am prepared for whatever happens." Scenario consultants should not, of course, be the final judges of their own effectiveness. When pressed for proof, the consultants have thus far offered only anecdotes, invariably self-promoting ones, drawn from a massive file drawer that holds an unknown mix of more or less successful test cases. Their favorite success story is Royal Dutch Shell in the early 1970s. The Shell group was looking for factors that could affect the future price of oil. They suspected that the Arabs would demand higher prices for their oil, but they could not say when. But they needed the ability to read the mind of Anwar Sadat, or a spy in the Egyptian high command, to predict the Yom Kippur war in October 1973. They knew only that storm clouds loomed on the horizon. The United States was exhausting its known reserves. American demand for oil was growing. And OPEC was flexing its muscles. A large fraction of the world reserves was controlled by Middle Eastern regimes that bitterly resented Western support for Israel. One of their scenarios now sounds eerily prescient: massive price shocks that transformed the oil business and contributed to the "stagflation" of the 1970s. Schwartz claims that mentally preparing Shell managers for this medium-term future gave them a critical advantage against their less imaginative competitors. Although scenario writers eschew prediction, they take parental pride when one of their progeny proves prophetic. In addition to the bull's-eye OPEC scenario, the Shell group advertises its success in anticipating, in 1983 when U.S.-Soviet tensions were running high, radical reform inside the Soviet Union. The Shell futurists persuaded top executives to consider the possibility that the Soviet Union would open its massive untapped resources for development by multinational companies, that the cold war would thaw, and that Europeans would be willing to buy most of their natural gas from the soon-to-be-former Soviet Union. The Shell team also advanced a scenario in which OPEC unity fractured as new supplies came on-line and as demand for oil remained flat. They can thus claim to have foreseen not only the rise of OPEC in the 1970s but also its partial fall in the 1980s. These bull's-eyes are less impressive, however, when we remember that consultants write so many scenarios that they are guaranteed to be right once per gig. For instance, James Ogilvy and colleagues constructed three scenarios for China in 2022 that covered a broad waterfront of possibilities.8 The first envisioned a prosperous, democratic China that becomes, in absolute terms, the world's largest economy and boasts of a per capita income equivalent to today's Taiwan. The second depicted a China that is dominated by an oligarchic network of extended families and is so beset by regional factions that it teeters on the edge of civil


war. A third anticipated corruption and inequitable distribution of wealth becoming so pervasive that a populist military leader seizes control (after conquering oil-rich territory in Russia's Far East). The authors advised investors to test the viability of their business plans against each scenario because none could be ruled out. There are good reasons to be wary here. Portfolio diversification theory in finance would not command such wide professional acclaim if it had not advanced beyond the folk aphorism "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." And scenario consultants cannot expect more than fleeting fame if their advice reduces to "anything is possible" so "be prepared for anything." There is also the concern that advocates of scenario methods make good livings hawking their wares and have little incentive to explore the negative side effects of leading people down too many overembellished paths. Absent the regulatory equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration to set standards for cognitive self-improvement products, it is hard to say whether consumers are wasting their hard-earned dollars on scenario snake oi1.9 There is, then, a need for a disinterested assessment. The starting point for our assessment is support theory, the final work of the extraordinary psychologist, Amos Tversky. Support theory posits the likelihoods people attach to outcomes to be monotonic functions of the relative strength of the arguments people can muster for those outcomes. If I feel that the arguments for one set of possibilities are five times more powerful than those for another, that 5:1 ratio will translate into a higher subjective probability (how much higher must be estimated empirically). More controversially, the theory also posits that people are quite oblivious to the complex possibilities implicit in characterizations of events and, as a result, prone to violate a core assumption of formal probability theory: the "extensionality" principle. Odd though it sounds, the expectation is that people will often judge the likelihood of a set of outcomes to be less than the sum of the likelihoods of each member of that set. "Unpacking" stimulates us to imagine sub-possibilities, and arguments for those sub-possibilities, that we would have otherwise overlooked. Thus, unpacking a set of events (e.g., victory in a baseball game) into its disjoint components, A1 U A2 (e.g., victory by one run or victory by more than one run), typically increases both its perceived support and subjective probability.10 Support theory raises a warning flag: people should quickly become discombobulated, and routinely violate extensionality, when they do what scenario consultants tell them to do: decompose abstract sets of possibilities—say, all possible ways a leader might fall—into increasingly specific and easily imagined sub-possibilities that specify in scenario-like detail the various ways in which that outcome might happen.11 According to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, such confusion derives from the difficulty that people have in reconciling the tension between "inside" and "outside" approaches to forecasting-12 Unpacking scenarios encourages people to adopt an inside view: to immerse themselves in each case and judge the plausibility of pathways to outcomes by drawing on their detailed case-specific knowledge of the forces at work. People usually find more support for these case-specific predictions than they would have if they had based their judgments on an outside view, if they had stepped back from the details of individual cases and grouped them into summary categories (base rates). This is because the outside view is anchored in external referents that stop people from being swept away by "good stories." For example, revolutions are rare events even in the "zone of turbulence," and the outside view reminds us that, no matter how good a story one can tell about impending regime collapse in North Korea or Saudi Arabia, one should adjust one's inside perspective likelihood estimates by outside perspective base rates for comparable outcomes in sets of comparable cases. Of course, in the end we might decide that confusion is a price worth paying if scenario exercises shield us from cognitive biases such as overconfidence and belief perseverance. The best way to combat powerful theory-driven biases could be by activating countervailing biases rooted in our imaginative ability to suspend disbelief and to mobilize support for even far-fetched possibilities.13 DEBIASING JUDGMENTS OF POSSIBLE FUTURES In the 1990s, we conducted a series of small-scale experiments designed to assess whether the hypothesized benefits of scenario exercises outweighed the hypothesized costs. The largest two of these experiments drew participants from the forecasting exercises on Canada and Japan (for details, see Methodological Appendix). Canadian Futures Scenarios This experiment compared the likelihood judgments that expert and dilettante, fox and hedgehog, forecasters made before they did any scenario exercises, after they completed scenario exercises, and finally, after they completed "reflective equilibrium" exercises that required reconciling logical contradictions between their pre- and postjudgments by ensuring their probabilities summed to 1.0. Figure 7.1 lays out the scenarios that were judged (a) possible futures involving either a continuation of the status quo (federal and provincial governments agree to continue disagreeing over constitutional prerogatives) or a strengthening of Canadian unity (in which agreements are reached); (b) possible futures in which a secessionist referendum in Quebec succeeds, and controversy shifts to the terms of divorce. Figure 7.2 shows that we replicated the well-established finding that "merely imagining" outcomes increases the perceived likelihood of those outcomes: pre-scenario judgments of probability were uniformly smaller than post-scenario judgments.14 We also broke new ground. We discovered that the imagination effect was greatest under three conditions: (a) forecasters were experts rather than dilettantes; (b) forecasters were imagining departures from the status quo (the breakup of Canada rather than continuation of the status quo; (c) forecasters were foxes rather than hedgehogs. These results took us a bit aback. Our guess has been that expertise would make it easier to winnow out far-fetched scenarios. But the net effect of expertise—especially expertise coupled to an imaginative cognitive style—was to make it easier to get swept away by "change scenarios" that prime rich networks of cause-effect associations. It is hard to make a convincing correspondence or coherence case that these scenario exercises improved judgment. If we adopt the correspondence definition that good judges assign higher probabilities to things that happen than to things that do not, the exercises clearly led forecasters astray. Before the exercise, experts judged continuation of Confederation more likely than disintegration; afterward, they flipped. If we adopt the coherence definition that good judges must be logically consistent, it gets even harder to discern the benefits of scenario exercises. Before the exercise, binary complementarity held: the judged probability of Canada holding together plus that of Canada falling apart summed to nearly exactly 1.0 for both experts and dilettantes. After the exercise, the average


probability of these futures summed to 1.58 for all experts and 2.09 for fox experts. Probability judgments became increasingly sub-additive and in violation of the "extensionality" norm of probability theory. Why do we find this? Unpacking is mentally disruptive and scenarios are extreme forms of unpacking. One takes a vague abstraction, all possible paths to Canada's disintegration, and explores increasingly specific contingencies. Quebec secedes and the rest of Canada fragments: the Maritimes—geographically isolated—clings to Ontario, but Alberta flirts with the United States rather than bonding with the other western provinces that have broken with Ontario. One knows in the back of one's mind that the cumulative likelihood of all these contingent linkages holding true is vanishingly small. But the images are vivid, the plotlines plausible, and it becomes increasingly taxing to keep all the other logical possibilities in focus.


A2: Predictions Good

We can NOT be sure about their impact—their knowledge in indirect, and it might be biased or wrong

Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and Milan Cirkovic, Professor of Cosmology at University of Novi Sad, 2008 [Global Catastrophic Risks ed. Bostrom p. 19] In assessing the probability, we must consider not only how unlikely the outcome seems given our best current models but also the possibility that our best models and calculations might be flawed in some as-yet unrealized way. In doing so we must guard against overconfidence bias (compare Chapter 5 on biases). Unless we ourselves are technically expert, we must also take into account the possibility that the experts on whose judgments we rely might be consciously or unconsciously biased. For example, the physicists who possess the expertise needed to assess the risks from particle physics experiments are part of a professional community that has a direct stake in the experiments going forward. A layperson might worry that the incentives faced by the experts could lead themw to err on the side of downplaying the risks. Alternatively, some experts might be tempted by the media attention they could get by playing up the risks. The issue of how much and in which circumstances to trust risk estimates by experts is an important one, and it arises quite generally with regard to many of the risks covered in this book.


2AC/1AR Morality Cards

Animal liberation is a moral imperative. Steven Best, Chair of Philosophy at UT-EP, no date given [http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/ARNewEnlightenment.htm] So, as for those who have burned their paper-thin veneer of detached, objective scholarly commitment and ripped off the straightjacket of academic normalization, I stand alone. Or at least among a crowd large enough to dance on the head of a pin. Some academics have written about animal and earth liberation issues, and some defend animal liberation tactics amidst beer-induced bravado, but few make the transition from scholarship of animal liberation to public advocacy, which I think is crucial. And of course I have in mind here a particularly type of peddle-to-the-metal advocacy that flouts corporate/speciesist laws and defends pretty much whatever it takes to break down the doors that hold animals captive to the most brutal bastards Satan could conjure up, including criminal action and sabotage tactics – and of course the ALF will emblazon the night with a fire bomb but not harm a hair on a vivisector’s head, apropos to their nonviolent credo. But the peaceniks regurgitate the repressive and speciesist discourse of the corporate-state complex and demonize the tough tactics all-too often needed to liberate an animal as “terrorist” or “violence.” But no sooner do they bray these platitudes of betrayal do they sink in the quicksand of hypocrisy and inconsistency. For any schoolchild knows that sometimes sabotage and even “violence” are necessary to stop evil. Let’s face facts: academics on the whole are a cowardly bunch of self-serving narcissists, spineless sycophants who eschew controversy and pathetically ingratiate themselves with administrators and bureaucrats. First, they are normalized into silence and conformity in order to win their bid for tenure, a highly political process that dispatches iconoclasts, non-conformists, and proponents of radical or controversial ideas. After enduring 5 years of submissiveness and self-repression, newly tenured professors theoretically have the right to speak their minds freely, but by then they often are thoroughly conditioned and co-opted, and there are always further rewards and punishments dangled in front of them, meted out according to the speech-acts they choose. These superfluous gasbags and oxygen thieves could possibly redeem themselves if they began each day by

studying the spine-shivering words of Dr. Martin Luther King (who didn’t fear losing his life, let alone a job): “Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe? Expediency asks the question: Is it politic? Vanity asks the question: Is it popular? But conscience asks the question: Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it simply because it is right.”

The speciest line is arbitrary—as demonstrated by animal psychology

Animal Liberation Front no date given [http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/animalrights.htm] 1. You are equating animals and humans, when, in fact, humans and animals differ greatly. Reply: We are not saying that humans and other animals are equal in every way. For example, we are not saying that dogs and cats can do calculus, or that pigs and cows enjoy poetry. What we are saying is that, like humans, many other animals are psychological beings, with an experiential welfare of their own. In this sense, we and they are the same. In this sense, therefore, despite our many differences, we and they are equal.

Exploiting animals is a moral choice—not an evolutionary necessity

Brian Luke, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton, 2007 [Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals p. 5] Complementing the picture of a sympathetic barrier between humans and other animals is the image of a natural competition between species. Animal exploiters commonly justify their actions by portraying life as a struggle in which only those who are willing and able to aggress against others can live and thrive. According to this perspective, people have survived to this point because humanity, particularly male humanity, has developed a predatory nature.I argue in chapter 2 that this defense cannot withstand scrutiny. Men's psychology and' physiology are not those of a natural predator but of something rather more ambiguous. We have the capacity to destroy other animals; but we tend to feel uneasy about it. We can live on animal-based foods, but in modern society we do better overall the more we

reduce the amount of animal fat in our diets. In general we are very capable of thriving without making use of large-

scale industries of animal exploitation such as hunting, animal farming, and animal experimentation. The reality is that the

human exploitation of animals is freely chosen, not a necessity imposed by our inherent nature.



Of course our account of values comes from humans, but that does NOT mean we should only give values to humans.

Keekok Lee, Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Lancaster University, 1999 [The Natural and the Artefactual p. 247-249] The first may be called 'axiological anthropocentricism,' the view that only humans are (intrinsically) valuable. The second may be called 'existential anthropocentrism,' the view that humans who alone can be participants in communication as moral subjects--are necessarily socially and normatively constituted. The former is incompatible with a nonanthropocentric account of nature; the latter is perfectly compatible with such an account.-~7 Existential anthropocentrism is, undoubtedly, correct; all accounts of nature are necessarily socially constructed in the sense that humans who articulate them are themselves socially and normatively constituted beings. Like the thesis closely related to it, namely, that all accounts of nature are anthropogenic as they emanate from humans, it is true but innocuous, provided it is not understood to mean that all knowledge is reducible to the sociology of knowledge, to embrace philosophical or normative relativism, or that reality or nature does not exist outside the activities of such socially and normatively constituted beings and their representations of reality or nature. In other words, all accounts of nature are necessarily anthropogenic as well as anthropocentric in the existential sense, but not necessarily anthropocentric in the axiological sense just identified. But Vogel does not endorse axiological anthropocentrism, only existential anthropocentrism.

Animals eating other animals is irrelevant—we still have a capacity to make a moral choice

ALF no date given [http://www.animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/FAQs/ARFAQ.htm] #36 In Nature, animals kill and eat each other; so why should it be wrong for humans? Most animals who kill for food could not survive if they did not do so. That is not the case for us. We are better off not eating meat. Also, we do not look to other animals for standards in other areas, so why should we in this case? Predatory animals must kill to eat. Humans, in contrast, have a choice; they need not eat meat to survive. Humans differ from nonhuman animals in being capable of conceiving of, and acting in accordance with, a system of morals; therefore, we cannot seek moral guidance or precedent from nonhuman animals. The AR philosophy asserts that it is just as wrong for a human to kill and eat a sentient nonhuman as it is to kill and eat a sentient human. To demonstrate the absurdity of seeking moral precedents from nonhuman animals, consider the following variants of the question: "In Nature, animals steal food from each other; so why should it be wrong for humans [to steal]?" "In Nature, animals kill and eat humans; so why should it be wrong for humans [to kill and eat humans]?" --DG SEE ALSO: #23, #34, #64



The language or intelligence standard is arbitrary and justifies exterminating coma victims.

David Meyer no date given [http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/PhilosophyOfAR.htm] Another justification is that humans are more intelligent. This seems true but it is humans who define the meaning of intelligence. In the same way that we experience difficulty finding a measure of intelligence that is valid across human cultural lines, it is impossible to find a standard measure of overall intelligence which we can apply to creatures with whom we cannot easily communicate. If we define intelligence as living harmoniously and in a sustainable balance with our environment, humans would rank among the least intelligent species. There are things we do as a species such as destroying our living environment and ourselves through war, greed, and hate, that are highly unintelligent. We know of no other animal that does this. Using general intelligence to define moral standing also creates a problem regarding those humans who, as a result of accident or birth defect, are rendered extremely unintelligent. If raw intelligence is the litmus test for who can be exploited, the mentally retarded and brain-injured should join the ranks of those in the circuses and on the scientists' experiment tables (they once were, but we've moved beyond that). People often cite more specific aspects of intelligence as a distinction between humans and other animals. None of these distinctions are absolute. Humans are capable of abstract thought. We can make no true judgment of the ultimate level of cognitive capabilities animals possess. We cannot speak their language. People with companion cats and dogs know that these animals can clearly think and reason. Time and Newsweek magazines featured cover stories on the mounting scientific evidence that many animals are capable of thought, reasoning, and even intentional deception.

IT’S HYPOCRITICAL AND IRRATIONAL TO SAY THAT ANIMALS DO NOT HAVE THE SAME RIGHTS AS HUMANS.

Taylor ‘03 Angus, philosopher of Animal Rights and professor at the University of Victoria, Animals and Ethics: an overview of the philosophical debate, “Do Animals Have Moral Rights?” 6.24.2010. p. (61) Salt’s book was later to make a strong impression on Peter Singer, even though the utilitarian Singer is a not a believer in moral rights as such. What is important for Salt is not the issue of whether ethics should employ the language of rights. What concerns him is whether we have any justification for treating animals in a fundamentally different manner than we treat human beings. Animals, says Salt, have moral rights if humans do. By this he means that to ascribe rights to humans but not to animals is to be logically inconsistent. For instance, if we claim that because suffering is generally to be avoided human beings must not be made to suffer unnecessarily, we cannot then turn around and without further ado claim that it is acceptable to make non-humans suffer unnecessarily. If we claim that the capacity for self-awareness gives those human beings who have it a right to life, we cannot then turn around and say that self-aware non-humans have no right to life. We must apply our moral principles (whatever they may be) consistently if we are not to be irrational.



Sentience and rationality do NOT make humans special—all life is of equal value

Nicholas Agar, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Victoria University, 2001 [Life’s Intrinsic Value p. 71-73] Goodpaster (1979) has this to say about the place of sentience in the biological world: "Biologically, it appears that sentience is an adaptive characteristic of living organisms that provides them with a better capacity to anticipate, and so avoid, threats to

life. This at least suggests, though of course it does not prove, that the capacities to suffer and enjoy are ancillary to something more important rather than tickets to considerability in their own right." The human capacity for pain and pleasure did not arise as an end in itself. We get biological priorities right if we say that it is of

secondary importance to one or other or some combination of autopoietic and naturally selected ends. We can parallel this type of biocentric argument with Charles Darwin's response to utilitarianism.16 Happiness should not be morality's end, said Darwin, as to think so was to invert the proper evolutionary relationship between survival and reproduction on the one hand and happiness on the other. Emotional states such as happiness and suffering were of value only insofar as they promoted the survival prospects of community members.'7 In parallel with Darwin's charge that Mill gets the wrong way around the relationship between happiness and survival and reproduction, biocentrists accuse various exponents of the psychological view of inverting the proper biofunctional relationship between the goods illuminated by the biocentric approach and sentience or rationality. Biocentrists are not of one mind on the issue of what strength of ethical conclusion to draw from this observation. The less thoroughgoing option is to insist that while biological goods must be accepted as the universal requirement for value, the presence of rationality or sentience adds value. Goodpaster (1978) leaves this option open by distinguishing between moral considerabiity and moral significance. Though a human and an ant cannot be distinguished in terms of their moral considerability, we are permitted to say that being folk psychological will make the human more morally significant.'8 This compromise position sits uneasily with the general tenor of Goodpaster's biological argument. Compare the reasoning with Taylor's more thoroughgoing approach. He advocates a biocentric egalitarianism rejecting any moral specialness for sentience-assisted pursuit of fundamental biological ends. Had the environment posed different challenges to our distant ancestors, then armored plates or acute night vision might have evolved in the place of rationality. These are all means to identical biological ends. Taylor complains of any attempt to reserve a special place for mental traits: It is not difficult to recognize a begging of the question. Humans are claiming human superiority from a strictly human point of view, that is, from a point of view in which the good of humans is taken as the standard of judgement. All we need to do is look at the capacities of nonhuman animals (or plants for that matter) from the judgement of their good to find a contrary judgement of superiority. The speed of the cheetah, for example, is a sign of its superiority to humans when considered from the standpoint of the good of its species.'


A2: Counterplan Solves Ethics

The appeal to extrinsic impacts like [ ] means you as a judge do not achieve the shift in ethical frames necessary to overcome speciesism.

Katherine Perdlo, PhD, 2007 [Journal of Critical Animal Studies 5.1] Animal rights campaigners disagree as to whether empirical arguments, based on facts such as those concerning nutrition, or ethical arguments, based on values such as the wrongness of hurting sentient beings, have greater validity and potential effectiveness. I want to address the issue in terms of “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” arguments – a distinction that corresponds only partly to the empirical and ethical couplet – and to make the case

that animal rights campaigns are most effectively advanced through intrinsic appeals. “Extrinsic arguments” are those that seek to promote an aim and its underlying principle by appealing to considerations politically, historically, or logically separable from that aim and that principle. “Intrinsic arguments” appeal to considerations within and inseparable from the aim and principle. In this case, the aim is animal liberation and the principle is the moral equality of species. For example, the claim that vegetarianism (ideally, veganism) helps reduce animal suffering is an intrinsic argument, but it can also be justified on extrinsic grounds through appeal to its environmental benefits. You can separate vegetarianism from the benefit to the environment, since it is logically possible that the one might not lead to the other, and environmentalism is an independent political cause. But you cannot separate vegetarianism from the benefit to animals, since the word vegetarianism, whatever its etymology, is used to mean abstention from meat or from all animal products. You might say that “benefit to animals” is an independent issue in that there are other means of ameliorating animal suffering besides vegetarianism, or you might promote vegetarianism only for human health benefits. But in terms of animal rights campaigning, vegetarianism is advanced for the intrinsic reasons that it benefits the animals themselves. The case for intrinsic arguments rests not on a concern for ideological purity, but on the need to reach a public that, although partly responsive to our ideas in some areas, has stopped far short of the acceptance needed to make significant breakthroughs. At some point in the encounter with us, the reaction sets in of either, “Yes, it’s terrible, but it’s justified if it saves human lives,” or, “Yes, it’s terrible and unjustifiable, but we have more important [i.e. human] things to worry about.” We need to tackle speciesism head-on, instead of relying on less challenging extrinsic arguments – “widely-accepted and existing frames” in Yates’s (2006) formulation – which tacitly consign “animal rights” and its policy demands to a marginal, indeed “extreme,” position. Besides disowning animal rights, extrinsic arguments contain inconsistent or evasive implications that can leave the audience doubtful and confused without being able to pin down what is wrong. It is true that extrinsic arguments have had some positive effect. If, for non-animal rights reasons, even one person has turned vegan or decided to oppose vivisection, while another has taken a small step in the right direction, such as by giving up “red meat,” there are nonetheless 2! ! benefits for animals and the planet. But what is truly needed to free billions of animals is a qualitative transformation in people’s thinking. Without a moral paradigm shift, the public may never be motivated to overcome either its own self-interest in using animals or governments’ aggressive protection of animal-abusing industries.


A2: Counterplan Solves Ethics

Justifications not centered on the intrinsic dignity of nature destroy your ability to overcome speciesism.

J. Baird Callicott, Professor of Philosphy at UNT, 2002 [Environmental Ethics p. 548-550] Bryan Norton, another environmental antiphilosopher, thinks that theoretical environmental ethics is not only an irrelevant subterfuge, but that it is also downright pernicious. Environmental ethicists arguing with one another about whether nature has intrinsic as well as instrumental value and about whether intrinsic value is objective or subjective divide environmentalists into deep and shallow camps. While these two camps spend precious time and energy criticizing one another, their common enemy, the hydra-headed forces of environmental destruction, remains unopposed by a united and resolute counterforce. But according to Norton a long and wide anthropocentrism "converges" on the same environmental policies-the preservation of biological

diversity, for example-as nonanthropocentrism. Hence the intellectual differences between anthropocentrists and nonanthropocentrists, deep ecologists and reform environmentalists are, practically speaking, otiose. Environmental philosophers, in Norton's view, should therefore cease spinning nonanthropocentric theories of the intrinsic value of nature and, as Norton himself does, concentrate instead on refining environmental policy. Norton opts for anthropocentrism because it is the more conservative alternative. Most people are anthropocentrists to begin with, and when the instrumental value of a whole and healthy environment to both present and future generations of humans is fully accounted, anthropocentrism, he believes, is sufficient to support the environmental policy agenda. 3 Norton's "convergence hypothesis," however, is dead wrong. If all environmental values are anthropocentric and instrumental, then they have to compete head-to-head with the economic values derived from converting rain forests to lumber and pulp, savannahs to cattle pasture, and so on. Environmentalists, in other words, must show that preserving biological diversity is of greater instrumental value to present and future generations than lucrative timber extraction, agricultural conversion, hydroelectric empoundment, mining, and so on. For this simple reason, a persuasive philosophical case for the intrinsic value of nonhuman natural entities and nature as a whole would make a huge practical difference. Warwick Fox explains why. Granting an entity intrinsic value would not imply "that it cannot be interfered with under any circumstances."' Believing, as we do, that human beings are intrinsically valuable does not imply that human beings ought never be uprooted, imprisoned, put at grave risk, or even deliberately killed. Intrinsically valuable human beings may-ethically may-be made to suffer these and other insults with sufficient justification. Therefore, Fox points out, the mere fact that moral agents must be able to jus-tify their actions in regard to their treatment of entities that are intrinsically valuable means that recognizing the intrinsic value of the nonhuman world has a dramatic effect upon the framework of environmental debate and decision-making. If the nonhuman world is only considered to be instrumentally valuable then people are permitted to use and otherwise interfere with any aspect of it for whatever reasons they wish (i.e., no justification is required). If anyone objects to such interference then, within this framework of reference, the onus is clearly on the person who objects to justify why it is more useful to humans to leave that aspect of the nonhuman world alone. If, however, the nonhuman world is considered to be intrinsically valuable then the onus shifts to the person who wants to interfere with it to justify why they should be allowed to do so: anyone who wants to interfere with any entity that is intrinsically valuable is morally obliged to be able to offer a sufficient justification for their actions. Thus recognizing the intrinsic value of the nonhuman world shifts the onus of justification from the person who wants to protect the nonhuman world to the person who wants to interfere with it-and that, in itself, represents a fundamental shift in the terms of environmental debate and decisionmaking.5 Just as Sayre seems to think of moral norms as hanging alone in an intellectual void, so Norton seems to think of environmental policies in the same way. We environmentalists just happen to have a policy agenda-saving endangered species, preserving biodiversity in all its forms, lowering CO2 emissions, etc. To rationalize these policies-to sell them to the electorate and their representatives-is the intellectual task, if there is any. (Much of Norton's research for his book, Unity Among Environmentalists, consisted of interviewing the Washington based lobbyists for "big ten" environmental groups. Such cynicism may be characteristic of lobbyists who are hired to pitch a policy, but starting with a policy and looking for persuasive reasons to support it is not how sincere environmentalists outside the

Beltway actually think.) People just don't adopt a policy like they decide which color is their favorite. They adopt it for what seems to them to be good reasons. Reasons come first, policies second, not the other way around. Most people, of course, do not turn to philosophers for something to believe-as if they didn't at all know what to think and philosophers can and should tell them. Rather, philosophers such as Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, and Roiston give voice to the otherwise inchoate and articulate thoughts and feelings in our changing cultural Zeitgeist. A maximally stretched anthropocentrism may, as Norton argues, rationalize the environmental policy agenda, but anthropocentrism may no longer ring true. That is, the claim that all and only human beings have intrinsic value may not be consistent with a more general evolutionary and ecological worldview. I should think that contemporary environmental philosophers would want to give voice and form to the still small but growing movement that supports environmental policies for the right reasons-which, as Fox points out, also happen to be the strongest reasons. Granted, we may not have the leisure to wait for a majority to come over to a new woridview and a new nonanthropocentric, holistic environmental ethic. We environmentalists have to reach people where they are, intellectually speaking, right now. So we might persuade Jews, Christians, and


Muslims to support the environmental policy agenda by appeal to such concepts as God, creation, and stewardship; we might persuade humanists by appeal to collective enlightened human self-interest; and so on. But that is no argument for insisting, as Norton seems to do, that environmental philosophers should stop exploring the real reasons why we ought to value other forms of life, ecosystems, and the biosphere as a whole. The eventual institutionalization of a new holistic, nonanthropocentric environmental ethic will make as much practical difference in the environmental arena as the institutionalization of the intrinsic value of all human beings has made in the social arena. As recently as a century and a half ago, it was permissible to own human beings. With the eventual institutionalization of Enlightenment ethics-per-suasively articulated by Hobhes, Locke, Bentham, and Kant, among others-slavery was abolished in Western civilization. Of course, a case could have been made to slaveowners and an indifferent public that slavery was economically backward and more trouble than it was worth. But that would not have gotten at the powerful moral truth that for one human being to own another is wrong. With the eventual institutionalization of a holistic, nonanthropocentric environmental ethic-today persuasively articulated by Aldo Leopold, Arne Naess, Holmes Roiston, and Val Plumwood, among others-the wanton destruction of the nonhuman world will, hopefully, come to be regarded as equally unconscionable.


A2: Conditional/Consultation Counterplans

Our ethical commitment to animal liberation must be unconditional

Tom Regan, Professor emeritus of philosophy at North Carolina State University, 2001 [Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology p. 54] Consider racism and sexism. Imagine that slavery is an institution of the day and that it is built on racist or sexist biases. Blacks or women are assigned the rank of slave. Suppose we are told that in extreme circumstances even slavery might conceivably be justified, and that we ought not to object to it or try to bring it down, even though no one has shown that it is actually justified in the present case. Well, I do not believe for a moment that we would accept such an attempt to dissuade us from toppling the institution of slavery. Not for a moment would we accept the general principle involved here, that an institution actually is justified because it might conceivably be justified. We would accept the quite different principle that we are morally obligated to oppose any practice which appears to violate rights unless we are shown that it really does not do so. To be satisfied with anything less is to cheapen the value attributable to the victims of the practice. Exactly the same line of reasoning applies in the case where animals are regarded as so many dispensable commodities, models, subjects, etc. We ought not to back away from bringing these industries and related practices to a halt just because it is possible that the harm caused to the animals might be justified. If we do, we fail to mean it when we say that animals are not mere things, that they are the subjects of a life that is better or worse for them, that they have inherent value. As in the comparable case involving harm to human beings, our duty is to act, to do all that we can to put an end to the harm animals are made to endure. The fact that the animals themselves cannot speak out on their own behalf, the fact that they cannot organize, petition, march, exert political pressure, or raise our level of consciousness--all this does not weaken our obligation to act on their behalf. If anything, their impotence makes our obligation the greater.~6


A2: Animal Welfare/Suffering Counterplans

Their focus on minimizing pain animal suffering reflects a speciesist anti-nature value system

J. Baird Callicott, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point, 1989 [In Defense of the Land Ethic p. 15-16] The "shift of values" which results from our "reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free" is especially dramatic when we reflect upon the definitions of good and evil espoused by Bentham and Mill and uncritically accepted by their contemporary followers. Pain and pleasure seem to have nothing at all to do with good and evil if our appraisal is taken from the vantage point of ecological biology. Pain in particular is primarily information. In animals, it informs the central nervous system of stress, irritation, or trauma in outlying regions of the organism. A certain level of pain under optimal organic circumstances is indeed desirable as an indicator of exertion--of the degree of exertion needed to maintain fitness, to stay in shape, and of a level of exertion beyond which it would be dangerous to go. An arctic wolf in pursuit of a caribou may experience pain in her feet or chest because of the rigors of the chase. There is nothing bad or wrong in that. Or, consider a case of injury. Suppose that a person in the course of a wilderness excursion sprains an ankle. Pain informs him or her of the injury and by its intensity the amount-of further stress the ankle may endure in the course of getting to safety. Would it be better if pain were not experienced upon injury or, taking advantage of recent technology, anaesthetized? Pleasure appears to be, for the most part (unfortunately it is not always so) a reward accompanying those activities which contribute to organic maintenance, such as the pleasures associated with eating, drinking, grooming, and so on, or those which contribute to social solidarity like the pleasures of dancing, conversation, teasing, and so forth, or those which contribute to the continuation of the species, such as the pleasures of sexual activity and of being parents. The doctrine that life is the happier the freer it is from pain and that the happiest life conceivable is one in which there is continuous pleasure uninterrupted by pain is biologically preposterous. A living mammal which experienced no pain would be one which had a lethal dysfunction of the nervous system. The idea that pain is evil and ought to be minimized or eliminated is as primitive a notion as that of a tyrant who puts to death messengers bearing bad news on the supposition that thus his well-being and security is improved. More seriously still, the value commitments of the humane move-ment seem at bottom to betray a world-denying or rather a life-loathing philosophy. The natural world as actually constituted is one in which one being lives at the expense of others,as Each organism, in Darwin's metaphor, struggles to maintain it own organic integrity. The more complex animals seem to experience (judging from our own case, and reasoning from analogy) appropriate and adaptive psychological accompaniments to organic existence. There is a palpable passion for self-preservation. There are desire, pleasure in the satisfaction of desires, acute agony attending injury, frustration, and chronic dread of death. But these experiences are the psychological substance of living. To live is to be anxious about life, to feel pain and pleasure in a fitting mixture, and sooner or later to die. That is the way the system works. If nature as a whole is good, then pain and death are also good. Environmental ethics in general require people to play fair in the natural system. The neo-Benthamites have in a sense taken the uncourageous approach. People have attempted to exempt themselves from the life/de~ath reciprocities of natural processes and from ecological limitations in the name of a prophylactic ethic of maximizing rewards (l~leasure) and minimizing unwelcome information (pain). To be fair, the humane moralists seem to suggest that we should attempt to project the same values into the nonhuman animal world and to widen the charmed circle--no matter that it would be biologically unrealistic to do so or biologically ruinous if, per impossible, such an environmental ethic were implemented.


A2: Animal Welfare/Suffering Counterplans

The counterplan is animal welfare because it applies anti-cruelty statutes.

“Animal Rights vs. Animal Welfare” no date given [http://www.sover.net/~lsudlow/ARvsAW.htm] Know the difference Animal rights To end all human "exploitation" of animals - this includes, but is not limited to, raising and slaughtering of livestock for human or animal consumption, eating meat, hunting, using animals for any medical or veterinary research, zoos (regardless of how well managed), circuses, rodeos, horseshows, dogshows, animals performing in TV commercials, shows or movies (regardless of how well treated any of the above are), guide-dogs for the blind, police dogs, search & rescue dogs, and the practice of owning pets. Animal Welfare To prevent suffering and cruelty to animals. And to provide care and good homes for pets in need. This often includes, but is not limited to, the funding and running of animal shelters (to provide a sanctuary for abandoned, abused, homeless, or unwanted pets, and to place them in good homes where possible, provide painless euthanasia for those that cannot be adopted, and to educate the public about the need for spaying/neutering their pets to prevent more surplus animals ending up in shelters), enforcement of anti-cruelty statutes (where their authority permits), initiating, lobbying for, and monitoring enforcement of legislation to ensure more humane standards of care for livestock, laboratory animals, performing animals, and pets.

And you won’t solve our animal liberation impact.

Steven Best, Chair Philosophy at UT-EP 2006 [The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, vol.2, no.3, (June 2006)] The ALM is only part, by far still the smallest part, of a growing social movement for the protection of animals I call the animal advocacy movement (AAM). The AAM has three major different (and sharply conflicting) tendencies: animal welfare, animal rights, and animal liberation. The AAM movement had humble welfarist beginnings in the early 19th century with the founding of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in Britain and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in the US.[2] Welfare organizations thereafter spread widely

throughout these and other Western countries, addressing virtually every form of animal abuse. The goal of welfare organizations, however,

has never been eliminating the institutions that exploit animals – be they research laboratories, factory farms,

slaughterhouses, fur farms, or circuses and rodeos – but rather reducing or ameliorating animal suffering within such violent and repressive structures. Welfarists acknowledge that animals have interests, but they believe these can be legitimately sacrificed or traded away if there is some overridingly compelling human interest at stake (which invariably is never too trivial to defend against substantive animal interests). Welfarists simply believe that animals should not be caused “unnecessary” pain, and hold that any harm or death inflicted on them must be done “humanely.”[3] In bold contrast, animal rights advocates reject the utilitarian premises of welfarism that allows the happiness, freedom, and lives of animals to be sacrificed to some alleged greater human need or purpose. The philosophy of animal rights did not emerge in significant form until the publication of Tom Regan’s seminal work, The Case for Animal Rights (1983). According to Regan and other animal rights theorists, a basic moral equality exists among human and nonhuman animals in that they are sentient, and therefore have significant interests and preferences (such as not to feel pain) that should be protected and respected. Moreover, Regan argues, many animal species (chimpanzees, dolphins, cats, dogs, etc.) are akin to humans by having the type of cognitive characteristics that make them “subjects of a life,” whereby they have complex mental abilities that include memory, self-consciousness, and the ability to conceive of a future. Arguments that only humans have rights because they are the only animals that have reason and language, besides being factually wrong, are completely irrelevant as sentience is a necessary and sufficient condition for having rights. Sharply opposed to the welfarist philosophies of the mainstream AAM and utilitarian philosophers like Peter Singer, proponents of animal rights argue that the intrinsic value and basic rights of animals cannot be trumped by any appeal to an alleged greater (human) good. Animals’ interests cannot be sacrificed no matter what good consequence may result (such as an alleged advance in medical knowledge). Just as most people believe that it is immoral to sacrifice a human individual to a “greater good” if it improves the overall social welfare, so animal rights proponents persuasively apply the same reasoning to animals. If animals have rights, it is no more valid to use them in medical experimentation than it is to use human beings; for the scientific cause can just as well – in truth, far better – be advanced through human

experimentation, but ethics and human rights forbids it. The position of animal rights is an abolitionist position that demands the end to all instances and institutions of animal exploitation, not merely reducing suffering; like its 19th century predecessor, it demands the eradication of slavery, not better treatment of the slaves. Yet, although opposed to welfarism in its embrace of egalitarianism, rights, and abolitionism, most animal rights advocates are one with welfarists in advocating strictly legal forms of change through education and legislation. Like welfarists, animal rights advocates typically accept the legitimacy of capitalist economic, political, and legal institutions, and rarely possess the larger social/political/economic context required to understand the inherently exploitative logic of capital and the structural relationship between market and state.


A2: Word PICs

The kritik obscures non-human oppression and is speciesist in its focus on the meaning of humans discourse to other humans

Richard Kahn, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research at the University of North Dakota. 2005 [http://richardkahn.org/writings/ecopedagogy/representinganimalsreview.pdf] When a young scholar at the Representing Animals conference went so far as to critique Goodall's work as "anthropomorphic," thereby generating a heated debate, it became clear that the state of a new liberal arts field, Animal Studies, was a contested (if burgeoning) disciplinary terrain in the United States. In 2000, a number of researchers clearly conceived of Animal Studies as akin to other counter-hegemonic disciplines like Women's Studies.[2] In their view, Animal Studies scholars should be animal advocates, the representative voices for non-human animals in an institutional structure that both tends to exclude non-human animals and considers them voiceless. Some percentage

of other scholars, however, perhaps sought to partake in Animal Studies as if it were a form of literary field and/or transdisciplinary fad. In this view, humanistic inquiry into the meaning of animals could take a

more stoic attitude as regards the contemporary plight of many non-human animals, as it was primarily concerned with mapping the varying cross- cultural histories, semantics and aesthetics of animal images instead.

For those whose work on and with animals is self-consciously progressive and normative, such maps tend to be seen as painfully anthropocentric. Thus, one conference participant, Charles Bergman, was deeply

enough moved to write an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he directly addressed those scholars that he felt merely pontificated about the intricacies of animal representations, such that they were content to forget entirely about the animal presences that had helped give rise to them. According to Bergman: the participants talked exclusively about what representations of animals mean to us. They said virtually nothing about how our representations affect the animals, or the ethical issues involved in

representation. The actual animals seemed almost an embarrassment, a disturbance to the symbolic field.[3]


Perm - Solvency Reject their one-track strategy of rejecting _____________. Our policy helps help animals and raise awareness, getting us one step closer to a society in which animals are free.

Norm Phelps, he has been an animal rights activist for more than twenty years, working with a number of animal protection organizations, no date given [http://www.veganoutreach.org/articles/normphelps.html] I believe that there are at least five excellent reasons for animal rights advocates to reject the arguments of the one-track activists and simultaneously pursue both abolition and reform—or at the very least, not oppose reformist efforts. Opening Windows on Torture Chambers First, campaigns to relieve the worst suffering of animals on factory farms force the public to think of animals as sentient, sensitive beings whose well-being is a matter of serious moral concern. This can only advance, not retard, liberation. "Out of sight, out of mind," the saying goes. And reflecting this idea, Sir Paul McCartney has observed that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. How many times have we all heard, "I don’t want to hear about that!" And, "Don’t show me those pictures, or I won’t be able to enjoy my dinner!" Campaigns like those against battery cages and gestation crates force people to hear the horror stories and look at the faces of suffering, whether they want to or not. They open windows in the solid walls of slaughterhouses and confinement sheds. They show the public the truth about these death camps, and even though these campaigns may not lead directly to a vegan world, they are slowly but surely changing the way the public thinks about animals and their suffering. And this sea change in public attitude is an important entryway to a vegan society. The critical point here is that most people are extremely resistant to moral criticism of things that they are personally doing. They simply reject it out of hand and refuse to consider it. They have to be led up to it gradually, one step at a time. Most people come to the animals’ cause by way of something that outrages their conscience that they are not doing themselves, like fur, vivisection, or dogfighting, and then as they become more committed, they make the move to vegetarianism and veganism. PETA, for example, receives the most calls regarding: 1) companion animals; 2) circus animals, 3) vivisection, and 4) fur. Similarly, most people oppose the worst abuses of farmed animals (for which, at the beginning, they do not feel personally responsible), and once they are committed to opposing a specific form of cruelty, such as battery cages, the consistency principle can kick in (we all like to see ourselves as consistent; moral inconsistency causes intense psychological distress), making them far more receptive to becoming vegan. The reform campaign throws open the door, so to speak, and once it is open, the need for consistency drives the person to take the next step. This has been confirmed by the experience of the coalitions that conducted the Florida and Arizona campaigns to ban gestation crates. A good number of animal advocates who weren’t yet vegetarians became active in those campaigns and then stopped eating animals as a result. In fact, I know of at least one animal advocate who now publicly speaks out against so-called "welfare campaigns" even though he became a vegan as a result of getting involved in an anti-gestation crate ballot measure. In short, two-track activism works by first raising awareness and inspiring people to take an active stand against cruelty, so that they see themselves as people who care about the suffering of animals. This makes them much more receptive to a vegan message. In this way—while it may seem paradoxical to those who are wedded to theoretical consistency—reform campaigns have the practical effect of challenging the concept of animals as mere food-producing commodities and leading people toward a vegan lifestyle. Driving up the Cost of Doing Business Another effect of reform campaigns is that they typically drive up the cost of animal products, which the animal agriculture industry sees as a potentially serious threat to its viability. On its anti-animal rights website ActivistCash.Com, for example, the notorious Center for Consumer Freedom, a well-known front for the animal abuse industries, warns that "HSUS spends millions on programs that seek to economically cripple meat and dairy producers." They are referring primarily to the campaigns to ban battery cages, gestation crates, and veal crates. The Animal Agriculture Alliance, an industry trade group, makes this dire prediction about the battery cage campaign. "Despite the national average price for "cage-free" eggs jumping 56 cents a dozen in the third quarter of 2007 and now costing 84% more than regular eggs, animal rights groups in California are pushing forward with a ballot initiative to illegalize regular production of eggs in California. The Animal Agriculture Alliance believes that the groups pushing this extreme initiative, led by the vegan-driven Humane Society of the United States will endanger animals and eliminate a cost-effective source of protein for many people." (Emphasis added.) In the October 2007 issue of Egg Industry magazine, Gene Gregory, president of United Egg Producers of Atlanta, expresses the same concern. The article, which includes the banner headline "If All Eggs Were Cage Free, Demand Would Fall," says that Gregory believes that, "if all egg production were to become cage free egg production, demand for eggs would be reduced because some consumers can’t afford to pay two or three times more for their eggs. ‘People tend to have a reference point for egg prices. If prices get too far out of line, they cut back.’" If the animal abuse industries recognize reform campaigns as a legitimate threat to their profitability, why can some animal activists not see it? Suffering Matters Factory farms constitute the most intense cruelty that the human race is capable of. They are, in fact, concentration camps in which sentient, sensitive beings live out their all-too-brief lives deprived of fresh air, sunlight, space in which to move about and stretch their legs or wings, and the ability to live in social communities suited to their natures. Their suffering is so intense and unrelieved from birth to death that insanity is a regular consequence of life in an animal factory. The helpless animals’ minds are simply crushed by pain and deprivation. The horror of life in a confinement shed or battery cage beggars description. It is literally unspeakable. You and I cannot fathom what it means to spend your entire life unable to move or do anything that would give your life meaning, and I cannot reconcile myself to the idea that it is acceptable to leave billions of helpless animals in this kind of hell for the sake of a utopia that neither these animals nor their children nor their grandchildren nor their descendents for many generations will live to see. Since HSUS launched its battery cage campaign in 2005, not quite three years ago, the percentage of laying hens confined in battery cages has declined from more than 98% to approximately 95%, a significant and measurable decrease in suffering for millions of animals every year. By 2012, veal crates will largely be a thing of the past. (America’s largest veal producer, Strauss Veal, will phase them out by 2010.) And it seems likely that gestation crates will be gone within the next decade. At the


beginning of this decade, that kind of progress was inconceivable. Today, thanks to so-called "welfarist" campaigns, it is rapidly becoming a reality. And these changes advance the wellbeing of the animals and bring us closer to a compassionate society in which animals’ basic interests are genuinely respected (obviously, this means that no one is eating, wearing, experimenting on, or otherwise using animals for human ends). Condemning those who also work to ease suffering in the here and now as if they were the enemy represents the triumph of ideology over compassion and common sense. If we cannot end suffering within the lifetimes of those who suffer, we have a moral obligation to ease it as much as we are able. A friend of mine who is working on the campaign to place a voter initiative on the California ballot in 2008 to ban veal crates, battery cages, and gestation crates tells me that a small number of California activists are refusing to support the initiative or collect signatures because it is a "welfarist" measure. If millions of animals on California’s factory farms are left to suffer in tiny cages because animal rights activists refuse to help them, that would be a tragedy of mind-boggling proportions. Suffering matters, and I cannot turn my back on it. I hope you can’t either. Animals Need All the Help They Can Get In developing a strategy for the animal rights movement, we have to take into account some very sobering history. As all social justice movements must, veganism began with a small core of dedicated idealists and has been expanding steadily ever since. Serious vegan advocacy in the United States began in 1960 when H. Jay Dinshah founded the American Vegan Society. It received a boost in the 1970s when Rev. Andrew Linzey published Christianity and the Rights of Animals and Peter Singer published Animal Liberation (which does not develop a strictly vegan argument, but nonetheless had the effect of promoting veganism on a larger scale than had hitherto been seen) and again when the International Vegetarian Union held its biennial convention in Orono Maine, which galvanized the American vegan/vegetarian movement into an energetic outreach program. In the 1980s, PETA began reaching unprecedented segments of the public with a vegan/vegetarian message, Tom Regan published The Case for Animal Rights (which does develop a vegan argument), and Victoria Moran published the groundbreaking and influential Compassion: The Ultimate Ethic: An Exploration of Veganism. In the 1990s, PETA’s vegan/vegetarian campaigns expanded exponentially, Alex Hershaft’s FARM began focusing exclusively on vegan/vegetarian campaigns, and Vegan Outreach took, well, vegan outreach, to a new level. With every year that goes by, vegan/vegetarian advocacy is growing in scope and sophistication, and it is succeeding admirably in the essential work of planting the vegan ideal in the public mind, especially among young people, and demonstrating that a vegan lifestyle is easy, convenient, and does not require personal sacrifice. As I said above, I believe that these efforts are and ought to be the core of the animal rights movement. But we cannot dismiss the fact that forty-seven years after the beginning of the vegan movement and twenty-two years after the birth of the modern animal rights movement, the number of animals slaughtered for food in the United States is continuing to rise. On October 15, 2007, USA Today reported that a Harris poll put the number of vegetarians at three-percent of the American population. Other polls in recent decades have put it at between two- and four-percent. While it is impossible to get a clear picture—in part because the polling questions are not always consistently worded, and in part because people often describe themselves as "vegetarian" when they eat fish, or when they eat meat "occasionally,"—it seems likely that the number of vegetarians and vegans is increasing slowly, especially among people of college age and younger. This growing awareness among the young is an encouraging development. Vegan advocacy is clearly gaining traction; but just as clearly, it is not going to empty the confinement sheds and shut down the slaughterhouses in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, the campaign to move retailers away from battery eggs—which was inaugurated in 2005—has already improved the lives of millions of laying hens by freeing them from battery cages. These animals will still suffer and be killed, but at least they will be able to walk, spread their wings, and lay their eggs in nests, all important behaviors that are permanently denied to battery hens. In these circumstances, there is a desperate need to pursue a variety of nonviolent tactics that offer promise of contributing to both the wellbeing and the

liberation of animals. By attacking those who want to expand our approaches to animal advocacy as they try to hit upon the combination of tactics that will work best, one-track activists have abandoned reason and wedded themselves to blind faith. Their approach to activism reverses the logical order of things. Instead of saying, "This strategy works; therefore, it is right," they say "This strategy is ideologically pure; therefore, if we just stick with it, it will have to work eventually." In an article posted on Tribe of Heart’s website, James LaVeck and Jenny Stein label activists who favor easing the suffering of farmed animals as "neocarns," by analogy to the "neocons" who have brought our country and our world to the edge of destruction. Despite this nasty-cutesy wordplay (which imitates Joan Dunayer’s "new speciesists," which, in turn, imitates Gary Francione’s "new welfarists"), it is one-track activists who most resemble the neo-conservatives in their approach to strategy. The neocons’ insistence that we will win in Iraq if we continue to blindly follow the same failed strategy ("Stay the course.") parallels the "abolitionists’" insistence that we will create a vegan society in the foreseeable future if we just continue to restrict ourselves to the one-track activism that has thus far failed to reduce the number of animals Americans consume. Rational advocacy requires that we constantly seek and evaluate feedback on how well our campaigns are working and make frequent mid-course corrections, looking for just the right mix of tactics that will lead to success. We may be ideological about the goal, but we must be pragmatic about the means. Letting our means be determined by ideological preconceptions is a formula for self-righteous failure. One-Track Activism: It Sounds Better than it is Mark Twain said that, "Richard Wagner’s music is better than it sounds." One-track activism sounds better than it is. It sounds simple, straightforward, and theoretically consistent. But history is littered with examples of elegant theories that failed utterly when applied to the real world. Such theories all too easily become an excuse for voicing noble platitudes while evading the difficult, frustrating, messy, nuts and bolts work of transforming our vision into progress for animals. Consider, for example, Harold Brown, whose presentation at FARM’s AR2007 can be seen on YouTube. In this talk, he promoted one-track activism and declared that "welfarist" campaigns have no place in the animal rights movement, while twice admitting, "I don’t have any answers." And indeed, he didn’t offer a single idea for making concrete progress. The closest he came was to say, "I’m sure we can work out tactics and strategies to deal with the different aspects of animal exploitation." Devising strategies and tactics that work in the real world is the most challenging part of animal rights advocacy. To brush it aside so cavalierly is a cop out. It must be great fun to be "a big picture kind of guy" (as Brown described himself not once, but twice), criticize people who are working hard in the trenches to alleviate the suffering of animals ("little picture folks," perhaps, who lack the esthetically magnificent vision of the "big picture" people?) and decline to take responsibility for proposing strategies and tactics. (As Brown cautioned activists, "We have to be careful not to get caught up in the minutiae, in the little things.") God, as the saying goes, is in the details, in the little things, and a patronizing dismissal of the work that is needed to translate "the big picture" into actual relief for suffering animals, is anything but helpful. Animals suffering and dying on factory farms need a strategy that will make a real difference in their lives in the shortest time possible. They need a two-pronged approach that combines vegan/abolitionist advocacy with campaigns for reform. One size doesn’t fit all, and it is this combination of tactics that holds the most promise for the most wretched of humanity’s victims, now and for future generations.


Perm – Solvency

We solve the impact to their kritik by creating a transnational coalitional politics that breaks down oppression by connecting animal to human liberation.

Steven Best, Chair Philosophy at UT-EP, no date given [“Common Natures, Shared Futures: Toward an Interspecies Alliance Politics”] The need for justice is universal. In his "Letter From Birmingham Jail," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly." Racism and sexism, for instance, have divided the working community and prevented them fromw achieving the power of a united front against corporate exploiters. Human beings must see that this "inescapable network of mutuality" includes nonhuman animals and that their plight is our plight, even if one cares only about human problems. In so many ways, what we do to the animals, we do to ourselves. Any form of hierarchical consciousness can feed into and reinforce another; and thus we must continually attack dualistic, discriminatory, and hierarchical frameworks until the hydra-headed monster of prejudice and oppression is slayed entirely. The exploitation of farmed animals provides a vivid illustration of the centrality of animal concerns to human issues and the vast interconnected effects of exploiting any single group. After World War II, as animals became ever more intensively produced as food commodities, family farms were increasingly replaced by factory farms. This monumental shift meant not only that animals would be raised indoors within intensive conditions of confinement, creating unprecedented levels of suffering, but also that huge corporations were gaining control of small scale farms and driving out families who cared for their land for generations. To work inside the filthy and dangerous factory farms and slaughterhouses, corporations exploited immigrant labor and other destitute and desperate workers. To control diseases and maximize growth, agribusiness pumped massive doses of antibiotics into the animals, helping to create widespread resistance to important drugs. To make animals grow as large and fast as possible, they injected them with growth hormones and eventually began to genetically engineer and clone them. Besides high doses of saturated fat, cholesterol and protein, the public was consuming a plethora of dangerous chemicals. Factory farms also generate huge amounts of chemicals and waste which foul the air, poison waterways, and destroy communities. Thus, because of its far-reaching consequences, injury to farmed animals brought immense harm to farmers, workers, consumers, and the environment. Far from being irrelevant to social movements, animal rights can form the basis for a broad coalition of social groups and drive changes that strike at the heart of capitalist exploitation of animals, people, and the earth. One stellar example of a great social activist who grasped the whole picture was Cesar Chavez, noted not only for being a vegetarian but also for opposing spectacles of animal cruelty such as the rodeo. There are limits to what animal rights activists can support, however, as they would never endorse better wages for underpaid poultry workers. Instead, they would advance the abolition of animal food industries and reemployment of workers in humane and ethically acceptable occupations. Similarly, the animal rights community cannot join consumer groups to advocate organic meat or embrace the slow foods movement that, although a critique of fast food culture and the corporate takeover of agriculture, nonetheless endorses meat consumption in organic and free-range form. Invariably, when one reads about the plight of workers in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants in Left publications like In These Times or The Nation, moral and critical attention focuses solely on the workers, and the voice of outrage says nothing about the animals as if the rivers of blood flowing out of these houses of horror would be acceptable given higher wages for the workers. But if radical social movements have ignored animal concerns and missed the big picture, the animal rights movement has paid insufficient attention to other social struggles and the logic of capitalism. Largely apolitical or single-issue in scope, many animal rights advocates fail to grasp how the animal abuses they decry result from the profit imperative, and are part and parcel of a social system that needs to be challenged and transformed in radical ways. To the extent that animal rights activists grasp the systemic nature of animal exploitation, they should also realize that animal liberation demands that they work in conjunction with other radical social movements. Animal activists need to realize that progressive social movements traditionally have viewed them with suspicion, as bearers of race and class privileges who ignore issues of social oppression, and thus they need to begin to build bridges in the progressive community (as, for example, people of color are a rare sight at animal rights protests and conferences). The need for alliances, and the great difficulty in achieving them, is evident in the attempts to build bridges between the feminist and animal rights communities. As spelled out by Carol Adams and other ecofeminists, the patriarchal ideologies of Western society reduce women to a subhuman status. Men have depicted women as closer to animals than to humans, as humans have rational capacities that are allegedly lacking in women and animals. Throughout our social landscape, one finds advertising images that link women�s bodies to animal bodies, equating both as meat to be consumed by men. Women and animals both are targets of male violence. Meat eating and hunting are bound up with ancient patriarchal values and institutions, and Adams argues that feminists who wish to be consistently anti-patriarchal should adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. Ecofeminists advance an ethics of care that promotes holism, connectedness, and respect for animals and the earth. Thus, there appears to be a natural affinity between core concerns of feminism and animal rights, as both have a common enemy in patriarchy. But the reality of forging alliances has often proved difficult. Feminists have complained, rightly, that while a disproportionate number of people in the animal rights community are women, the leaders overwhelmingly are men. For many feminists, the existence of sexist norms within the animal rights community is most obvious in the case of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), the world's largest animal rights organization that is infamous for featuring naked or scantily clad women in their demonstrations and advertisements, thereby reproducing society's dominant images of women as sex objects rather than human subjects. PETA unapologetically defends this tactic as necessary to gain media attention for their education campaigns that otherwise would be ignored, but many feminists feel that PETA is sending out a mixed message that denounces one form of exploitation while endorsing another. Beyond Identity Politics Some of these feminists respond by leaving the animal rights movement altogether and many animal rights activists wish them fond farewell for what they view to be divisive concerns. This truly is unfortunate. For the last few decades, social movements have taken the form of identity politics that are highly Balkanized, with each group pursuing its own agenda relating to its specific form of identity (black, brown, female, environmental, gay, and so on). This development perhaps was necessary


for various cultures and groups to find their own histories and voices, but the fragmentary politics of identity now needs to be replaced with a politics of alliance where each group not only recognizes its own particular mode of oppression and champions its distinct identities and interests, but also grasps its theoretical and political relations to other groups and works in a strategic unity against common forces of oppression such as capitalism. There are signs that such a movement is emerging. Many commentators characterize the 1999 Battle of Seattle as a turning point in that a rich diversity of groups came together to challenge a common enemy-global capitalism and the World Trade Organization. Dozens of coalitions worked harmoniously in a united front of justice for all, as diverse groups such as teamsters (labor) and turtles (environmental and animal groups) stood together. On numerous occasions since then, activists have gathered around the world in similar coalitions contesting the injustices of global capitalism. As capitalism globalizes and unites various countries in new trade treaties such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) which subsumes 34 countries of North and South America into a "free-trade" zone, activists are uniting into alliances not only within their own countries, but also creating new global blocs of resistance across national boundaries. Other hopeful recent signs of alliance include the Harvard Living Wage Campaign-created by students in solidarity with janitors, dining service, and other underpaid workers at the university-and the student anti-sweatshop movement. One of the most moving demonstrations of solidarity I have witnessed occurred at the 1996 national animal rights conference in Washington, D.C., where gay activists from ACT-UP denounced animal experimentation, rejected any medical advance for AIDS that was dependent upon causing pain to other beings, and embraced interspecies solidarity. The challenge will be not only to come together on occasion for dramatic protests against global capitalism, but to sustain alliances in a multifaceted attack on injustice. For this to work, progressive social movements will have to include animal rights and veganism within their agendas and, indeed, their lives-just as animal rights activists need to extirpate elitism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice from their community. Activists will need to forge a shared vision and set of values beyond protest and critique, knowing both what they want "freedom from" and "freedom to," the kind of society they can no longer tolerate and the nature of community they want to build. To change the conditions for animals, we have to change the social institutions, and that demands alliances with other progressive groups. The animal welfare/rights movement is showing increasing strength and sophistication in its ability to pass city, state, and national legislation for animal protection, but it remains a single issue movement devoid of roots in communities of workers, women, people of color, and church groups (who for better or worse are a key part of the grass roots). But as they hopefully mature as a social movement, animal advocates are a powerful reminder that "social justice" is a limited political concept and that no species is free until all species are free. The slogan of the future must not be "We are all one race, the human race," but rather, "We are one community, the community of living subjects."


A2: Alternative Solves The Case

They don’t solve our aff because the Left is infected by a self-alienating anthropocentrism, inevitably devolving into a new Stalinism.

Steven Best, Chair Philosophy at UT-EP 2006 [The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, vol.2, no.3, (June 2006)] Animal liberation requires that the Left transcend the comfortable boundaries of humanism in order to make a qualitative leap in ethical consideration, thereby moving the moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity. Just as the Left once had to confront ecology, and emerged a far superior theory and politics, so it now has to engage animal rights. As the confrontation with ecology infinitely deepened and enriched Leftist theory and politics, so should the encounter with animal rights and liberation. Speciesism is the belief that nonhuman species exist to serve the needs of the human species, that animals are in various senses inferior to human beings, and therefore that one can favor human over nonhuman interests according to species status alone.7 Like racism or sexism, speciesism creates a false dualistic division between one group and another in order to arrange the differences hierarchically and justify the domination of the “superior” over the “inferior.” Just as society has discerned that it is prejudiced, illogical, and unacceptable for whites to devalue people of color and for men to diminish women, so it is beginning to learn how utterly arbitrary and irrational it is for human animals to position themselves over nonhuman animals because of species differences. Among animals who are all sentient subjects of a life, these differences —humanity’s false and arrogant claim to be the sole bearer of reason and language— are no more ethically relevant than differences of gender or skin color, yet in the unevolved psychology of the human primate they have decisive bearing. The theory —speciesism— informs the practice —unspeakably cruel forms of domination, violence, and killing. The prejudice and discriminatory attitude of speciesism is as much a part of the Left as the general population and its most regressive elements, calling into question the “radical,” “oppositional,” or “progressive” nature of Left positions and politics. While condemning violence and professing rights for all, the Left fails to take into account the weighty needs and interests of billions of oppressed animals. Although priding themselves on holistic and systemic critiques of global capitalism, Leftists fail to grasp the profound interconnections among human, animal, and earth liberation struggles and the need to conceived and fight for all as one struggle against domination, exploitation, and hierarchy. From the perspective of ecology and animal rights, Marxists and other social “radicals” have been extremely reactionary forces. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels lumped animal welfarists into the same petite-bourgeoisie or reactionary category with charity organizers, temperance fanatics, and naïve reformists, failing to see that the animal welfare movement in the US, for instance, was a key politicizing cause for women whose struggle to reduce cruelty to animals was inseparable from their struggle against male violence and the exploitation of children.[10] In works such as his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Karl Marx advanced a naturalistic theory of human life, but like the dominant Western tradition he posited a sharp dualism between human and nonhuman animals, arguing that only human beings have consciousness and a complex social world. Denying to animals the emotional, social, and psychological complexity of their actual lives, Marx argued that whereas animals have an immediate and merely instinctual relation to productive activity the earth, human labor is mediated by free will and intelligence. If Marxism and other Left traditions have proudly grounded their theories in science, social radicals need to realize that science – specifically, the discipline of “cognitive ethology” which studies the complexity of animal emotions, thought, and communications – has completely eclipsed their fallacious, regressive, speciesist concepts of nonhuman animals as devoid of complex forms of consciousness and social life.[11] While there is lively debate over whether or not Marx had an environmental consciousness, there is no question he was a speciesist and the product of an obsolete anthropocentric/dominionist paradigm that continues to mar progressive social theory and politics. The spectacle of Left speciesism is evident in the lack of articles – often due to a blatant refusal to consider animal rights issues ―on animal exploitation in progressive journals, magazines, and online sites. In one case, for example, The Nation wrote a scathing essay that condemned the treatment of workers at a factory farm, but amazingly said nothing about the exploitation of thousands of chickens imprisoned in the hell of battery cages. In bold contrast, Gale Eisnitz’s powerful work, Slaughterhouse, documents the exploitation of animals and humans alike on the killing floors of slaughterhouses, as she


shows the dehumanization of humans in and through routinized violence to animals.[12] As symptomatic of the prejudice, ignorance, provincialism, and non-holistic theorizing that is rife through the Left, consider the case of Michael Albert, a noted Marxist theorist and co-founder of Z Magazine and Z Net. In a recent interview with the animal rights and environmental magazine Satya, Albert confessed: “When I talk about social movements to make the world better, animal rights does not come into my mind. I honestly don’t see animal rights in anything like the way I see women’s movements, Latino movements, youth movements, and so on … a large-scale discussion of animal rights and ensuing action is probably more than needed … but it just honestly doesn’t strike me as being remotely as urgent as preventing war in Iraq or winning a 30-hour work week.” While I do not expect a human supremacist like Albert to see animal and human suffering as even roughly comparable, I cannot fathom privileging a work reduction for humans who live relatively comfortable lives to ameliorating the obscene suffering of tens of billion of animals who are confined, tortured, and killed each year in the most unspeakable ways. But human and animal rights and liberation causes are not a zero-sum game, such that gains for animals require losses for humans. Like most within the Left, Albert lacks the holistic vision to grasp the profound connections between animal abuse and human suffering. The problem with such myopic Leftism stems not only from Karl Marx himself, but the traditions that spawned him – modern humanism, mechanistic science, industrialism, and the Enlightenment. To be sure, the move from a God-centered to a human-centered world, from the crusades of a bloodthirsty Christianity to the critical thinking and autonomy ethos of the Enlightenment, were massive historical gains, and animal rights builds on them. But modern social theory and science perpetuated one of worst aspects of Christianity (in the standard interpretation that understands dominion as domination), namely the view that animals are mere resources for human use. Indeed, the situation for animals worsened considerably under the impact of modern sciences and technologies that spawned vivisection, genetic engineering, cloning, factory farms, and slaughterhouses. Darwinism was an important influence on Marx and subsequent radical thought, but no one retained Darwin’s emphasis on the intelligence of animal life, the evolutionary continuity from nonhuman to human life, and the basic equality among all species. Social ecologists and “eco-humanists” such as Murray Bookchin condemn the industrialization of animal abuse and killing but never challenge the alleged right to use animals for human purposes. Oblivious to scientific studies that document reason, language, culture, and technology among various animal species, Bookchin rehearses the Cartesian-Marxist mechanistic view of animals as dumb creatures devoid of reason and language. Animals therefore belong to “first nature,” rather than the effervescently creative “second nature” world of human culture. Like the Left in general, social ecologists fail to theorize the impact of animal exploitation on the environment and human society and psychology. They ultimately espouse the same welfarist views that permit and sanctify some of the most unspeakable forms of violence against animals within current capitalist social relations, speaking in the same language of “humane treatment” of animal slaves used by vivisectors, managers of factory farms and slaughterhouses operators, fur farmers, and bosses of rodeos and circuses. The Left traditionally has been behind the curve in its ability to understand and address forms of oppression not directly related to economics. It took decades for the Left to recognize racism, sexism, nationalism, religion, culture and everyday life, ideology and media, ecology, and other issues into its anti-capitalist framework, and did so only under the pressure of various liberation movements. The tendency of the Marxist Left, in particular, has been to relegate issues such as gender, race, and culture to “questions” to be addressed, if at all, only after the goals of the class struggle are achieved. Such exclusionist and reductionist politics prompted Rosa Luxemburg, for one, to defend the importance of culture and everyday life by exclaiming, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution!” Neo-Marxists, such as Frankfurt School theorists, grasped the importance of politics, culture, and ideology as important issues related but not reducible to economics and class, and after the 1960s Leftists finally understood ecology as more than a “bourgeois issue” or “diversion” from social struggles. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno developed important insights into the relationship between the domination of humans over nature and over one another, and sometimes sympathetically evoked images of animals in captivity as important symbols of human arrogance and alienation from nature. Most notably, Herbert Marcuse emphasized the importance of a “new sensibility” grounded in non-exploitative attitudes and relations toward the natural world. Although since the 1970s the Left has begun to seriously address the “nature question,” they have universally failed to grasp that the “animal question” that lies at the core of social and ecological issues.[13] To make the point about the interrelationships here in a simple but crucial way, consider that no society can achieve ecological sustainability if its dominant mode of food production is factory farming. The industrialized system of confining and fattening animals for human food consumption, pioneered in the US after World War II and exported globally, is a main cause of water pollution (due to fertilizers, chemicals, and massive amounts of animal waste) and a key contributor to rainforest destruction, desertification, global warming, in addition to being a highly inefficient use of water, land, and crops.[14] Critiques of human arrogance over and alienation from nature, calls for a “re-harmonization” of society with ecology, and emphases on a “new ethics” that focus solely on the physical world apart from the millions of animal species it contains are speciesist, myopic, and inadequate. It’s as if everyone can get on board with respecting rivers and mountains but still want to eat, experiment on, wear, and be entertained by animals. Left ecological concerns stem not from any kind of deep respect for the natural world, but rather from a position of “enlightened anthropocentrism” (a clear oxymoron) that understands how important a sustainable environment is for human existence. It is a more difficult matter to understand the crucial role animals play in sustaining ecosystems and how animal exploitation often has dramatic environmental consequences, let alone more complex issues such as relationships between violence toward animals and violence to other human beings. Moreover, it is far easier to “respect nature” through recycling, planting


trees, or driving hybrid cars than it is to respect animals by becoming a vegan who stops eating and wearing animal bodies and products. Much more so than a shift in how one views the inorganic world, it is far more difficult, complex, and profound ―for both philosophical and practical reason― to revolutionize one’s views toward animals and adopt ethical veganism. In short, the modern “radical” tradition ―whether, Marxist, socialist, anarchist, or other “Left” positions that include anti-racism and feminism― stands in continuity with the entire Western heritage of anthropocentrism, and in no way can be seen as a liberating philosophy from the standpoint of the environment and other species on this planet. Current Left thought is merely Stalinism toward animals. A truly revolutionary social theory and movement will not just emancipate members of one species, but rather all species and the earth itself. A future revolutionary movement worthy of its name will grasp the ancient conceptual roots of hierarchy and domination, such as emerge in the animal husbandry practices of the first agricultural societies, and incorporate a new ethics of nature – environmental ethics and animal rights – that overcomes instrumentalism and hierarchical thinking in every pernicious form.[15]


A2: Alt Solves The Case They don’t solve our aff—Animal rights can’t be subordinated to other causes

Steven Best, Chair of Philosophy at UT-EP, 2007 [JCAS 5.2] Lest one get the false impression that Phelps dismisses all causes but animal rights, he adds this qualification: “I am not for a moment suggesting that animal advocates should not also be outspoken feminists, socialists, anarchists, or advocates for whatever other causes they believe in. I am only saying that the animal rights movement as a movement needs to maintain its independence and keep its focus on the animals.” Phelps does make a sound point – as I myself have often underscored --- that radical Left traditions are replete with dogmatic humanists and speciesists who are blind to the moral, social, and environmental importance of animal rights and vegetarianism. With their oppressors’ mentality, stunted moral philosophy, and fragmented political vision, Left humanists cannot grasp the fact that animal liberation and human liberation are interdependent. Thus, there is in fact a problem with tying the rope of animal liberation to the wagon of human liberation; in most cases Leftists, humanists, and “social revolutionaries” are themselves animal oppressors who do not want to abandon their “privileges” and who want to marginalize animal issues to the last priority of far “more important” goals such as reducing the work week, ending the US Invasion of Iraq, and advancing human rights and human equality.In cases where animal liberationists join in alliance politics and coalitions against war, militarism, imperialism, global warming, and other important causes, the voice of the animals must never be drowned out by prevailing human interests that seek to emancipate humans first, with the promise to bring along animals later (no doubt with the aid of a welfarist ethic). Animal and human liberation projects work together, or not at all. Phelps’s single-issue politics transforms the relative autonomy of animal issues into a radical autonomy that separates animal liberation from its larger social, political, and economic context. Phelps’ atomistic, single-issue, two-party, liberal vision thwarts any effort to forge alliance movements against issues such as war, rainforest destruction, poverty, and world hunger that affect humans and animals alike. Like Francione, Hall, and other “abolitionists,” Phelps uncritically accepts capitalism as the political-economic structure that can carry us indefinitely into an ever-brighter and more prosperous future, one where animals – the primary slaves of the present day crucial to the operations of global capitalism – will ultimately be free, if not completely then at least from severe forms of cruelty and suffering.


A2: Policymaking/Using The State Bad

Changes in ethics are not enough—we must transform the state to create viable alternatives to the dominant anthropocentric order.

Prue Taylor, Senior Lecturer of law and a founding member of the New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law at the University of Auckland,1998 [An Ecological Approach to International Law: Responding to the Challenges of Climate Change (Hardcover) p. 39-42, 45-48] As Miller states, a new environmental ethic is a paradigm shift in moral philosophy because it is a value theory which 'can move us beyond our traditional views of human and patriarchal dominance of the natural order .- A new ecological moral philosophy would encourage us to change and develop (i.e., shift) our consciousness to one which recognises that we are an integral part of nature. Once we recognise this ecological reality, we would be encouraged to place important limitations upon our actions, limitations which go beyond protection of human interests to include the interests of other species. Thus our standards of 'how clean is clean?, which currently focus predominantly on human welfare concerns, would be redefined to ensure ecosystem protection. We would also be encouraged to redefine our decision-making processes from those which focus on short-term, atomistic strategies to those which focus on long-term, holistic ones, and to work hard at evaluating and resolving conflicts between human and non-human environmental interests. Thus stated the development of a new ethic seems to offer hope for a better future. However, these expectations must be immediately qualified by recognising that a new ethic (morality) is only one part of an overall survival strategy. We must address, in concert, our existing concepts of economic growth and wealth, existing political structures and concepts of democracy, the 'state' and 'world order', consciousness and spirituality, and the prevailing 'scientific' belief system. All these aspects of human society play their part in the creation and continuance of the ecological crisis.24 Many people are currently performing the task of redefining these concepts from the perspective of ecology and ecocentrism. This book shall limit its task to redefining international environmental law. Turning now from the above discussion, which looked at the ethical debate in general terms, we need to ask the following questions: What does the ethical debate mean in the context of international environmental law:' How is it relevant? Law is undoubtedly reflective of prevailing social attitudes and conven-tional thinking and values. As Bosselmann states: The analysis of environmental politics and environmental law is especially suited to verify the failure of conventional ways of thinking. Nowhere else are the socially cohesive standards and values so clearly expressed as they are in the environmental programmes and laws of states. The anthropocentric ethic can, and will in following chapters, be clearly identified in international environmental law. International environmental law will be seen to reflect and affirm this ethic. This can most dearly be demonstrated by an analysis of the concept of territorial sovereignty, which is a conceptual cornerstone of international law, from which international environmental law has emerged. It will also be demonstrated in following chapters that the consequences of this are very serious indeed. In essence, the environment is not being adequately protected. Large holes exist in the fabric of the law, through which environmental degradation is perpetrated. One might call them 'windows of continued opportunity'. In more theoretical terms, it can be said that in affirming the anthropocentric ethic the law is perpetuating the deepest cause of the environmental crisis! Its current responses to environmental problems do no more than suppress symptoms. Can we continue to muddle through the environmental crisis with legal tools which are clearly deficient and defective? The answer must be a resounding no! We must face the need for a new conceptual foundation for international environmental law - one which goes beyond anthropocentrism. Capra, in his book The Turning Point, in which he discussed the shift from the traditional technocratic, mechanistic paradigm to a holistic, ecological paradigm, said:" The universe is no longer seen as a machine, made up of a multitude of objects, but must be seen as one indivisible dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can he understood only as patterns of a cosmic process Finally, the former United Nations Secretary General Javiez Perez de Cuellar, recognises the imperative of a turning point in humanity's relationship with nature:250 As we approach the 1990s it is clear that a turning point has been reached. For the first time it is generally recognised that we must enter into a new relationship with our planet - a kind of environmental compact whereby we, who get our life sustenance from our planet, will agree to work together to protect it. Some commentators go so far as to suggest that the paradigm shift, from the anthropocentric paradigm to a new ecocentric paradigm, is now clearly under way and evident in many European societies. Bosselmann's book im Namen der Natur: Dei' Wig vim ok&ogischen Recbtsstaat (In the Name of Nature: The Concept of lko-Law), attempts to demonstrate that a far reaching change of consciousness is now occurring on both an individual and social level. In his opinion sufficient evidence exists of: ' "Environmental protection" in its anthropocentric sense [being] replaced by a holistic concept of ecocentrism.'251 Bosselmann finds this evidence in a variety of areas including: political theory, law, science (quantum physics, evolutionary theory, ecology, new biology etc.) spiritual and theological movements, economics and medicine He is by no means alone in this wide ranging - '5' search for evidence of a paradigm shift.- - The above discussion suggests that a new principle of law, encompassing an ecocentric ethic, does not amount to the creation and imposition of new ethic from out of the ether. On the contrary, it is a reflection of an emerging consciousness. 253 This is critical, after all: 'Iwle can not choose a new ethic as we would a new article of clothing. It is the result of changed attitudes. If ''54 the attitudes do nor exist, nor does the new ethic, - The third general point about the above proposal emerges from the question: how can a new principle of international environmental law, which encapsulates a new ethic, actually contribute to the adoption of such an ethic? Can it perform the most important task of all - can it bring about a change in the attitudes and behaviour of humanity?25' The answer is probably no. If it is accepted that ethics are moral systems then it seems probable that new moral systems can not be imposed, they must be allowed and encouraged to evolve. A legal principle can facilitate this process of evolution of humanity's attitudes and behaviour. It can stimulate movement toward new attitudes and behaviour by


provoking humanity to perceive the problems differently. It can be educational by promoting awareness of the unity of the biosphere and the impact of human activity.256 As a consequence it may cause humanity to reassess its understanding of the world and thus the; propriety -57 or justification of human behaviour in relation to the environment'," but it cannot, alone, revolutionise environmental ethics. In short, it can help in the development of a new ecological consciousness. In attempting to define that new consciousness, I share the concerns of so-called deep ecology as summarised by Fox:25 Justice does not require equality. It does require that we share one another's fate. The lesson of ecology is that we do share one another's fate in the shallow sense that we all share the fate of the earth. The message of deep ecology is that we ought to care as deeply and as compassionately as possible about that fate - nor because it affects us but because it is as, Christopher Stone is optimistic about the prospect of a new environmental ethic - Nor should it be supposed that to define and proselytize an international environmental ethic is too idealistic. It is true that the task of sensitizing humankind to the environment is hard, particularly in a world pressed with ever more urgent demands for natural resources. But in some ways an international environmental ethic faces relatively less opposition than an international ethic on human rights. The proponents of international norms on human rights and genocide collide with long-standing doctrines about sovereignty and associated notions of what constitutes purely internal affairs. By contrast, there is no matter more fit for international accord than protection of the environment, particularly of global attributes or components - such as weather patterns, ocean and atmosphere -that play so clear a role in the indivisible fate of all nations and of all humankind.


A2: Biopower

Turn: we challnege the human/animal divide at the root of biopoltiics. WADIWEL, 2 (Joseph W., doctorate candidate @ Univ. of Western Sydney, “Cows and Sovereignty”, Borderlands, 1:2) 2. But how does the question of life itself relate to the life of the (non-human) animal? The scene described in the fragment above could count as a spectacle of modern biopolitics. Certainly, if the quarantined cows were substituted for humans, then it would be possible to detect with more clarity the ‘politics’ of this situation, and recognise the relation of life (and death) to these politics. That cows, and other non-human animals, are not clearly eligible for consideration within a discussion of biopolitics, is not due to any essential poverty in the potential scope of Foucault’s term. Rather, the deficiency relates to the tradition of politics itself, at least in the West, which has, by and large, exempted the non-human animal from agency as a political being. This tradition may be traced concretely to Aristotle, and his pronouncement that ‘man’ distinguishes ‘himself’ from other animals through the perfection of ‘his’ status as a ‘political animal’(1952: 446). Thus for Aristotle, ‘Man’ is not a transcendent being who is unrelated to the animal life; rather, ‘man’ is defined as an animal with a surplus ability over and above other animal life. Upon this reckoning, the gap between non-human and human animals is the ability to vocalise principles related to expediency (or rationality) and justice — a gap which, for all intents, defines the meaning of politics itself, at least in so far as it is perfected by ‘man.’ For even if there were to be a non-human animal who, through a vocalisation, could make itself understood, that being would still lack the ability to comprehend justice, which for Aristotle characterises ‘man’ as the political animal par excellence (1952: 446). This assertion, that there is something essential that separates humans from the rest of the animals, is hardly limited to Aristotle, and has remained in various forms within Western philosophy; whether in the belief that ‘man’ possesses an ‘immortal’ soul which animals lack; or that ‘man’ possesses a sort of exemplary consciousness which other living matter has no access to. 3. If it were possible to close our eyes to the gap that we believe separates ourselves from other animals, then the meaning of politics itself changes radically. In the modern context, bio-politics is not only the operation of a range of instruments which direct the attention of power towards questions of human life, but towards all life, in the broadest possible sense. This is evident when one considers the role of the modern sovereign, which not only manages the life of its human subjects, but turns its attention to the management of all animal and plant life within its domain.


A2: Psychoanalysis They are a doomed political project. Their framework criticizes emancipation as a fantasy to be kritiked rather than a struggle to be forged, proving the defeatism of their cynical methodology.

Paul Gordon 01 [ Race & Class v. 42 n. 4] Cohen is in many ways representative of those `radicals' who, in response to the setback of the radical political project of the 1960s and 1970s, abandoned not just the Marxist framework within which they had worked, but anything which they saw as in any way connected to the idea of the Enlightenment. It is here, goes the thinking, that the roots of so much that is wrong with radical politics are to be found, for it is with the Enlightenment that men (yes, men) begin to think that they, rather than God or fate, may be able to make history. But for the postmodernists, this is not only hubris, it is a hubris that leads inexorably to the nightmares of the twentieth century, in particular the Holocaust and the Gulag. Cohen adds to this the claim that the very notion of ènlightenment' (his inverted commas) is deeply implicated in a practice of reason which is historically rooted in certain dominant forms of European race thinking. Reason, he appears to be saying, is racist.57 The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with disappointment. All the tragedies of the political project of emancipation ± the evils of Stalinism in particular ± are seen as the inevitable product of men and women trying to create a better society. But, rather than engage in a critical assessment of how, for instance, radical political movements go wrong, they discard the emancipatory project and impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed them: `the intellectuals and academics have fled into discourse and deconstruction and representation ± as though to interpret the world is more important than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing world'.58 To justify their flight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change through self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals find abundant intellectual alibis for themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true also of psychoanalysis; that it offers à world-historical alibi' for the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has nothing but contempt for those naive enough to imagine that it might be possible for modern humankind to be free. At every turn for such theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are nothing but prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . . There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax.59 Cohen's political defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or collective action. For him, `communities' are always ìmagined', which, in his view, means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In this scenario, the idea that people might come together, think together, analyse together and act together as rational beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that never existed in the ®rst place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently solidarity out of the thin air of modern times, a mechanism of re-enchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.' 61 Now, this is not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense at that. Is history àlways false'? Did the Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always ìmagined'? Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle?


A2: Must Break Down The Subject

Breaking down the subject destroys the political struggle against non-human animals subjugation.

Steve Baker no date given [http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa4.1/baker.html] Birke names postmodernism as one of the strands of feminist criticism of science by which she has been influenced, and she summarizes it thus: "Here, an important concern is to question any universalizing claim (or `master narrative' such as positivist science), and to deconstruct boundaries (such as subject/object...)" (p. 144). She cites Haraway's recent work as an important example here. Birke, however, has "reservations about wholeheartedly taking postmodernism on board." Two of these reservations seem especially pertinent. The first is a concern that postmodernism's preoccupation with texts, discourses, and an apparently endless chain of representations and simulacra risks losing sight of the realities of human cruelty and animal pain. The second is a concern that postmodernism's celebration of the "death of the subject" in fact celebrates the death of a privileged white male human subjectivity, and in doing so often complacently overlooks the fact that both animals and women have, Birke argues, traditionally "been denied subjectivity" (p. 146). These objections are not to be dismissed lightly. Contemporary theoretical perspectives, postmodern or otherwise, will be of no use to animal advocates unless they can be framed in a way which acknowledges the lived experience of both animals and humans, and which refuses to set artificial boundaries as to who will count as the subject of one of the "different selves" envisaged by Adams.


A2: Ethics Bad

Ethical demands are key to fighting humanist domination—their kritik is just a bunch of high theory trying to hide the fact that is no strategy for liberation

Peter Singer 2007 http://animalrightskorea.org/essays/peter-singer-ethics-and-animals.html Some people are skeptical about the impact of moral argument on real life. They believe that moral argument is really a rationalization of what we wish to do, and rarely or never does it change anyone’s mind. The animal movement offers a counterexample to this view. As James Jasper and Dorothy Nelkin observed in The Animal Rights Crusade: The Growth of a Moral Protest, “Philosophers served as midwives of the animal rights movement in the late 1970s.” This movement has led to significant reforms in the ways in which experiments are performed on animals, and, especially in the European Union, to laws phasing out some of the worst forms of factory farming, including keeping veal calves and sows in crates so small that they cannot walk or even turn around, and keeping hens in very small wire cages without any kind of nesting box to lay their eggs in, or enough room to perform basic instintual behaviors. These reforms in the European Union will affect hundreds of millions of animals, and transform large industries – all because of an ethical concern for the welfare of animals. Now it seems that the United States is beginning to follow Europe’s example. Following referenda in Florida and Arizona that have banned some of the cruelest factory farm practices, the largest pig producer in the world, Smithfield, has announced that it will voluntarily phase out keeping its sows in individual crates. Canada’s largest pig producer, Maple Leaf, has now said it will do the same. Now big veal producers in the United States have also announced that they will be phasing out the cruel individual stalls they have been using for veal calves. So here is an area of everyday life in which philosophy has played a truly critical role in society, not only at the level of ideas, but in instigating significant changes in society. It is noteworthy that this modern philosophical challenge to the way we think about nonhuman animals came from writers in what is sometimes called the “analytic” tradition, that is, the tradition of English-language philosophy. Thinkers in the continental European tradition, the tradition of Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, and Deleuze, played no role at all. Despite the much-vaunted “critical stance” that these thinkers are said to take to prevailing assumptions and social institutions, this extensive body of thought has largely failed to grapple with the issue of how we treat animals. Why should this have been so? Of course, it is possible to ask the same question of philosophy in the analytic tradition before the 1970s, and some of the possible answers are common to all philosophical traditions. Just as it was convenient for the slave-traders and slave-owners to believe that they were justified in treating people of African descent as property, so too it is convenient for humans to believe that they are justified in treating animals as things that can be owned, and to deny that they have interests that give rise to moral claims upon us. But there are other, more specific factors involved in the failure of the continental tradition to challenge orthodoxy regarding animals, even when philosophers outside that tradition were actively engaged in debating the issue. One reason may be that the British tradition of Hume, Bentham and Mill already had reached the conclusion that the capacity for experiencing pain and pleasure is what is crucial to moral status. In contrast, the continental tradition, focused more on Kant, made the ability to reason, and with it the capacity for autonomy, the crucial requirement. Still, it is astonishing that so few of Kant’s followers noticed that this gave rise to a problem about the status of human infants and humans with profound intellectual disabilities. Clearly, if the ability to reason or to act autonomously, is what makes human beings “ends in themselves” rather than just the means to the ends of others, then obviously some human beings are just means to the ends of others, not ends in themselves. The real lesson to be learned from the failure of continental European philosophy to grapple with the issue of the moral status of animals, is that to adopt a “critical stance” requires us to be critical about vague rhetorical formulations that appear profound or uplifting, but do more to camouflage weaknesses in reasoning than to hold them up for critical scrutiny. Philosophy should be less respectful of the authority of the “great” philosophers of the past, and more ready to punch a whole in inflated rhetoric that lacks clear argument – even if doing so makes us as unpopular as Socrates became when he did the same thing in ancient Athens. My original New York Review essay, from which I quoted at the beginning of this lecture, ended with a paragraph that saw the challenge of the animal movement as a test of human nature: Can a purely moral demand of this kind succeed? The odds are certainly against it. The book holds out no inducements. It does not tell us that we will become healthier, or enjoy life more, if we cease exploiting animals. Animal Liberation will require greater altruism on the part of mankind than any other liberation movement, since animals are incapable of demanding it for themselves, or of protesting against their exploitation by votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Is man capable of such genuine altruism? Who knows? If this book does have a significant effect, however, it will be a vindication of all those who have believed that man has within himself the potential for more than cruelty and selfishness.


A2: Ethics Bad

Ethics does NOT degenerate into domination. Ethical action is based upon power biological imperatives for empathy that can break down elite domination and speciesism.

Gary Olson, Chair, Department of Political Science, Moravian College, 2007 [http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15381] The nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world's most eminent scientists, "What Are You Optimistic About? Why?" In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, cites the proliferating experimental work into the neural mechanisms that reveal how humans are "wired for empathy." Iacoboni's optimism is grounded in his belief that as these recent findings in experimental cognitive science seep into public awareness, ". . . this explicit level of understanding our empathic nature will at some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and that threaten to destroy us." (Iacoboni, 2007) Only five years earlier, Preston and de Waal predicted that science is on the verge of "an ultimate level description that addresses the evolution and function of empathy." (Preston, 2002) While there are reasons to remain circumspect (see below) about the progressive political implications flowing from this work, a body of impressive empirical evidence reveals that the roots of prosocial behavior, including moral sentiments like empathy, precede the evolution of culture. This work sustains Noam Chomsky's visionary assertion that while the principles of our moral nature have been poorly understood, "we can hardly doubt their existence or their central role in our intellectual and moral lives." (Chomsky, 1971, 1988; 2005) The emerging field of the neuroscience of empathy parallels investigations being undertaken in cognate fields. Some forty years ago the celebrated primatologist, Jane Goodall, observed and wrote about chimpanzee emotions, social relationships, and "chimp culture" but experts remained highly skeptical. Even a decade ago, scientific consensus on this matter was elusive, but all that's changed. According to famed primate scientist Frans B.M. de Waal "You don't hear any debate now." In his more recent work, de Waal plausibly argues that human morality—including our capacity to empathize—is a natural outgrowth or inheritance of behavior from our closest evolutionary relatives. It's now indisputable that we share moral faculties with other species. (de Waal, 2006; Kropotkin, 1902; Trivers, 1971; Katz, 2000; Gintis, 2005; Hauser, 2006) Following Darwin, highly sophisticated studies by biologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson posit that large-scale cooperation within the human species—including with genetically unrelated individuals within a group—was favored by selection. (Hauser, 2006, p. 416) There were evolutionary (survival) benefits in coming to grips with others. If morality is rooted in biology, in the raw material or building blocks for the evolution of its expression, we now have a pending fortuitous marriage of hard science and secular morality in the most profound sense. The details of the social neuroscientific analysis supporting these assertions lie outside this paper but suffice it to note that it's persuasive, proliferating, and exciting. (Jackson, 2004 and 2006; Lamm, 2007) That said, one of the most vexing problems that remains to be explained is why so little progress has been made in extending this orientation to those outside certain in-group moral circles. That is, given a world rife with overt and structural violence, one is forced to explain why our moral intuition doesn't produce a more ameliorating effect, a more peaceful world. Iacoboni suggests this disjuncture is explained by massive belief systems, including political and religious ones, operating on the reflective and deliberate level. These tend to override the automatic, pre-reflective, neurobiological traits that should bring people together. Thus a few cautionary notes are warranted here. The first, then, is that social context and triggering conditions are everything because where there is conscious and massive elite manipulation, it becomes exceedingly difficult to get in touch with our moral faculties. As Albert cautions, circumstances may preclude and overwhelm our perceptions, rendering us incapable of recognizing and giving expression to moral sentiments (Albert, n.d.; and also, Pinker, 2002). For example, the fear-mongering of artificially created scarcity may attenuate the empathic response. The second is Hauser's (2006) observation that proximity was undoubtedly a factor in the expression of empathy. In our evolutionary past "there were no opportunities for altruism at a distance" and therefore the emotional intensity was/is lacking. This can't be discounted but, given some of the positive dimensions of globalization, the potential for identifying with the "stranger" has never been more robust. For examples of help extended to strangers that wasn't available in our evolutionary past, including blood donations, Holocaust rescuers, adoption, and filing honest tax returns, see Barber (2004). Finally, as Preston (2006-2007; and also, in press) suggests, risk and stress tend to suppress empathy whereas familiarity and similarity encourage the experience of natural, reflexive empathy. This formidable but not insurmountable challenge warrants further research into how this "out-group" identity is created, reinforced, and its influence diluted. The concept of empathy was first discussed by the German psychologist Theodore Lipps in the 1880s. He introduced the term "einfuhlung" (in-feeling) as a way of describing one person's affective response to another person's experience. Empathy is not synonymous with compassion, shared suffering or sympathy with another's pain. Limited to the former, one would be paralyzed by "over-identification" and the inability to distinguish oneself from the other's distress. At a minimum, it requires being able to grasp another's feeling state, to put oneself in the place of another. This necessitates making a distinction between self and others by employing the cognitive capacity for detachment in order to act on that perception. (Hardee,


2003) We know from neuroscientific empathy experiments that the same affective brain circuits are automatically mobilized upon feeling one's own pain and the pain of others. Through brain imaging, we also know that separate neural processing regions then free up the capacity to take action. As Decety notes, empathy then allows us to "forge connections with people whose lives seem utterly alien from us." (Decety, 2007) Where comparable experience is lacking, this "cognitive empathy" builds on the neural basis and allows one to "actively projects oneself into the shoes of another person," by trying to imagine the other person's situation. (Preston, in press) Empathy is "other directed" and recognizes the other's humanity. But, again, why the disjuncture? What can we expect from this potentially transforming synthesis? Hauser, as I read his exposition of a "universal moral grammar," posits a more neutral or benign process at work. Given a moral grammar hard wired into our neural circuit via evolution, this neural machinery precedes conscious decisions in life-and-death situations. However, we observe "nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems." At other points he suggests that environmental factors can push individuals toward defective moral reasoning, and the various outcomes for a given local culture are virtually limitless. (Hauser, 2006) For me, this discussion of cultural variation fails to give sufficient attention to the socioeconomic variables responsible for shaping the culture. Cohen and Rogers, in parsing Chomsky's critique of elites, note that "Once an unjust order exists, those benefiting from it have both an interest in maintaining it and, by virtue of their social advantages, the power to do so." (For a concise but not uncritical treatment of Chomsky's social and ethical views, see Cohen, 1991.) Clearly, the vaunted human capacity for verbal communication cuts both ways. In the wrong hands, this capacity is often abused by consciously quelling the empathic response. When de Waal writes, "Animals are no moral philosophers," I'm left to wonder if he isn't favoring the former in this comparison. (de Waal, 2000) One of the methods employed within capitalist democracies is Chomsky and Herman's "manufacture of consent," a form of highly sophisticated thought control. Potentially active citizens must be "distracted from their real interests and deliberately confused about the way the world works." (Cohen, 1991; Chomsky, 1988) For this essay and following Chomsky, I'm arguing that the human mind is the primary target of this perverse "nurture" or propaganda, in part because exposure to certain new truths about empathy—hard evidence about our innate moral nature—poses a direct threat to elite interests. That is, given the apparent universality of this biological predisposition toward empathy, we have a potent scientific baseline upon which to launch further critiques of this manipulation. First, the insidiously effective scapegoating of human nature that claims we are motivated bg greedy, dog-eat-dog "individual self-interest is all" is undermined. Stripped of yet another rationalization for empire, predatory behavior on behalf of the capitalist mode of production becomes ever more transparent. Second, for many people, the basic incompatibility between global capitalism and the lived expression of moral sentiments may become obvious for the first time. (Olson, 2006, 2005) For example, the failure to engage this moral sentiment has radical implications, not the least being consequences for the planet. Researchers at McGill University (Mikkelson, 2007) have shown that economic inequality is linked to high rates of biodiversity loss. The authors suggest that economic reforms may be the prerequisite to saving the richness of the ecosystem and urge that ". . . if we can learn to share the economic resources more fairly with fellow members of our own species, it may help to share ecological resources with our fellow species." While one hesitates imputing too much transformative potential to this emotional capacity, there is nothing inconsistent about drawing more attention to inter-species empathy and eco-empathy. The latter may be essential for the protection of biotic communities. Third, learning about the conscious suppression of this essential core of our human nature begs additional troubling questions about the motives behind other elite-generated ideologies, from neo-liberalism and nationalism to xenophobia and the "war on terror." Equally alarming for elites, awareness of this reality contains the potential to encourage "destabilizing" but humanity-affirming cosmopolitan attitudes toward the faceless "other," both here and abroad. In de Waal's apt words, "Empathy can override every rule about how to treat others." Finally, as de Waal admonishes, "If we could manage to see people on other continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle of reciprocity and empathy, we would be building upon rather than going against our nature." (de Waal, 2005) An ethos of empathy is an essential part of what it means to be human. We've been systematically denied a deeper and more fulfilling engagement with this moral sentiment. I would argue that, paradoxically, the relative absence of widespread empathic behavior is in fact a searing tribute to its potentially subversive power.


Topicality Cards

There are hundreds of dogs in Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The United States War Dogs Association 10 [United States War Dog Association website, “Past, Present, Future”, June 18, 2010, p. http://www.uswardogs.org/] It has been estimated that these courageous canine heroes saved over 10,000 lives during the conflict in Vietnam. Today all branches of our Armed Forces are utilizing Military Patrol Dogs specializing in Drug and Bomb/Explosive detection. There are approximately 600-700 of these canines in the Middle East in such places as Kuwait, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. They are being used to patrol Air Bases, Military Compounds, Ammunition Depots and Military Check Points. They are guarding and protecting our Military Personnel as they were trained to do, with Courage, Loyalty and Honor.

There is a dog unit in South Korea.

Wicke 2005 [Staff Sgt. Russell, 51st Fighter Wing Public Affairs, I-News Wire, “Military dogs dig into security”, March 29, 2005, p. http://www.i-newswire.com/military-dogs-dig-into-security/a12457] OSAN AIR BASE, South Korea (AFPN) -- Not all Air Force equipment has engines, wings or even operating instructions. One unit here is responsible for equipment that has a mouth packed with sharp teeth and a hide of fur. "Osan has the largest operational dog kennel in the Air Force," said Tech. Sgt. Jerry Woodard, 51st Security Forces Squadron kennel master. "We have 23 dogs." Sergeant Woodard said by the time the dogs are fully trained and working at Osan, they each are worth $30,000. "Although the Air Force gives them each a stock number and considers them equipment, the dogs are partners to us," he said.

Dog deployments to Middle East are up

Davenport 9 [ Christian, Washington Post Staff Writer, Washington Post, “Recruited to Serve and Sniff -- Again; Ace Bomb and Weapons Detectives, More Military Dogs Being Sent Overseas,” March 29, 2009, p. Lexis] The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't just forcing thousands of soldiers and Marines to deploy for two and three tours. The sacrifice is being shared by a key, and growing, part of the U.S. military: highly trained German shepherds and Belgian Malinois. In a war with no front lines, they have become valuable at sniffing out makeshift bombs, which cause most U.S. casualties. The use of dogs in war, whether as scouts, sentries or trackers, goes back hundreds of years. But since Sept. 11, 2001, the Defense Department has increased the number of military dogs from 1,320 to 2,025, and many have served multiple tours.

animal soldiers affirmative

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