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False Heroism K

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1NC

The aff is a façade --- a pseudo-sign image of real progressWILLIAMS 2k (Christopher R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, “The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the ‘Gift’ of the Majority,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, August 2000, pgs. 321-343)The impediments to establishing democratic justice in contemporary American society have caused a national paralysis; one that has recklessly spawned an aporetic1 existence for minorities. The entrenched ideological complexities afflicting under- and nonrepresented groups (e.g., poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, crime) at the hands of political, legal, cultural, and economic power elites have produced counterfeit , perhaps even fraudulent, efforts at reform: Discrimination and inequality in opportunity prevail (e.g., Lynch & Patterson, 1996). The mi sguided and futile initiatives of the state , in pursuit of transcending this public affairs crisis, have fostered a reification, that is, a reinforcement of divisiveness . This time, however, minority groups compete with one another for recognition, affirmation, and identity in the national collective psyche (Rosenfeld, 1993). What ensues by way of state effort, though, is a contemporaneous sense of equality for all and a near imperceptible endorsement o f inequality; a silent conviction that the majority still retains power. The “gift” of equality , procured through state legislative enactments as an emblem of democratic justice, embodies true (legitimated) power that remains nervously secure in the hands of the majority. The ostensible empowerment of minority groups is a facade ; it is the ruse of the majority gift. What exists , in fact, is a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1981, 1983) of equality (and by extension, democratic justice): a pseudo-sign image (a hypertext or simulation) of real sociopolitical progress.

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This narcissistic reinforcement of power turns the caseWILLIAMS 2k (Christopher R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, “The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the ‘Gift’ of the Majority,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, August 2000, pgs. 321-343)Reciprocation on your part is impossible. Even if one day you are able to return our monetary favor twofold, we will always know that it was us who first hosted you; extended to and entrusted in you an opportunity given your time of need. As the initiators of such a charity , we are always in a position of power, and you are always indebted to us. This is where the notion of egoism or conceit assumes a hegemonic role . By giving to you, a supposed act of generosity in the name of furthering your cause, we have not empowered you. Rather, we have empowered ourselves. We have less than subtlely let you know that we have more than you. We have so much more, in fact, that we can afford to give you some. Our giving becomes, not an act of beneficence, but a show of power, that is, narcissistic hegemony! Thus, we see that the majority gift is a ruse: a simulacrum of movement toward aporetic equality and a simulation of democratic justice. By relying on the legislature (representing the majority) when economic and social opportunities are availed to minority or underrepresented collectives, the process takes on exactly the form of Derrida’s gift. The majority controls the political, economic, legal, and social arenas; that is, it is (and always has been) in control of such communities as the employment sector and the educational system. The mandated opportunities that under- or nonrepresented citizens receive as a result of this falsely eudemonic endeavor are gifts and, thus, ultimately constitute an effort to make minority populations feel better . There is a sense of movement toward equality in the name of democratic justice, albeit falsely manufactured. 18 In return for this effort, the majority shows off its long-standing authority (this provides a stark realization to minority groups that power elites are the forces that critically form society as a community), forever indebts under- and nonrepresented classes to the generosity of the majority (after all, minorities groups now have, presumably, a real chance to attain happiness), and , in a more general sense, furthers the narcissism of the majority (its representatives have displayed power and have been generous). Thus, the ruse of the majority gift assumes the form and has the hegemonical effect of empowering the empowered , relegitimating the privileged, and fueling the voracious conceit of the advantaged.

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Their demand for the ballot is trapped in a web of scheming --- this poisons their call for changeMCGOWAN 2009(Todd McGowan, Associate Professor, film theory, University of Vermont, PhD, Ohio State University, studies the intersection of Hegel, psychoanalysis, and existentialism and cinema, “The Exceptional Darkness of The Dark Knight,” Jump Cut, No. 51, Spring 2009, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/darkKnightKant/text.html)According to Kant, when we emerge as subjects, we do so as beings of radical evil, that is, beings who do good for evil reasons. We help our neighbor for the recognition we gain; we volunteer to help with the school dance in order to spend time with a potential romantic interest; we give money for disaster relief in order to feel comfortable about our level of material comfort; and so on. For Kant, this is the fundamental problem that morality confronts and the most difficult type of evil to extirpate. He explains,“The human being (even the best) is evil only because he reverses the moral order of his incentives in incorporating them into his maxims. He indeed incorporates the moral law into those maxims, together with the law of self-love; since, however, he realizes that the two cannot stand on an equal footing, but one must be subordinated to the other as its supreme condition, he makes the incentives of self-love and their inclinations the condition of compliance with the moral law — whereas it is this latter that, as the supreme condition of the satisfaction of the former, should have been incorporated into the universal maxim of the power of choice as the sole incentive.”[12]Though Kant believes that we have the capacity to turn from beings of radical evil to moral beings, we cannot escape a certain originary radical evil that leads us to place our incentives of self-love above the law and that prevents us from adhering to the law for its own sake.[13]Our first inclination always involves the thought of what we will gain from not lying rather than the importance of telling the truth. Even when we do tell the truth, we do so out of prudence or convenience rather than out of duty. This is why Kant contends that most obedience to the moral law is in fact radical evil — obedience for the wrong reasons. The presence of radical evil at the heart of obedience to the law taints this obedience and gives criminality the upper hand over the law.There is always a fundamental imbalance between law and criminality. Criminality is inscribed into the law itself in the form of misdirected obedience, and no law can free itself from its reliance on the evil of such obedience. A consequentialist ethics develops as a compromise with this radical evil at the heart of the law . Consequentialism is an ethics that sees value only in the end — obedience — and it disregards whatever evil means that the subject uses to arrive at that obedience. If people obey the law, the consequentialist thinks, it doesn’t matter why they do so. Those who take up this or some other compromise with radical evil predominate within society, and they constitute the behavioral norm. They obey the law when necessary, but they do so in order to satisfy some incentive of self-love. Theirs is a morality of calculation in which acts have value in terms of the ultimate good that they produce or the interest that they serve. Anyone who obeys the law for its own sake becomes exceptional.Both Batman and the Joker exist outside the calculating morality that predominates among the police, the law-abiding citizens, and the criminal underworld in Gotham. Both have the status of an exception because they adhere to a code that cuts against their incentives for

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self-love and violates any consequentialist morality or morality concerned solely with results. Though Batman tries to save Gotham and the Joker tries to destroy it, though Batman commits himself to justice and the Joker commits himself to injustice, they share a position that transcends the inadequate and calculated ethics authorized by the law itself. Their differences mask a similar relationship to Kantian morality. Through the parallel between them, Christopher Nolan makes clear the role that evil must play in authentic heroism.It is the Joker, not Batman, who gives the most eloquent account of the ethical position that they occupy together. He sets himself up against the consequentialist and utilitarian ethic that rules Gotham, and he tries to analyze this ethic in order to understand what motivates it. As the Joker sees it, despite their apparent differences, all of the different groups in Gotham indulge in an ethics of what he calls scheming . That is to say, they act not on the basis of the rightness or wrongness of the act itself but in order to achieve some ultimate object. In doing so, they inherently degrade their acts and deprive them of their basis in freedom. Scheming enslaves one to the object of one’s scheme.

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The alternative is to vote negative because the 1AC’s ethics are right --- to be the Dark Knight --- this is the only option for true heroism and substantive changeMCGOWAN 2009 (Todd McGowan, Associate Professor, film theory, University of Vermont, PhD, Ohio State University, studies the intersection of Hegel, psychoanalysis, and existentialism and cinema, “The Exceptional Darkness of The Dark Knight,” Jump Cut, No. 51, Spring 2009,http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/darkKnightKant/text.html)Just as The Dark Knight illustrates the inextricable relation between heroism and evil, it also undermines the idea of the hero who can appear as heroic. From early in the film, Batman proclaims his desire to step aside in order to cede his position to someone who can be heroic without wearing a mask. He sees this possibility in the figure of Harvey Dent. But the film shows that there is no hero without a mask — and, more specifically, without a mask of evil. As Slavoj Žižek puts it,“The properly human good, the good elevated above the natural good, the infinite spiritual good, is ultimately the mask of evil.”[20]Without the mask of evil, good cannot emerge and remains stuck the calculation of interest; without the mask of evil , good remains scheming . This is precisely what Harvey Dent evinces, despite the promise that Batman sees in him for the perfect form of heroism.Throughout the beginning part of the film, Harvey Dent seems like a figure of pure good. The purity of his goodness allows him to never be nonplused. Even when a mobster tries to shoot him in open court, he calmly grabs the gun from the mobster’s hand and punches the mobster in the face. After the punch, we see Dent’s expression of total equanimity, even in the midst of an attempted assassination. This coolness stems from his absolute certainty that events will ultimately follow according to his plans. The rapidity with which Nolan edits together the threat from the mobster and Dent’s response minimizes the spectator’s sense of danger. The threat against Dent’s life disappears almost before we can experience it as such, which suggests that it lacks a quality of realness, both for Dent and for the spectator. The court scene establishes him as a hero whom one cannot harm. Ironically, [but] the superhero in the film, Batman, shows himself to be vulnerable when he first appears in the film, as dogs bite him through his protective armor. This distinction between Dent and Batman’s vulnerability explains why the former cannot be an authentic hero . In contrast to Batman, Dent’s heroism does not involve the experience of loss and is based on a repudiation of the very possibility of losing. Bruce Wayne adopted the identity of Batman after the trauma of being dropped in a cave full of bats and the loss of his parents, but no such traumatic loss animates the heroism of Dent. He is heroic through an immediate identification with the good, which enables him to have a purity that Batman doesn’t have. No rupture and subsequent return animates his commitment to justice. He can publicly avow his heroic actions because he performs them in a pure way, without resorting to the guise of evil . But the falsity of this immediate identification with the good becomes apparent in Dent’s disavowal of loss, which Nolan locates in the tic that marks Dent’s character — his proclivity for flipping a coin to resolve dilemmas.On several occasions, he flips the coin that his father had given him in order to introduce the possibility of loss into his activities. By flipping a coin, one admits that events might not go according to plan, that the other might win, and that loss is an ever-present possibility. Though

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the coin flip represents an attempt to master loss by rendering it random rather than necessary or constitutive, it nonetheless ipso facto accedes to the fact that one might lose. Dent first flips the coin when he is late to examine a key witness in court, and the coin flip will determine whether he or his assistant Rachel will do the questioning. When Rachel wonders how he could leave something so important to chance, Dent replies, “I make my own luck.” It is just after this that the mobster tries and fails to shoot Dent, further suggesting his invulnerability.Dent wins this and subsequent coin flips in the first part of the film because he uses a loaded coin, a coin with two heads. When it comes to the coin flip, Dent does make his own luck by eliminating the element of chance. The coin that he uses ensures that he will avoid the possibility of losing. The coin with two heads is certainly a clever device, but it also stands as the objective correlative for Dent’s lack of authentic heroism. The immediacy of his heroism cannot survive any mediation. Once loss is introduced into Dent’s world, his heroism disappears, and he becomes a figure of criminality.The transformation of Harvey Dent after his disfigurement is so precipitous that it strains credulity. One day he is the pure defender of absolute justice, and the next he is on a homicidal warpath willing to shoot innocent children. One could chalk up this rapid change to sloppy filmmaking on Christopher Nolan’s part, to an eagerness to move too quickly to the film’s concluding moments of tension. But the rapidity of the transformation signifies all the more because it seems so forced and jarring. It allows us to retroactively examine Harvey Dent’s relationship to the law earlier in the film.Dent becomes Two-Face after his injury, but in doing so he merely takes up the identity that police department had adopted for him when he was working for the Internal Affairs division. As an investigator of other officers, Dent earned this nickname by insisting on absolute purity and by targeting any sign of police corruption. Even Gordon, an officer who is not corrupt, complains to Dent of the paralyzing effects on the department of these tactics. On the one hand, an insistence on purity seems to be a consistently noncalculating ethical position. One can imagine this insistence obstructing the longterm goal of better law enforcement (which is why Gordon objects to it). On the other hand, however, the demand for purity always anticipates its own failure. The pure hero quickly becomes the criminal when an experience of loss disrupts this purity.This first occurs when Gordon is apparently killed at the police commissioner’s funeral. In response to this blatant display of public criminality, Dent abuses a suspect from the shooting and even threatens to kill him, using his trick coin as a device for mental torture. Even though Dent has no intention of actually shooting the suspect, Batman nonetheless scolds Dent for his methods when he interrupts the private interrogation. This scene offers the first insight into what Dent will become later in the film, but it also shows the implications of his form of heroism. Dent resorts to torture because his form of heroism has no ontological space for loss. When it occurs, his heroism becomes completely derailed.Rachel's death and his own disfigurement introduce traumatic loss into Dent’s existence. Nolan shows the ramifications of this change through the transformation that his coin undergoes during the explosion that kills Rachel. The explosion chars one side of Dent’s two-headed coin (which he had earlier flipped to Rachel as he was taken away to jail), so that it becomes, through being submitted to a traumatic force, a coin with two different sides. The

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film indicates here how trauma introduces loss into the world and how this introduction of loss removes all subjective certainty . When Dent as Two-Face flips the newly marked coin, the act takes on an entirely new significance. Unlike earlier, he is no longer certain about the result of the flip. He flips to decide whether he will kill the Joker in the hospital room, whether he will kill Detective Wuertz (Ron Dean) in a bar, or whether he will kill Detective Ramirez (Monique Curnen) in an alley. Of the three, only Wuertz ends up dead, but Dent also kills another officer and the criminal boss Maroni, along with some of his men. This rampage ends with Dent holding Gordon’s family hostage and threatening to kill the one whom Gordon holds most dear. Dent becomes a killer in order to inflict his own experience of loss on others: he tells Gordon that he wants to kill what is most precious to him so that Gordon will feel what he felt. Dent can so quickly take up this attitude because his heroism has no place for loss. When it occurs, the heroism becomes completely undone.After Dent’s death, the film ends with Batman accepting responsibility for the killings performed by Dent in order to salvage Dent’s public reputation and thereby sustain the image of the public hero. Gordon and Batman believe that this gesture is necessary for saving the city and keeping its hope for justice alive. When Gordon says, “Gotham needs its true hero,” we see a shot of him turning Dent’s face over, obscuring the burned side and exposing the human side. In death, Dent will begin to wear the mask that he would never wear in life . A mask of heroism will cover his criminality . As the film conceives it, this lie — that purity is possible — represents the sine qua non of social being . Without it, without the idea that one can sustain an ethical position, calculation of interest would have nothing to offset it, and the city would become identified with criminality.But the real interest of the film’s conclusion lies with Batman and the form of appearance that his heroism takes. It is as if Batman takes responsibility for Dent’s act not to save Dent’s face but to stain his own image irrevocably with evil. He remains the heroic exception , but his status changes radically. In order to guarantee that Dent dies as a hero, Batman must take responsibility for the murders that Dent committed. With this gesture, he truly adopts the mask of evil. In the closing montage sequence, we see the police hunting him down, Gordon smashing the Bat Signal, and finally Batman driving away into the night on his motorcycle. As this sequence concludes, we hear Gordon’s voiceover say,“He’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. And so we’ll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he’s not a hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector ... a dark knight.”As Gordon pronounces the final word, the film cuts to black from the image of Batman on his motorcycle. The melodrama of this voiceover elevates Batman's heroism, but it does so precisely because he agrees to appear as evil. This gesture, even more than any of his physical acts of courage, is the gesture of the true hero because it leaves him without any recognition for his heroism. For the hero who appears in the form of evil , heroic exceptionality must be an end in itself without any hope for a greater reward. When the exception takes this form, it loses the danger that adheres to the typical hero. The mask of evil allows the exception to persist without multiplying itself. By adopting this position at the end of the film, Batman reveals that he has taken up the lesson of the Joker and grasped the importance of the break

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from calculation. Dent, the hero who wants to appear heroic, descends into murderous evil. But Batman, the hero who accepts evil as his form of appearance, sustains the only possible path for heroic exceptionality.In an epoch when the law's inadequacy is evident, the need for the heroic exception becomes ever more pronounced, but the danger of the exception has also never been more apparent. Declarations of exceptionality abound in the contemporary world, and they allow us to see the negative ramifications that follow from the exception, no matter how heroic its intent. Audiences flock to superhero movies in search of a heroic exception that they can embrace, an exception that would work toward justice without simultaneously adding to injustice in the manner of today’s real world exceptions. In The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan offers a viable image of heroic exceptionality. As he sees, its form of appearance must be its opposite if it to avoid implicating itself in the injustice that it fights. The lesson for our real world exceptions is thus a difficult one. Rather than being celebrated as the liberator of Iraq and the savoir of U.S. freedom, George W. Bush would have to act behind the scenes to encourage charges being brought against him as a war criminal at the World Court, and then he would have to flee to the streets of The Hague as the authorities pursue him there. In the eyes of the public, true heroes must identify themselves with the evil that we fight .

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2NC EpistemologyThey’re lack of consciously examining their advocacy doesn’t mean there’s no link --- rather, it supercharges our egoism arguments and means their epistemology is bankruptARRIGO 2k (Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, Christopher R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, “The Philosophy of the Gift and the Psychology of Advocacy: Critical Reflections on Forensic Mental Health Intervention,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2000, pgs. 215-242)The psychological egoist questions the possibility of acting altruistically; that is, of acting purely with regard for the interests of another. That is to ask, can our actions at times be motivated purely by a concern for the welfare of others without some manifestation of primary self-interest in our actions? Though questions of self-interest factored significantly into the classical era of philosophical speculation, the establishment of egoism as psychologically predetermined and, consequently, inescapable received its first detailed and philosophically animated treatment in the work of Thomas Hobbes.10 Hobbes’s theory rests on one core assumption: human beings, when acting voluntarily, will be egoistically motivated. In other words, all human actions are rooted in self-interest, and the very possibility of being motivated otherwise is forbidden by the structure of our fundamental psychological make-up. Hobbes’s conceptualizations on the self are artfully depicted in passages from his work, On Human Nature (1650), in which he defines both “charity” and “pity.” These ideas are particularly important for our purposes. Indeed, they anticipate future developments in the logic of the gift and the motivational aspects of advocacy. With regard to the former, Hobbes deconstructs the prevalent sentiment of neighborly love, finding “charity” to be a veiled form of egoism. As he describes it: There can be no greater argument to a man, of his own power, than to find himself able not only to accomplish his own desires, but also to assist other men in theirs: and this is that conception wherein consisteth charity.11 Actions motivated by a concern for others are those which Hobbes refers to as “charity.” To this, we might also add “altruism,” “assistance,” “intervention,” and, to that effect, “advocacy.” For Hobbes, charity is nothing more than one taking some delight in one’s own power. The charitable man is demonstrating to himself, and to the world, that he is more capable than others. He can not only take care of himself, he has enough left over for others who are not so able as he. He is really just showing off his own superiority.12 There is another important aspect of the charitable person, relevant more specifically to the psychological underpinnings of such selfinterested displays of benevolence. This is the notion of conscious selfinterest versus self-interest that motivates from behind or, in Freud’s topology, underneath the level of conscious awareness.13 This point will become clearer when we discuss self-interest in the context of a Lacanian psychoanalytic critique. For now, we note that even Hobbes recognized that persons motivated by self-interest might not be consciously aware that their seemingly selfless acts were , in fact, blemished by concerns for the self . What is more characteristic of such behavior in terms of human psychology is that we

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consciously regard our actions as altruistic; an interpretation most beneficial to our psychic life. In other words, we want to believe that our actions are unselfish and , consequently, we interpret them in such a fashion. In fact, following psychological egoists, this interpretation obtains only superficially; that is, we delude ourselves absent a careful investigation of the unconscious dynamics that give rise to the logic of charitable , altruistic, intervening behavior .

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2NC AltEven if they win their offense, that just supercharges why the alt solves --- rejecting the affirmative is akin to Batman’s sacrifice --- it’s a choice to not be the hero but to allow the affirmative to lose the debate and die the hero --- a martyr who gave up the ballot for their ethics --- a true hero --- that’s a better method for generating community wide awareness and change and avoids the road to fascism turning their ethicsMCGOWAN 2009 (Todd McGowan, Associate Professor, film theory, University of Vermont, PhD, Ohio State University, studies the intersection of Hegel, psychoanalysis, and existentialism and cinema, “The Exceptional Darkness of The Dark Knight,” Jump Cut, No. 51, Spring 2009,http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/darkKnightKant/text.html)The film begins with Batman’s grasp of the problem, as it depicts his attempt to relinquish his exceptional status and to allow the legal order to operate on its own. In order to do this, a different form of heroism is required, and the quest that constitutes The Dark Knight is Batman’s attempt to find the proper public face for heroism. He is drawn to Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) because Dent seems to embody the possibility of a heroism that would be consistent with public law and that could consequently function without the need for disguise. After the death of Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Dent’s own serious facial burn transforms him from a defender of the law into the criminal figure Two-Face, Batman sees the impossibility of doing away with the hero’s mask. Dent, the would-be hero without a mask, quickly becomes a criminal himself when he experiences traumatic loss. This turn of events reveals that the hero must remain an exception, but it also shows that the heroism of the hero must pass itself off as its opposite . Just as the truth that Leonard (Guy Pearce) discovers at the end of Nolan’s Memento (2000) is a constitutive lie, the conclusion of The Dark Knight illustrates that the true form of appearance of heroism is evil. The film concludes with Batman voluntarily taking responsibility for the murders that Dent/Two-Face committed. By doing so, Batman allows Dent to die as a hero in the public mind, but he also — and more importantly — changes the public perception of his own exceptional status. When he agrees to appear as a criminal at the end of the film, Batman avows simultaneously the need for the heroic exception and the need for this exception to appear as criminality. If the heroic exception is not to multiply itself in a way that threatens any possibility for justice, then its appearance must become indistinguishable from criminality.The heroic gesture, as The Dark Knight conceives it, does not consist in any of the particular crime-fighting or life-saving activities that Batman performs throughout the film. It lies rather in his embrace of the appearance of criminality that concludes the film . Gordon’s voiceover panegyric to Batman that punctuates the film affirms that this is the truly heroic act . This act privileges and necessitates its own misrecognition: it is only through misrecognition that one sees it correctly. If the people of Gotham were to see through Batman’s form of appearance and recognition his real heroism, the heroism would be instantly lost. As the film portrays it, the form of appearance of authentic heroism must be that of evil. Only in this way does the

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heroic exceptionality that the superhero embodies avoid placing us on the road to fascist rule.

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AT: PermThe aff’s façade of equality through community only serves to reify exclusion --- this turns the caseWILLIAMS 2k (Christopher R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, “The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the ‘Gift’ of the Majority,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, August 2000, pgs. 321-343)Communio is a word for military formation and a kissing cousin of the word “munitions”: to have a communio is to be fortified on all sides, to build a “common” (com) “defense” (munis), as when a wall is put up around the city to keep the stranger or the foreigner out. The self-protective closure of “community,” then, would be just about the opposite of . . . preparation for the incoming of the other, “open” and “porous” to the other. . . . A “universal community” excluding no one is a contradiction in terms; communities always have an inside and an outside. (p. 108) Thus, the word community has negative connotations suggesting injustice, inequality, and an “us” versus “them” orientation. Community , as a thing, would constitute a binary opposition with the aforementioned concept of democratic society. The latter evolves with, not against, the other. Although the connotations may be latent and unconscious, any reference to a community or a derivative thereof connotes the exclusion of some other . A democratic society, then, must reject the analogical conceptions of community and present itself as a receptacle for receiving difference, that is, the demos (the people) representing a democratic society.

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The aff’s façade of hospitality is nothing more than a narcissistic display of power --- this turns the caseWILLIAMS 2k (Christopher R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, “The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the ‘Gift’ of the Majority,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, August 2000, pgs. 321-343)The implications, then, of Derrida’s deconstructive analysis are profound. The word hospitality and, thus, the function of hospitality becomes a display of power by the host (hospes). Being hospitable is an effort to welcome the other while maintaining or fortifying the mastery the host has over the domain. Thus, the host is someone who welcomes the other and gives to the other while always sustaining control. The host is always someone who possesses the power to welcome someone or something. If one did not enjoy some control, some dominance over the situation, one would not be a host at all: One would be on equal terms with the other (actually, there would be no other), and neither would constitute the host or guest. A display of hospitality, then, does not endanger the inherent power that the host experiences. The power, control, and mastery of the host and the alterity of the stranger or other are not disrupted by the display of hospitality. As Caputo (1997) notes, “there is an essential ‘self-limitation’ built right into the idea of hospitality , which preserves the distance between one’s own and the stranger ” (p. 110). The notion of giving while retaining power is embodied in the concept of hospitality: “A host is only a host if he owns the place, and only if he holds on to his ownership; [that is,] if one limits the gift” (Caputo, 1997, p. 111). The welcoming of the other into and onto one’s territory or domain does not constitute a submission of preexisting power, control, mastery, or identity. It is simply, as Derrida (1997) describes, a limited gift. The hospes, then, is the one engaged in an aporetic circumstance. The host must appear to be hospitable, genuinely beneficent, and unbounded by avaricious narcissism while contemporaneously defending mastery over the domain. The host must appeal to the pleasure of the other by giving or temporarily entrusting (consigning) something owned to the care of the other while not giving so much as to relinquish the dominance that he or she harbors. The host must feign to benefit the welfare of the other but not jeopardize the welfare of the giver that is so underwritten by the existing circumstances— whether they be democratically and justly legitimated or not. Thus, hospitality is never true hospitality, and it is never a true gift because it is always limited. Derrida (1997) refers to this predicament as the “im-possibility of hostil-pitality” (p. 112, italics added). True hospitality can only be realized by challenging this aporia, ascending the paralysis, and experiencing the (im)possible. The inherent self-limitation of hospitality must be vanquished. Hospitality must become a gift beyond hospitality (Caputo, 1997). Hospitality is . . . that to which I have never measured up. I am always . . . too unwelcoming, too calculating in all my invitations, which are disturbed from within by all sorts of subterranean motivations—from wanting to show off what I own to looking for a return invitation. (Caputo, 1997, p. 112) Thus, hospitality , like the gift (the gift of hospitality), is always limited by narcissistic, hedonistic cathexes . Avaricity governs the Western capitalistic psyche and soma. As the

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(im)possibility of hospitality and the gift denote, one will never fully compromise that which belongs to the self.

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Aff

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AltFirst let’s examine what the alternative actually does. The K asks you to vote neg in order to “mask the heroism of the affirmative”, to provide the shield of evil to allow for real heroism, the pure heroism of the 1AC, to have effect in society.

But if we reexamine the alternative evidence, we see that Mcgowan actually says that “the film ends with Batman accepting responsibility” – in the kritik’s metaphor we are Dent and the neg is Batman, so, if the alternative advocacy hopes to be in line with Mcgowan’s burdens, it is a prerequisite that you vote the negative down in an affirmation of their taking responsibility.

Batman has to don the mask of evil to allow Dent to be perceived as pure, which is also Mcgowan – how can voting neg possible represent even a tangentially similar process? No; let the negative be downed in this round, let them embrace the negativity and mire of defeat, so that the ethical purity of the 1AC is allowed to have social implications. Truly, the negative is the heroic exception that allows for the affirmative to solve – this is the only plausible interpretation of the evidence that makes any sense. What can the aff even be a heroic exception to? There is no other heroic norm in the debate round, as the neg is postulated entirely on the supposed pure heroism of the aff.

What the affirmative needs is a secondary figure to don the mask of evil, so that our ethics can continue to be perceived as pure – Mcgowan again opines that Batman had to embrace Dent’s evil so as to allow the pure ethics of the affirmative that are “instrumental to the well-functioning of society”. If you vote us down, or force us to embrace the mask of evil, then what you’re doing is turning society against our advocacy – you’re “staining our image”, which is precisely what Mcgowan says that the Batman, or the negative, should be doing.

The alt flows to the affirmative.

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Perms

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Do Both

Perm – affirm the pure ethics of the affirmative and the need for a mask of evil. BUT, let the negative be the Batman who represents the heroic exception – let the negative have their reputation besmirched, so that our ethics can remain pure in the public eye and so that the aff can solve.

This is what Mcgowan actually calls for; two separate bodies. One, Dent or the affirmative, is the pure ethics that needs to be preserved for society to function. Two, Batman or the negative, is the true good masked in evil that allows for the preservation of the former.

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Do the AltPerm – do the alternative. C/A the analysis of the alt from above, the alt effectively calls for an act of damning the neg to allow for the purity of the affirmative ethics – no negative vote is required.

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All Other InstancesPerm – do the alternative in all other instances of recognizable pure ethics. We have to legitimately affirm the resolution in today’s debate to avoid the immediate harms present in the 1AC, and can look to less pressing issues to address the existential threats presented by the kritik.

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Alt SolvencyForcing the affirmative to don a mask of evil to allow for true activism sums to zero. The alt leads to a public perception of the aff akin to the Gotham public’s perception of Batman; this cripples our ability to solve.Chou 8, Sandley. "The Power of Public Opinion: How Much Does Public Opinion Matter in Policy-making?" The Daily. N.p., 29 Jan. 2008. Web. 11 May 2013.The power of public opinion: How much does public opinion matter in policy-making?In the United States, the answer is fairly obvious. Interest groups, lobbyists and activists can sway votes. In Michigan, the car industry is powerful enough that politicians almost always vote favorably for it regardless of what else is on a bill. Dole Plantation and Chiquita Bananas have so much invested in trade relations with Latin America that in 1998, the Clinton administration slapped on a 100 percent tariff on more than $500 million worth of European goods because they refused to import bananas.Democracies are built on public opinion. The idea of responding to a constituency group is critical to a healthy local-federal relationship , as well as establishing the longevity of an office- holder. However, a fact that is often overlooked is that public interest groups and public opinion matters not only in democratic countries, but also international with authoritarian governments.Reputation is very important to a lot of countries, democratic or not. The role of the non-governmental organizations (NGO) and international non-governmental organizations (INGO) is increasingly important in shaping policies globally and in authoritarian states.In India, international non-governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations both played critical roles in halting dam developments that were environmentally detrimental. Major international activist groups have also been persuasive in changing minor parts of China’s Three Gorges Dam, although they were unable to deter the construction of the dam altogether.China’s international reputation is extremely important to the government there. The 2008 Olympics encompass the pride and joy of the country and a sign of its economic growth, long history and growing international involvement.I lived in western China in 2005-2006 and the entire country was already selling merchandise for the Olympics. Street vendors were illegally selling small Olympic icon key chains and T-shirts. Beijing was completely wrapped up in construction in anticipation for the big event. In Tiananmen Square, a countdown had been set aside for the Olympics, and even buses and cabs were being swapped for the newest and cleanest fleet.It is not surprising that protestors to China’s involvement with Sudan have planned to demonstrate right outside the 2008 Olympics. Their goal is to shame China into drawing a hard line with Sudan.This is the most effective way to shake China’s authoritarian, interest-driven, cost-benefit analysis style of policy-making. China has fallen into a money-first, morality-second mode, with the economic growth of the country taking first priority. However, its global reputation carries serious implications to how people in different countries will react to a positive relationship

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with China, frequent human rights abuses and a supporter of many of the world’s most brutal regimes.Public opinion, especially demonstrated through the increase of NGOs and INGOs across the world, has entered a new level of importance and influence in global decision-making. Activism in the United States about the atrocities of Sudan has been slowly gaining momentum in Congress, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has invested greatly in intervention in Sudan.China is one of the missing pieces to stopping the atrocities taking place.

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Public opinion matters; besmirching the perception of the aff by donning the mask of evil precludes solvency Norton 13, W.W. "American Politics Today | StudySpace." Chapter 5: Public Opinion. N.p., 13. Web. 11 May 2013One of the most important pieces of evidence that public opinion remains highly relevant in American politics is the amount of time and effort politicians , journalists, and political scientists spend trying to find out what Americans think.Many of the arguments about the irrelevance of public opinion hinge on misreading poll results. For most people, opinions are not fixed. Because opinions change, it can be difficult to establish a clear connection between political outcomes and public opinion.Despite the aforementioned difficulties, it is clear that public opinion exerts influence in widespread areas of government. It is difficult to find a major policy that did not have majority support in the electorate at the time it was made. Concerning the war in Iraq, as public support waned, members of Congress began to express reservations. The strong decline in public support for the war may have directly influenced the pro-democratic shift in the 2006 and 2008 elections, in which Democrats gained control of the House and Senate, as well as the presidency.

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Kantian Ethics Turns

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O/V

If the aff wins that Kantian ethics are bad, there are several implications:

1. The derogatory effect of scheming goes away, so the aff no longer links to the kritik

2. The alternative is no longer worth voting for, because the point of donning the mask of evil is to subvert the scheming rationale of the aff to promulgate that same purity

In other words, if we win a deontology turn, then we win the round

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Kantian Ethics Bad / Impossible

Instrumental action is no less empirical than intrinsic action. This turns Kant’s thesisSprynet 5, The Owl. "A Critique of the Kantian Ethics." Critique of Kant's Ethics. N.p., 20 Nov. 2005. Web. 11 May 2013.Kant associates hypothetical imperatives with inclinations and with actions aiming at ends beyond themselves. It is his conviction of the a priori and rational nature of morality that convinces him that morality can have no basis in means-end calculations. But this is a mistake. The distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values has nothing to do with the distinction between a priori and empirical principles , nor the distinction between reason and inclinations. Take utilitarianism as a common foil for the Kantian moral theory: utilitarians counsel us to act always to achieve the end of happiness. Nevertheless, their theory is just as a priori as Kant's. They do not appeal to experience to show that actions which maximize happiness are right. Although they do have to appeal to experience to determine which actions will produce happiness, a similar thing could be said of followers of Kant: the fact that a given action will fulfill a promise, or aid the needy , or develop my talents (all duties that Kant mentions) is no less empirical a fact than the fact that it will produce pleasure. This is especially obvious for the case of the duty of helping others -- for helping them, presumably, means helping them to be happier and to satisfy their inclinations, and what will help other people in this way is surely no less empirical an issue than is what will help myself .Actions that are performed for their own sake may also be based on inclinations just as well as on reason. Suppose, for example, that somebody likes to dance just for the sake of dancing. The fact that the dancing would not be aimed at some further end beyond itself does not mitigate the fact that it is motivated by inclination rather than reason.So we see that, contra Kant, instrumental values can be rational, and intrinsic values can be based on inclination. Kant therefore has lost his basis for insisting on the purely deontological (as opposed to consequentialist(4)) form of morality.

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Kant’s ends-based position is ambiguous and has no rational basis in the rest of his theorySprynet 5, The Owl. "A Critique of the Kantian Ethics." Critique of Kant's Ethics. N.p., 20 Nov. 2005. Web. 11 May 2013.Categorical imperative #2 is the proposition that one should always treat humanity, in oneself and others, as an end and not merely as a means. Its first problem is ambiguity. I know how to treat a state of affairs as an end (namely, try to bring it about), but I don't know how to treat an entity as an end. Does treating a person as an end mean treating his existence as an end? Should we, then, simply try to maximize the number of rational beings existing? Kant does not say anything that sounds like this, but in his second discussion of the meritorious duties towards others, he implies that treating people as ends means treating their happiness as an end. This is why we have a duty of helping people to achieve what they want. But how this flows from the rest of Kant's theory is obscure, since he previously insisted upon the utter worthlessness of all objects of inclination. If moral virtue is infinitely better than happiness and pleasure, then, just as we must always sacrifice our own pleasure to moral virtue, must we not also sacrifice others' happiness for the sake of moral virtue? Wouldn't the proper thing be to treat people's moral virtue as an end, rather than either their happiness or their existence? Thus we should have to go about preaching constantly to each other . This need not involve detriment to their happiness, but with the Kantian doctrine of the incommensurability of values, it is unlikely anybody's happiness would ever influence our actions. Although it's a theoretical possibility that two actions could result in the same amount of moral virtue in the world but one produce more happiness, so that the latter should be chosen, it is infinitely unlikely this would ever happen. That two quantities should be exactly equal, or that an action influencing our happiness should have no effect whatsoever on our moral virtue, is an infinitesimal possibility. We therefore can for all practical purposes disregard any concerns of benefitting others or ourselves, and focus all our energies on trying to get people to obey the categorical imperative.

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Kant’s ethics are predicated on a ginormous circular fallacySprynet 5, The Owl. "A Critique of the Kantian Ethics." Critique of Kant's Ethics. N.p., 20 Nov. 2005. Web. 11 May 2013.The second problem with CI #2 is a circularity problem: Why should we treat people as ends and never merely as means ? Because they in fact possess intrinsic, incommensurable value. Why do they possess such value? Because they are capable of morality , and dutiful action is the sole intrinsic, and incomparable, good in the world. But for this to be so surely presupposes that there are duties (presumably Kant didn't think that action according to false moral principles was good). Moral action is good only if we do in fact have obligations . And when we inquire into these duties we come full circle at last, learning that the only duty there is is the duty to treat people as ends (which we were trying to figure out why it existed to begin with). Ultimately, this alleged duty has no basis . The absolute worth Kant ascribes to human beings would only be warranted, from his argument, if he could show independently that there were obligations. If there were obligations to do some things other than just try to see to it that people follow obligations, then there could also be an obligation to do that. But the morality I suggested in the previous paragraph (of maximizing virtue) is an impossibility: there cannot be a moral imperative to do nothing but make sure people follow that very imperative . This is what would result if the sole principle of morality were (as Kant tries to make it) the importance of people's adhering to morality. This would be like a government whose only law said to treat law-abiding citizens in a certain way.

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Kantian Ends-Based Relationships falls apart logicallySprynet 5, The Owl. "A Critique of the Kantian Ethics." Critique of Kant's Ethics. N.p., 20 Nov. 2005. Web. 11 May 2013.Finally, the illustrations that Kant gives of CI #2 are, while more convincing than those for CI #1, mostly unsuccessful:a) He claims that suicide is a case of treating oneself as a means instead of an end. Well, it is a case of treating one's existence (or non-existence) as a means for one's happiness. The ambiguity in the categorical imperative resurfaces. If we are supposed to treat the mere existence of human beings as an end, then no one should commit suicide. But if the happiness (and absence of pain) of humanity is the end, then perhaps some of us should. It is interesting that when it comes to oneself , Kant thinks one should treat the mere existence of humanity as an end in itself, whereas when it comes to others, he thinks we should treat their happiness as an end in itself.b) Kant tells us that breaking a promise constitutes treating another person as a means, namely the person to whom the promise was made. Since the breaking of a promise rarely kills anyone, we can assume the complaint is that it fails to treat the other person's happiness as an end in itself. This is not always the case either, for the breaking of a promise need not make the promisee unhappy; in theory, it might even increase his happiness . Nor is it obvious why the person who wishes to break a promise would be treating promisee as a means any more than promisee would be treating promisor as a means by holding him to the promise. If defaulting on a debt is immoral because it uses another person to promote your own happiness, then why isn't collecting a debt also immoral, because it also promotes your own happiness at the expense of another person? Why, indeed, isn't any sort of business dealing which one does for profit immoral?

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The categorical imperative is impossible to live bySprynet 5, The Owl. "A Critique of the Kantian Ethics." Critique of Kant's Ethics. N.p., 20 Nov. 2005. Web. 11 May 2013.c) When it comes to the duty to develop one's talents, Kant introduces a third meaning of 'treating humanity as an end' -- now it means treating the perfection of humanity as an end in itself. Since this may interfere with taking our happiness as an end in itself, we should be equally entitled to say that the person who develops his talents is failing to regard himself (his happiness) as an end , as to say the person who neglects his talents fails to regard himself as an end.d) Kant reverts to the idea of treating humanity's happiness as an end when he discusses the duty to help others. But once again we can turn Kant's principle against him. He uses it to show[s] that egoism, and refusing to help others, is wrong , but can't it just as well be used to argue that altruism is wrong? For isn't the altruist just using himself as a means for the sake of others' happiness? Indeed, if taking money from other people to use on yourself is treating them merely as means and not as ends (and presumably taking their money for any purpose, even to help some third party, would also be treating them as means) then surely taking your own money and using it on others, by analogy, is treating yourself as a means.With regard to any possible action where people have conflicting interests -- the action serves one person's interests while harming another's -- it could be argued that the person who performs or refrains from the action is treating one of the parties as a means, no matter what he chooses to do. If I have ten dollars which I can give to either of two people (perhaps one of whom is myself), then whomever I give it to, I will, perhaps, be accused of treating the other person merely as a means -- or at the least, of failing to treat him as an end. If this is so, it is impossible to adhere to the categorical imperative.

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The idea of intrinsic ultimate values puts people in an impossible moral bind. The CA is logically impossibleSprynet 5, The Owl. "A Critique of the Kantian Ethics." Critique of Kant's Ethics. N.p., 20 Nov. 2005. Web. 11 May 2013.Moreover, since the reason given for CI #2 is the absolute and incomparable value of human beings, there is no way to make choices between people. Since one cannot compare the value of one person to that of another person, or to anything else, in a situation in which one is given a choice between different people (suppose there are a limited number of life rafts on the Titanic), there is nothing one can do. If values are incommensurable, we cannot say a hundred deaths are worse than one.Frankly, I find this doctrine irrational . It ignores the fact that there are situations in which we are forced to compare values . We have to decide, for instance, how much money to spend on health care -- if we choose to take health as an incommensurable value, then there is little doubt it can consume the entirety of the gross national product of the country, and leave no time or resources for anything else. This is what any 'absolute value' in this sense will do: it will destroy everything else. For this reason it is logically impossible to have multiple absolute and overriding values -- they must come into conflict, in which case they can not both be treated as absolute. Moreover, the concept of incomparable values is just mathematically absurd -- the notion of a quantity that is neither greater nor less than, nor yet equal to, another quantity (both being quantities of the same thing, as value, or mass, etc.) is mathematically absurd. Kant appears to want this incoherent idea to justify his principle of never treating people as means. If he admitted comparison of values, then one might sometimes be required to sacrifice one person for the sake of others. If he merely said all people were equally valuable, then two people would be twice as valuable as one, so you could kill one person in order to save two. That, of course, is only on consequentialist assumptions. Kant's theory of the incomparability of values (his theory of 'dignity') is his way of undermining consequentialism. I think it is unsuccessful, although I do not think it is the only possible way of undermining consequentialism.

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Deontology Bad Analytics1. Deontology always collapses into an ends based view of justice because side

constraints are chosen on the basis that they secure some greater end like pleasure. We can't measure negative rights violations without imposing a conception of the good.

2. Deontology violates principles of equality because it gives one person views infinite weight when they conflict with the views of others. For instance, a deontological system would require complete censorship of offensive material if one person was offended or felt violated.

3. Deontology can’t adjudicate conflicting rights claims. A deontological standard provides for impossible debate because it can’t weigh ¾tween two violations – they’re both treated as inviolable and in such a case action cannot be justified.

4. Infinitely Regressive: Side constraints would nullify the existence of the contemporary nation-state as projects of the government will always influence the rights of others. Any decision will have externalities and it is arbitrary to stop measuring violations of side constraints to avoid circularity.

5. A deontological perspective doesn’t correspond with our moral intuitions. Deontology would argue that you would have to tell the Nazi SS that there is a Jew hiding in your closet if asked because lying would be using one as a means to an external gain. Side constraints must be violated when greater social harms are in the balance.

6. Deontology does not exist. Deontology relies upon our ability to abstract some general moral principle from what exists in the world. However, as David Hume argues, all actions are minimally based upon self-interest because otherwise we have no incentive to follow through with them. Therefore, we cannot generate some universal principle and all actors are held to a universal standard of utility.

7. Means-based ethical theories provide no protection from the prisoner’s dilemma when engaging in cooperative behavior. A system of negative rights cannot effectively allocate scarce resources, because such restrictions can only justify never using the resource, as to use part of the resource would necessarily impinge on the ability of others to use that resource.

8. Infinitely regressive: deontology’s conception of a subject appeals to rationality, but there is no bright-line to rationality. Deontology might justify abuses to mentally diseased persons since they’re not fully rational, but might

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also justify giving animals the same rights as humans if the definition of rationality is expanded.

9. In taking an action, a rational agent states that his intent is desirable and that he ought to purse that end. However, there is no justification for him committing to that intent as universally desirable, because individuals can only lay claim to their own wills, not the obligations of others to will the others' ends. Thus, the categorical imperative is not a reasonable test of the justice of an action.

10. Individuals are not equal under morality, because there are situations where individuals need privileges denied to others. In times of war, it is incoherent to claim that enemy combatants should have the same right as generals to view classified documents, because we must draw limits to preserve government authority.

11. There is no justification why duty generates obligations. Kant asserts that we must look to duty because it is 'intrinsically valuable,' but there is no clarification of what makes something intrinsically valuable.

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Consequentialism GoodEven if their values are good, policymaking necessitates consequentialismBrock, ‘87 [Dan W. Brock, Professor of Philosophy and Biomedical Ethics, and Director, Center for Biomedical Ethics at Brown University, Ethics, Vol. 97, No. 4, (Jul., 1987), pp. 786-791, JSTOR]JFS

When philosophers become more or less direct participants in the policy-making process and so are no longer academics just hoping that an occasional policymaker might read their scholarly journal articles, this scholarly virtue of the unconstrained search for the truth-all assumptions open to question and follow the arguments wherever they lead-comes under a variety of related pressures. What arises is an intellectual variant of the political problem of "dirty hands" that those who hold political power often face. I emphasize that I do not conceive of the problem as one of pure, untainted philosophers being corrupted by the dirty business of politics. My point is rather that the different goals of academic scholarship and public policy call in turn for different virtues and behavior in their practitioners. Philosophers who steadfastly maintain their academic ways in the public policy setting are not to be admired as islands of integrity in a sea of messy political compromise and corruption. Instead, I believe that if philosophers maintain the academic virtues there they will not only find themselves often ineffective but will as well often fail in their responsibilities and act wrongly. Why is this so? The central point of conflict is that the first concern of those responsible for public policy is, and ought to be, the consequences of their actions for public policy and the persons that those policies affect. This is not to say that they should not be concerned with the moral evaluation of those consequences-they should; nor that they must be moral consequentialists in the evaluation of the policy, and in turn human, consequences of their actions-whether some form of consequentialism is an adequate moral theory is another matter. But it is to say that persons who directly participate in the formation of public policy would be irresponsible if they did not focus their concern on how their actions will affect policy and how that policy will in turn affect people. The virtues of academic research and scholarship that consist in an unconstrained search for truth, whatever the consequences, reflect not only the different goals of scholarly work but also the fact that the effects of the scholarly endeavor on the public are less direct, and are mediated more by other institutions and events, than are those of the public policy process. It is in part the very impotence in terms of major, direct effects on people's lives of most academic scholarship that makes it morally acceptable not to worry much about the social consequences of that scholarship. When philosophers move into the policy domain, they must shift their primary commitment from knowledge and truth to the policy consequences of what they do. And if they are not prepared to do this, why did they enter the policy domain? What are they doing there?

Even if deontology is right, states must act as consequentialists

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Stelzig, ‘98[Tim Stelzig, B.A. 1990, West Virginia University; M.A. 1995, University of Illinois at Chicago; J.D. Candidate 1998, University of Pennsylvania, 146 U. Pa. L. Rev. 901, March, 1998, L/N]JFS

This Comment seeks to dissipate the tension Blackstone broached when he stated that the "eternal boundaries" provided by our "indelible rights" sometimes must be "modified" or "narrowed" by the "local or occasional necessities of the state."(n269) Rights, as trumps against the world, ostensibly ought not to be things that may be cast aside. Yet, it is intuitively obvious that the state justifiably acts in ways impermissible for individuals as it collects taxes, punishes wrongdoers, and the like. Others have offered explanations for why coercive state action is morally justified . This Comment adds another. This Comment began by adopting deontology as a foundational theoretic assumption and briefly describing how deontology was to be understood herein. I then examined the characteristics of two leading theories of rights--Dworkin's theory of legal rights and Thomson's theory of moral rights. Although neither Dworkin nor Thomson is an absolutist with respect to rights, neither account explains why the state , but not individuals, may act in ways seemingly justifiable only on consequentialist grounds: that is, why the state may override the trumping effect of rights. In attempting to provide an answer to this question, I first noted that deontology does not exhaust moral discourse. The deontologist is forced to recognize that rights cannot capture everything of moral importance. I then provided several examples of distinctions recognized in the philosophical literature that delimit areas in which deontology does not apply, focusing in particular on the Trolley Problem and the distributive exemption from deontological norms that the Trolley Problem illustrates. The deontological exemption was examined fairly closely in order to enumerate the criteria that trigger the exemption and understand the principles that guide its application. By applying the distributive exemption to the state, I accomplished two things. First, I was able to provide a new justification for the existence of the coercive state , both when premised on the traditional assumptions of social contractarians, and when premised on a more realistic understanding of the modern state. Second, I was able to sketch the relationship between the constraints of rights and the demands of policy, justifying a state that provides for the general welfare without violating rights in a way objectionable to liberals. Libertarians have argued that such a state violates deontologicalnorms, that governmental intervention going beyond what is minimally necessary to preserve social order is not justified. Deontology does not require such a timid state and, moreover, finds desirable a state which promotes the general welfare to the fullest extent possible, even if in so doing it acts in ways deontologically objectionable for anyone other than one filling the government's unique role in society. More specifically, I argued that the government must consequentially justify its policy choices. The elegance of this particular rationale for the contours of permissible governmental action is that it remains a deontological justification at base. One of the worries of full-blown consequentialism is that it requires too much, that any putative right may be set aside if doing so would produce greater good. The justification offered here does not suffer that flaw. The distributive exemption does not permit that any one be sacrificed for the betterment of others; rather, it only permits a redistribution of inevitable harms, a

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diversion of an existing threatened harm to many such that it results in harm to fewer individuals.

We must choose the lesser evil. Hard and fast rules about what is right must be made to limit further atrocities against civilizationIssac 02 (Professor of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, PhD from Yale Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, p.)JFS

WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. There is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion. Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought . And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped . Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends. A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means- -perhaps the dangerous means-- we have to employ in order to oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates , in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about

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the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.