Introna K

Introna K Edina 20111/47 DML

Introna K

Introna K........................................................................................................................................................................1Topshelf................................................................................................................................................................................2

1NC....................................................................................................................................................................................3Long...............................................................................................................................................................................4Short..............................................................................................................................................................................6

Overviews..........................................................................................................................................................................82NC Overview................................................................................................................................................................92NR Overview..............................................................................................................................................................112NR Floating PIC..........................................................................................................................................................122NC Alt........................................................................................................................................................................13

Random Links..................................................................................................................................................................15Link – Warming/Environment.....................................................................................................................................16Link – Climate Refugees..............................................................................................................................................18Link – Asteroids/Longer Clark......................................................................................................................................20

Blocks..................................................................................................................................................................................22Generic Stuff....................................................................................................................................................................23

AT: Framework...........................................................................................................................................................24AT: Owen....................................................................................................................................................................26AT: Tuathail/Reps Focus Bad......................................................................................................................................27AT: Perm.....................................................................................................................................................................28AT: Utopian Fiat..........................................................................................................................................................30AT: Vague Alts............................................................................................................................................................31AT: Floating PIKs.........................................................................................................................................................32

Specific Stuff....................................................................................................................................................................33AT: Case Outweighs/Util.............................................................................................................................................34AT: Predictions Good..................................................................................................................................................36AT: Calculations Good.................................................................................................................................................37AT: Isaac/Moral Absolutism........................................................................................................................................38AT: Human Focus Good..............................................................................................................................................39AT: Transhumanism/Immortality...............................................................................................................................41AT: Realism.................................................................................................................................................................42AT: Anthro Good.........................................................................................................................................................43AT: Anthro Inevitable.................................................................................................................................................44AT: May......................................................................................................................................................................45AT: Schwartz...............................................................................................................................................................46

One of the most fun Ks to read, in my opinion – basically anthro with an ethics twist. This is pretty much entirely blocked out – there’s just a couple things that you should remember while reading this:

1. The Henning card in the overview makes a floating PIK argument. There is a theoretical defense of it later in the file, but if you don’t want to read it it’s okay.


2. You absolutely must read the Clark card in the “AT: Case Outweighs” section. It’s the single most important card in this file.

3. Added bonus!!! You get my favorite cards ever – immortality impact turns! They’re in the “AT: Transhumanism” block.

If you want to read a long 1NC, read both cards – otherwise just read the “short” version.


Topshelf


1NC


Long

The affirmative seeks a technological fix to worldly problems – this creates an artificial binary between the machine and the human that traps us into purely calculative modes of thoughtIntrona 10 – Professor of Organization, Technology and Ethics at Lancaster University(Lucas, “The ‘Measure of a Man’ and the Ethos of Hospitality: Towards an Ethical Dwelling with Technology”, AI and Society Vol 25 no 1, pg 93-102, dml)

When referring to an ‘ethics of technology’ or an ‘ethics of the artificial’, I am referring to it in two very distinct ways. In the first, more traditional sense, I mean the values and interests built into the very materiality of the technologies we draw upon—inscribed in

their ‘flesh’ as it were (Winner 1980). In drawing upon the possibilities presented by these technologies, we become wittingly or unwittingly enrolled into particular scripts and programmes of action (in the actor network theory sense of the word). These scripts and programmes make certain things possible and others not , include certain interests and others not (for example the increased use of ATM may have lead to the closure of bank branches which exactly excludes those that can not use ATM’s,

such as physically disabled people). In this sense of use, the ethics of machines is very important and is in desperate need of our attention (an example of this type of work is the paper by Introna and Nissenbaum (2000) on search engines and the work of Brey (2000) as proposed in his disclosive ethics). However, this paper is not primarily concerned with this sense of technological ethics. It is rather concerned with the question of the moral and ethical significance of technological artefacts in their technological being, i.e. the question of the weight of our moral responsibility towards technological artefacts as artificial beings. In order to develop and structure the discussion, I will draw on a particular episode of Star Trek (2003) titled: ‘‘The measure of a man’’. 1 In this episode, the ethical significance, and therefore subsequent rights, of the android Data becomes contested. This ‘case study’—if I may call it that—will give us some indication of how

the problem of ethical significance of the artificial can become apparent and considered. In discussing this case, I will argue that its approach to the issue, as well as the work of

Levinas, is essentially anthropocentric—ultimately the measure of ethical significance is ‘the measure of a [hu]man’. I will argue, with Heidegger (1977a), that it will ultimately fail to provide us with an adequate way to consider the ethical significance of the artificial. I will then proceed to suggest, with the help of Derrida, a more radical interpretation of Levinas as a possible way forward towards an ethics (or rather ethos) of hospitality—an ethical dwelling with the artificial other that so pervade our everyday being in the world. 2 Commander Data and the measure of a [hu]man Those familiar with Star Trek will know that Commander Data is a highly sophisticated android designed by Doctor Noonien Soong. Dr Soong created only one Data in his lifetime. Lieutenant Commander Data is now one of the officers on the USS Enterprise, which is part of the Federation’s Starfleet. The acclaimed robotics expert Commander Maddox has been authorised by Star Fleet’s Admiral Nakamura to remove Data from the USS Enterprise for study, with the intention to refit and replicate him. Maddox intends to download Data’s brain into a computer for analysis, and then reload a copy back into a refitted and upgraded Data. Due to certain technical complexities, the procedure is risky and he could not guarantee the end result. Data objects to the procedure by claiming that the end result would not be him. He suggests that ‘‘there is an ineffable quality to memory that [would not] survive the shutdown of [my] core.’’ As such he is concerned about the continuity of his identity, for him it would be like dying and waking up as somebody else. After considering a number of options, Data decide to resign as officer of the Starfleet in order to prevent the possibility of being disassembled. Commander Maddox responds by arguing that Data does not have the freedom to resign since he is a machine and as such the property of the Starfleet—a view shared by Admiral Nakamura. He argues that they ‘‘would [not] permit the computer on the Enterprise to refuse a refit’’, why should Data be accorded such a right? The matter is referred to Captain Phillipa Louvois of the understaffed local Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) office for a decision. After considering the legal position, she issues her own summary ruling that Data is not a sentient being but mere machine, and therefore, as property of the Federation, lacks the legal right either to refuse Maddox’s re fit or to resign from the Starfleet. The USS Enterprise’s Commanding Officer, Captain Picard, immediately challenges her decision. Due to resource constraints of the JAG office, an impromptu hearing is arranged by Captain Phillipa Louvois where Captain Picard will defend Data and Commander Riker, the direct subordinate of Captain Picard, will represent the Starfleet view that Data is a machine and as such cannot resign or refuse the refit. Commander Riker is profoundly disturbed at being placed in this position as his relationship with Data leaves him in no doubt as to the status of his colleague and trusted friend. However, if he refuses Captain Louvois’ ruling will stand, thus, he agrees. The court case starts with Commander Riker outlining the case for the Starfleet, i.e. that Data is a machine and as such cannot resign or refuse the refit RIKER Your honor, there is only one issue in this case and one relevant piece of evidence. I call Lieutenant Commander Data. Data seats himself in the witness chair, and places his hand on the scanner. COMPUTER VOICE Verify, Lieutenant Commander Data. Current assignment, USS Enterprise. Starfleet Command Decoration for… RIKER Your honor, we’ll stipulate to all of this. PICARD (leaping to his feet) Objection, your honor, I want it read. All of it. PHILLIPA Sustained. COMPUTER VOICE (resuming)… Gallantry, Medal of Honor with clusters, Legion of Honor, the Star Cross. RIKER Commander Data, what are you? DATA (looking to Picard for guidance, Picard nods to him to answer) An android. RIKER Which is? DATA Webster’s Twenty-Third Century Dictionary, Fifth Edition, defines Android as an automaton made to resemble a human being. RIKER (musing) An automaton. Made. Made by whom? DATA Sir? RIKER Who built you, Data? DATA Doctor Noonien Soong. RIKER And he was? DATA The foremost authority in cybernetics. RIKER More basic than that. What was he? DATA (puzzled, but groping for the right answer; he says questioningly) A human? *** [He removed Data’s hand after a demonstration of Data’s strength] *** RIKER (continuing) Data is a physical representation of a dream, an idea conceived of by the mind of a man. His purpose? To serve human needs and interests. He is a collection of neural nets and heuristic algorithms. His responses are dictated by an elaborate software program written by a man. The hardware (slapping the hand [of Data] against his palm) was built by a man. [Riker has been preambulating around the courtroom, each step bringing him closer to Data. He is now at his side, and without warning he leans down, presses the switch, and turns him off. Data collapses like a broken toy]. RIKER (continuing) And this [hu]man has turned him off. Pinocchio is broken, the strings are cut. Riker lays the hand down next to Data. Shocked silence fills the room. Picard’s reaction—shock and certainty that he cannot win.

PICARD I request a recess. PHILLIPA Granted. Riker who, as he walks to his chair, is in agony. A single tear runs down his cheek. He has destroyed a friend. Riker’s argument is simple and clear. Data is an artificial machine, made by a

[hu]man for serving the purposes of man, as such he is subjected to man’s choice—he can be switched off. As a machine, he has no intrinsic value or significance other than his value to those who made him, his owners. Since they wish to replicate and upgrade him they are free to do so. There is of course an interesting contradiction in the proceeding, as hinted by Picard, in that Data has previously been awarded the ‘Command Decoration for Gallantry’, and medals of honour for services rendered. Presumably such distinctions have not been awarded to the computer on the Enterprise. In his defence, Captain Picard realises that he cannot deny the obvious, i.e. that Data is a machine, once made by a man. He opens his defence: PICARD (making his opening statement) Commander Riker has dramatically demonstrated to this court that Lieutenant Commander Data is a machine. Do we deny that? No. But how is this relevant?

We too are machines , just machines of a different type . Commander Riker has continually reminded us that Data was built by a human. We do not deny that fact. But again how is it relevant? Does construction imply ownership? Children are created from the building blocks of their parents’ DNA. Are they property? We have a chance in this hearing to severely limit the boundaries of freedom. And I think we better be pretty damn careful before we take so

arrogant a step. Picard argues that it is plausible for us to think of ourselves as ‘machines’. It is not whether we are or not machines. It is rather the status we attribute to the machine when interacting with it. If we award a machine medals are we not implicitly according the machine a sort of autonomy that would make it meaningless to award the medals to his designer or to a chair? Presumably if we award it medals we will also hold it, rather than the designer, accountable in the event of a mistake or inappropriate behaviour. Picard proceeds with his defence with Commander Maddox on the stand. Maddox suggested that Data is a machine because he is not sentient. He defines sentience as having intelligence, self-awareness and consciousness. He reluctantly agreed that Data seems to conform to at least the first two of these. Nevertheless, he insists that Picard is sentient and Data not. Picard proceeds: PICARD But you admire him? MADDOX Oh yes, it’s an outstanding– PICARD (interrupting) Piece of engineering and programming. Yes, you’ve said that. You’ve devoted your life to the study of cybernetics in general? PICARD And Data in particular? MADDOX Yes. PICARD And now you’re proposing to dismantle him. MADDOX So I can rebuild him and construct more! PICARD How many more? MADDOX Hundreds, thousands. There’s no limit. PICARD And do what with them? MADDOX Use them. PICARD How? MADDOX As effective units on Federation ships. As replacements for humans in dangerous situations. So much is closed to us because of our fragility. But they… PICARD (interrupting; he picks up an object and throws it down a disposal chute) Are expendable. MADDOX It sounds harsh but to some extent, yes. PICARD Are you expendable, Commander Maddox? Never mind. A single Data is a curiosity, a wonder, but a thousand Datas, doesn’t that become a new race? And aren’t we going to be judged as a species about how we treat these creations? If they’re expendable, disposable, aren’t we? What is Data? MADDOX What? I don’t understand. PICARD What… is… he? MADDOX (angry now and hostile) A machine! PICARD Is he? Are you sure? MADDOX Yes! PICARD But he’s met two of your three criteria for sentience, and we haven’t addressed the third. So we might find him meeting your third criterion, and then what is he? MADDOX (driven to his limit) I don’t know. I don’t know! PICARD He doesn’t know. (to Phillipa) Do you? That’s the decision you’re facing. Your honor, a courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away the egos, the selfish desires, the half-truths, until we’re left with the pure product—a truth—for all time. Sooner or later it’s

going to happen. This [hu]man or others like him are going to succeed in replicating Data. And then we have to decide—what are they? And how will we treat these creations of our genius? The decision you reach here today

stretches far beyond this android and this courtroom. It will reveal the kind of a people we are. And what (points to Data)… they are going to be. Do you condemn them to slavery? Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. (indicating Data) Well, there he sits, your honor, waiting on our decision. You have a chance to make law. Well, let’s make a good one. Let us be wise. PHILLIPA This case touches on metaphysics, and that’s the province of philosophers and poets. Not confused jurists who don’t have the answers. But sometimes we have to make a stab in the dark, and speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Absolutely. Is he our property? No… The courtroom erupts in joy. It seems to me that there are at least three distinct steps in Picard’s argument for us to consider. Firstly, he argues that the whole court case is meaningless since the Federation has already confirmed Data’s status as more than a ‘mere machine’ since they have placed him in a role of responsibility and have allocated him certain duties in which they expected him to be accountable. They have also judged him to be doing these duties exceedingly well by awarding him medals. Therefore, all their past interaction with Data already suggests a status that this case now attempts to deny. His second step is to suggest that Data is not a machine but a person since he conforms to all the criteria of sentience suggested by Maddox: intelligence, self-awareness and consciousness. He gains agreement that Data is intelligent and self-aware, both of which suggests consciousness. Although he cannot prove it, the court (and in particular Maddox) can equally not prove that he, Picard, possesses all of these, except by some form of intuition. Such intuition would suggest that it is evident to any human being that they possess these capacities and therefore other human beings should also. However, this intuition would not tell us anything about androids such as Data. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine that we could construct a Turing type test for sentience, and that it seems

entirely feasible that Data could succeed in passing such a test (based on the evidence of Data’s behaviour in the Star Trek series). However, the most important point in his defence, for my argument, is that he takes the measure of ethical significance to be the ‘measure of a [hu]man’ , i.e. machines are ethically significant if they are like us , sentient beings. It would

be an interesting thought experiment to imagine a world in which the androids were the majority and they would decide that , besides sentience, having a ‘reuseable’ body is the ultimate measure of ethical significance. Such a suggestion points the intimate link between ethics and politics. I will return to this matter in the next section. The final step in his defence, which draws on the first two, is that ultimately we are going to be judged as a species


about how we treat these creations of ours; and if they are ‘‘expendable, disposable, aren’t we?’’ This is an interesting step and

captures the essence of Heidegger’s argument against western metaphysics which is humanistic and in which everything is valued in human terms and subsequently everything (also humanity) is robbed of its worth: [I]t is important finally to realise that precisely through the characterisation of something as ‘a value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation. But what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object , particularly when objectivity takes the form of value. Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivizing. It does no let beings: be. Rather, valuing lets beings: be valid—solely as the objects of its doing (Heidegger 1977a,

p. 228, emphasis mine). In this regard, neither Riker nor Picard escape this anthropocentric valuing. Riker argues that machines are instruments of [hu]man, at its disposal. They should be valued in terms of their value ‘for us.’ However, in the sociotechnical assemblages of contemporary world, it is increasingly difficult to draw a clear boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ If they are merely ‘for us’, then we all are a ‘for us’. As Heidegger (1977b) argues in his essay The Question Concerning

Technology, in such a world we all become ‘standing reserve’ (at the disposal of the network) . Picard’s humanistic defence invokes a hierarchy of values in which Data

becomes valued because he is ‘like us’ (sentient beings). However, if Heidegger is right then even where valuing is positive it is always subjectivising. Thus, neither of these positions escape the ‘technological’ world view in which the world is rendered present as a ‘for us’ (Gestell/enframed in Heidegger’s terminology). As enframed beings not only the artificial but also [hu]man becomes mere ‘standing reserve’ within which other possibilities for being are concealed. Not only this. In framing beings (and itself) in its own terms the very concealing of other possibilities for being itself becomes concealed. Instead of creating value systems in our own self-image, the absolute otherness of every Other should be the only moral imperative, so argues Levinas and Derrida. We need an ethics of the artificial that is beyond the self-identical of human beings. Such an ethics beyond anthropocentric metaphysics need as its ‘ground’, not a system for comparison, but rather a recognition of the impossibility of any comparison —every comparison is already violent in its attempt to render equal what could never be equal (Levinas 1991[1974]). How might we encounter the other, ethically, in its otherness? This is what I will no turn to.

Their framing of existence in terms of human value creates the world as standing reserve and legitimizes endless genocide – the only way to escape this cycle is to vote negative to affirm the infinite value of all forms of BeingIntrona 9 – Professor of Organization, Technology and Ethics at Lancaster University(Lucas, “Ethics and the Speaking of Things,” Theory, Culture & Society 2009 vol 26 no 4, 25-46, dml)

In the ethics of hybrids our ethical relationship with things is determined beforehand by us, it is anthropocentric. In this encounter with things we have already chosen, or presumed, the

framework of values that will count in determining moral significance. In this ethics, things are always and already ‘things-for-us’ – objects for our use, in our terms, for our purposes.

They are always inscribed with our intentionality – they carry it in their flesh, as it were. The defining measure of the ethics of hybrids is the human being – the meaning of the Latin root of ‘man’ is measure. Indeed our concern for things is what they might do to us humans, as was suggested above. Our concern is not our instrumental use of them, the violence of our inscriptions in/on them, but that such scripts may ultimately harm us. As things-for-us, or ‘objects’ as we will refer to them, they have no moral significance as such. In the value hierarchy of the modern ethical mind they are very far down the

value line. What could be less morally significant than an inanimate object? Their moral significance is only a derivative of the way they may circulate the network as inscriptions for utility or enrolment. For example, they may become valuable if they can be sold in a market where they are valued, as is the case with works of art. The magnitude and diversity of our projects are

mirrored in the magnitude and diversity of the objects that surround us. As things-for-us they are at our disposal – if they fail to be useful , or when our projects drift or shift, we ‘dump’ them . Images of endless ‘scrap’ heaps at the edges of our cities abound. Objects are made/inscribed, used and finally dumped. We can dispose of them because we author-ized them in the first place. Increasingly we design them in such a way that we can dispose of them as effortlessly as possible. Ideally, their demise must be as invisible as possible. Their entire moral claim on our conscience is naught, it seems. One can legitimately ask why should we concern ourselves with things in a world where the ethical landscape is already overcrowded with grave and pressing matters such as untold human suffering, disappearing bio-diversity and ozone layers – to name but a few. It is our argument that our moral indifference to so many supposedly significant beings (humans, animals, nature, etc.) starts with the idea that there are some beings that are less significant or not significant at all . More originally it starts with a metaphysics that has as its centre – the ultimate measure – us human beings – a metaphysics which has been at the heart of Western

philosophy ever since Plato (Heidegger, 1977a). Thus, when we start our moral ordering we tend to value more highly things like us (sentient, organic/natural, alive, etc.)

and less highly, or not at all, things most alien to us ( non-sentient, synthetic/artificial, inanimate, etc.). It is our argument that one of the reasons why this anthropocentric ethics of things fails is because it assumes that we can , both in principle and in practice, draw a definitive boundary between the objects (them) and us. Social studies of science and technology have thrown severe doubt on such a possibility. If it is increasingly difficult to draw the boundary between our objects and us, and if in this entangled network of humans and non-humans

objects lack moral significance from the start, then it is rather a small step to take for an ethics to emerge in which all things – human and non-


human alike – circulate as object s : ‘things-for-the-purposes-of’ the network. In ordering society as assemblages of humans and objects we ultimately also become ordered as a ‘for-the-purposes-of’. Thus, the irony of an anthropocentric ethics of things is that ultimately we also become ‘objects’ in programmes and scripts, at the disposal of a higher logic (capital, state, community, environment, etc.). In the network, others and our objects ‘objectify’ us. For example, I cannot get my money out from the bank machine because I forgot my PIN number. Until I

identify myself in its terms (as a five digit number) I am of no significance to it. Equally, if I cannot prove my identity by presenting inscribed objects (passport, drivers licence) I cannot get a new PIN number. In Heidegger’s (1977b) words we have all become ‘standing reserve’ , on ‘stand by’ for the purposes of the network – enframed (Gestell) by the calculative logic of our way of being. Enframed in a global network that has as its logic to control, manipulate and dominate : ‘Enframing is the gathering together which belongs to that setting-upon which challenges [hu]man and puts him in position to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve’ (Heidegger, 1977a: 305). The value hierarchy presumed in an anthropocentric ethics is in fact a dynamic network of

values and interests – there never was a hierarchy. The fate of our objects becomes our fate. In the ethics of hybrids we are also already objects – indeed

everything is already object. Instead of a hierarchy of values we find a complete nihilism in which everything is leveled out , everything is potentially equally valuable/valueless; a nihilistic network in which ‘the highest values devaluate themselves’ (Nietzsche, 1967: 9). If this is so, then we would argue that we should not ‘extend’ our moral consideration to other things, such as inanimate objects – in a similar manner that we have done for animals and other living things, in environmental ethics for example. In other words we should not simply extend the reach of what is considered morally signi ficant to include more

things. Rather, we should abandon all systems of moral valuing and admit , with Heidegger, that in ‘the characterisation of something as “a value” what is so valued is robbed of its worth’ and admit that ‘what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object , particularly when objectivity takes the form of value’, furthermore, that ‘every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivising’ (Heidegger, 1977a: 228). We must abandon ethics for a clearing beyond ethics – to let beings be in their own terms. We must admit that any attempt at humanistic moral ordering – be it egocentric, anthropocentric, biocentric (Goodpaster, 1978; Singer, 1975) or even ecocentric (Leopold, 1966; Naess, 1995) – will fail. Any ethics based on us will eventually turn everything into our image , pure will to power (Heidegger, 1977a, 1977b). As Lingis (1994: 9) suggests: ‘The man-made species we are, which produces its own nature in an environment it produces, finds nothing

within itself that is alien to itself, opaque and impervious to its own understanding’ (emphasis added). Instead of creating value systems in our own image, the absolute otherness of every other should be the only moral imperative. We need an ethics of things that is beyond the self- identical-ness of human beings. Such an ethics beyond metaphysics needs as its ‘ground’ not a system for comparison, but rather a recognition of the impossibility of any comparison – every comparison is already violent in its attempt to render equal what could never be equal (Levinas, 1991 [1974]). How might we encounter the other in its otherness? Levinas (1991 [1974], 1996, 1999) has argued for the radical singularity of our fellow human beings. But what about all other others? In the next

section we will argue that Heidegger, especially as presented in the work of Harman (2002, 2005), might provide us with some hints towards the overcoming of ethics, towards an ethos of letting-be of all beings.


Overviews


2NC Alt

The alternative is outlined by our Introna evidence – in order to create a more genuine and ethical relationship with the existence of both ourselves and others we must abandon systems of ethics that value other beings in terms of their utility and instead recognize that every person, thing, or idea has its own Being that cannot be exhausted by its nature or utility to others – only by holding this true can we escape the logic that is the root of genocide

The alternative recognizes our ultimate insignificance and affirms the flux of the cosmos as the ultimate ethical imperative – this is the only way to reclaim meaning from a valueless existenceTurnbull 6 – Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Social Theory at Nottingham Trent University(Neil, “The Ontological Consequences of Copernicus: Global Being in the Planetary World,” Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 23(1): 125-139, dml)

The political a priori of the planetary dimension has been conceived by one influential commentator as a fledgling ‘extra-terrestrial planetary humanism’, and an expression of ‘heterological, postanthropological, cosmopolitan’ world ‘yet-to-come’ (Gilroy, 2000: 334). This may, perhaps, eventually annul

the Greek moment of philosophy itself because, in a planetary world, one ‘ cannot take for granted any particular Western philosophical system’

(Patomäki, 2002: 90; see also Hall, 2001; Maffie, 2001).5 Thus what is needed is a thoroughgoing re-examination of the traditional conceptual hierarchies and lexica that have traditionally been the source of modern philosophy’s ‘conceptual core’ , typically those inherent within the panoply of spatial tropes – from classical ideas of form to modern ideas of world – through which Western philosophy has defined its programmatic aims. Henri Lefèbvre was one of the first thinkers to acknowledge this problem by recognizing that, in an age of planetary technology, the modern philosopher is forced to think beyond traditional ideas of both world and earth . In his view, ‘the conflation of the terms “planet”, “earth”, “worldwide” and “universe” is

still rather ridiculous. Mounting a critique of the confusions surrounding the term “world” may increasingly be a key issue for reflective thought’ (Lefèbvre, 1995: 254). One way to approach this issue is to follow Irigaray and chide Heidegger – and Wittgenstein – for their preoccupation with earth as a ground for thinking and judging. However, it may be that these

philosophers simply assumed too narrow – and too culturally and historically parochial – an account of the earth’s ontological significance. For, as the above discussion has shown, in a planetary age the philosophical problem of the meaning of the earth remains a pivotal issue : only in this case the idea and the experience of the earth seems much larger, more ‘vital’, more complex and more redolent with political significance than the early modern Copernican earth. As ‘planetary technology’ – to use Heidegger’s phrase – provides practical conditions of possibility for a new convergence of ‘earth’ and ‘world’ upon wider sets of planetary concerns, so the philosopher is forced to concede that the earth is no longer a certain existential ground linked to primal kinaesthetic experience – the ontological first principle of saying and doing – but has become an affordant sign of cosmopolitan cultural reality: an aestheticized and cosmological planetary ‘blue globe’ that extends the perceptual horizon and thus opens up a very different idea of the world , a world where the planetary dimension becomes a new axiomatic and new authority for knowing and judging. But how is the philosopher to make ontological sense of these new planetary forms of authority? Deleuze and Guattari stand out as the two philosophers who have provided the most systematic attempt to philosophize in a ‘post-Copernican’ mode for an age when the old earth has become what they term ‘desert earth’ and the sense of a ‘new earth’ has yet to be philosophically articulated. For

them, the issue of the nature and significance of the earth remains one of the central concerns of philosophy: but only when the idea of the earth is sharply differentiated from that of territory. The earth for Deleuze and Guattari represents a utopia (see Goodchild, 1996) and stands in stark opposition to the earth of ‘English’ capitalistic expansion : the old Greek earth ‘broken, fractalised and extended to

the entire universe’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 104). In their view, Heidegger made the mistake of conflating earth and territory, for now the earth has become something other than territory in its cosmopolitical separation from cartographic control. Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, the earth is ‘[t]he Deterritorialised, the Glacial, the giant Molecule – “ a body without organs ”’ (1987: 40). The earth is thus not ‘one element among other elements’ (1994: 85), fixed in specific place in time under a ‘specific sky’, but a fluidity ‘ that brings all elements within a single embrace’ (1994: 85). The earth is a space permeated by flows in all directions, free intensities and nomadic singularities (1987: 40). When conceived in this manner, the earth is no longer conceived as a background but a destratified plane upon which all minds and bodies can be situated.

According to them, the plane of the earth ‘knows nothing of differences in level, orders of magnitude, or distances’ (1987: 68); such codings can only come from the social technological ‘machinic assemblages’ that straddle and ‘cartographise’ the earth . In

opposition to the idea of the ‘coded’ earth, they offer an idea of the earth as decoded and unengendered , an ‘immobile motor’, ‘[s]uffering and dangerous, unique, universal’ it is the ‘full body’ and an ‘enchanted surface of inscription’ (1983: 154). It is the ‘single plane’ that escapes the territorial codings of the modern nation-state , and is the extraterritorial grounds for thinking and acting beyond its remit. To conceive of the earth in this manner requires a rejection of the basic assumptions of ‘subjectivist’ modern philosophy – for when rendered ‘earthly’, thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one


around the other, but something that takes place in a deterritorialized space between territory and earth (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 85).

The implication of this claim is that the major issue facing contemporary Western philosophy today is how to ‘devise’ a philosophy that interrogates and gives ‘ontological sense’ to planetary deterritorialization – the epochal moment when the earth loses its ancient association with territory – when, as

Deleuze and Guattari point out, philosophy itself is still territorialized on Greek soil, such that Greece – and ipso facto Europe – is still ‘the philosopher’s earth’ (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 86). Clearly, this will demand a different set of ‘philosophical ideals and vocabularies’ – ones less ‘grounded’ in narrowly defined ideas of earth as both terra and its political corollary territory. Deleuze and Guattari note that, at the birth of modernity, modern philosophy ‘turns back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth and a new people’ (1994: 99). This new earth was the Copernican earth: the earth removed from its nodal position as the ultimate ground of the Aristotelian universe and ‘exploded’ into ‘the universe’ while at the same time being redefined and repositioned as one element of a wider heliocentric interplanetary system (the ‘third stone from the sun’). Its continual movement and dependence upon much larger and scientifically more significant interplanetary forces made it a poor candidate for certainty and necessity. Grounds were thus located elsewhere by modern philosophers – in more anthropological locations such as subjectivity, language and/or the hidden teleologies of history. It is only in the last century that such moves were exposed by the late

Wittgenstein and late Heidegger as metaphysical illusions as existentially pernicious as the Aristotelian metaphysics that they replaced. But, in turn, the emergence of the planetary dimension to modern life undermined their territorialized conceptions of philosophy, creating a hiatus in the history of Western philosophy (that some have mistaken for the end of philosophy itself). However, when this issue is conceived in a Deleuzian manner, philosophy’s task is again to summon forth a new conception of the earth appropriate to the global cosmopolitan age . This conception of the earth can longer function as an a priori cognitive self-justifying principle; for the global earth is a dynamic and fluid – largely ‘oceanic’ – earth where ground, sky and water converge

to form a new planetary idea of the world (where the earth, as world, is understood, in an Irigarayan manner, as largely ‘air’). But this does not necessarily imply that planetary representations are simply another imperialistic avatar ‘that universalises loss of meaning , the society of the void’ (Latouche, 1996: 73). No, for the new universal expresses a new political imaginary outside the ideological strictures of the modern nation-state. It is the condition of possibility for a planetary ideal of a new humanity – the non-human basis and destiny of every human – that brings together the planet’s cultural and ecological elements in a singular cosmological embrace (suggesting that both natural and cultural life are holistically related as vibrant multiplicities). This is earth is not the hypermodern Copernican earth, where human values and vitalities are rendered diminutive by the ‘vast sea of darkness surrounding a blue and green point of unified, singular human space’ (Redfield, 1996: 258), but a dynamic and open earth that is an expansive plane that brings all elements with a single plane of composition . It stands for the idea of a way of ‘dwelling’ without territory; an idea of global being for a new planetary Mitsein. This idea of the earth is also found in Indian philosophy – especially in Vedic traditions where the earth is conceived as ‘the far-spreading one’ and a

‘great wide abode’ (see Radhakrishnan and Moore, 1989: 11–12). And, for Deleuze and Guattari, this new earth requires a more topological articulation by a new kind of philosopher – in their view the philosopher must become nonphilosopher – in order to make ultimate sense and significance of what might be the ‘tao of globalisation’ (see Anderson, 2004: 77) and the ‘last universal’: the planetary world that must be shared by all .


2NC Overview

The affirmative utilizes the world as a means to an end – they view ___________ as a specific technological fix necessary to achieve the goals of ______________ – this construction of the world poses technology and the machine as a tool, and when its usefulness is exhausted, we can get rid of it – but what separates the human from the machine? Do not let this ethic overcome our society – it leads to an enframing nihilism that causes everything to circulate as standing reserve – everything and everyone become calculable and disposable, and we can dump anything that does not serve us – this is a disingenuous and unethical mode of engaging with existence which you should reject at all costs

We do not preclude the kind of action that the plan takes – we argue that it must begin from a standpoint of interconnectedness with the rest of reality –

It’s an independent ethical priorityHenning 9 – associate professor of philosophy at Gonzaga University(Brian, ‘Trusting in the Efficacy of Beauty: A Kalocentric Approach to Moral Philosophy’, Ethics and the Environment)

Final truths (whether in religion, morality, or science) are unattainable not only due to the finitude and fallibility of human inquirers, but because we live in what the theologian John F. Haught calls an “unfinished universe” (2004). The notion that one could achieve

anything like a final or absolute formulation in any field of study presupposes that one’s object is static. Thankfully, we do not live in such a universe. Over the last century scientists have consistently discovered that the universe is not a plenum

of lifeless, valueless facts mechanistically determined by absolute laws. Rather, we live in a processive cosmos that is a dynamic field of events organized in complex webs of interdependence, rather than a collection of objects interacting via physical laws. The intuition that the universe is fundamentally a clockwork machine successfully guided science in the wake of Newton’s inspirational formulation of the laws of mechanics, but this metaphor proved increasingly inadequate as Newton’s work was supplanted in the early 20th century by both general relativity and quantum mechanics. Even at its peak, the mechanical metaphor created difficulties for thinking about human beings, who were never effectively illuminated by the assumption that they were

complex machines. At the level of elementary particles, quantum mechanics disclosed a world of wave-like particles spread out in space and inextricably entangled with other particles in the local environment. The notion of autonomous “individual” particles disappeared. Although all metaphors are misleading to some degree, the metaphor of the world as an evolving organism has become more helpful than the old mechanical model of the world as a clock. This, in a sense, is the founding insight of Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism,” which took as its starting point the view that individuals—particles, plants, and people are not discrete facts walled off from each other but parts of complex and

intersecting wholes. Conceived of as an organic process, every individual is inextricably intertwined and interconnected with every other. The fundamental reality is no longer individual entities but rather the ongoing processes by which they interact and create novel structures. Once we recognize that every individual—from a subatomic event to a majestic sequoia—brings together the

diverse elements in its world in just this way, just here, and just now, we see that nothing is entirely devoid of value and beauty. This process whereby many diverse individuals are brought together into the unity of one new individual, which will eventually add its energy to future individuals, characterizes the most basic feature of reality and is what Whitehead calls the “category of creativity.” On this view, reality is best characterized not as an unending march of vacuous facts, but as an incessant “creative advance” striving toward ever richer forms of beauty and value. Noting its emphasis on interdependence and interrelation, many scholars have rightly noted that Whitehead’s metaphysics is uniquely suited to provide a basis for making sense of our relationship to the natural world.10 Decades before modern ecologists taught us about ecosystems, Whitehead was describing individuals as interrelated societies of societies. No individual, Whitehead insisted, can be understood apart from its relationship to others.11 Indeed, whereas ecologists only explain how it is that macroscopic individuals are related in interdependent systems, Whitehead’s organic metaphysics of process provides a rich account of how individuals at every level of complexity—from

subatomic events to ecosystems, and f rom oak trees to galaxies—arise and are perpetuated.12 What is more, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism places a premium on an individual’s

dependence on and relationship to the larger wholes of which it is a part without making the mistake of subsuming the individual into that larger whole.13 With the philosophy of organism we need not choose between either the one or the many, “the many become one and are increased by one” (Whitehead [1929] 1978, 21). By providing a robust alternative to the various forms of reductive physicalism and destructive dualism that currently dominate many branches of science and philosophy, the philosophy of organism is an ideal position from which to address the complex social and ecological challenges confronting us. First, if who and what I am is intimately and inextricably linked to everyone and everything else in the universe, then I begin to recognize that my own

flourishing and the flourishing of others are not independent. Not only do I intimately and unavoidably depend on others in order to sustain myself, with varying degrees of relevance, how I relate to my environment is constitutive of who and what I am. As we are quickly learning, we ignore our interdependence with our wider environment at our own peril. Moreover, in helping us to recognizing our connection to and

dependence on our larger environment, an organic model forces us to abandon the various dualisms that have for too long allowed us to maintain the illusion that we are set off from the rest of nature. Adopting an organic metaphysics of process forces us finally to step down from the self-constructed pedestal from which we have for millennia surveyed nature and finally to embrace the lesson so compellingly demonstrated by Darwin: humans are not a singular exception to, but rather a grand exemplification of, the processes at work in the universe.14 In this way we ought finally to reject not only the materialisms of contemporary science, but also the dualisms that often undergird our religious, social, political, and moral understandings of ourselves and our relationship to the natural world. As John Dewey concisely put it, “man is within nature, not a little god outside” (1929, 351). Until we shed our self-deluding arrogance and recognize that who and what we are as a species is fundamentally bound up in and dependent on the wider scope of events unfolding in the universe, the ecological crisis will only deepen. Taken seriously, our understanding of reality as composed of vibrant, organically interconnected achievements of beauty and value, has a dramatic effect on how we conceive of ourselves, of nature, and of our moral obligations—morality can no longer be limited merely to inter-human relations. In rejecting modernity’s notion of lifeless matter, we come to recognize that every form of actuality has value in and for itself, for others, and for the whole. In aiming at and achieving an end for itself, every individual—no matter how ephemeral or seemingly insignificant—has intrinsic value for itself and in achieving this self-value it thereby becomes a value for others and for the whole of reality. Every individual from the most fleeting event in deep space to centuries old redwoods, has value for itself, for others, and for the whole of reality and it is from this character of reality that our

moral obligations derive (Whitehead 1938, 111). Given that every individual in our universe, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, has some degree of value, the scope of our direct moral concern15 can exclude nothing. Thus, in rather sharp

contrast to the invidious forms of anthropocentrism that characterize much of western moral thought, our scope of direct moral concern cannot be limited to humans , to sentient

beings, or even to all living beings . Morality is not anthropocentric, but neither is it sentientcentric or biocentric. In affirming the value of every individual, we must begin to recognize that every relation is potentially a moral

relation. As Whitehead vividly puts it, “ The destruction of a man, or of an insect, or of a tree, or of the Parthenon, may be moral or immoral.… Whether we destroy or whether we preserve , our action is moral if we have thereby safeguarded the importance [or value of experience so far as it depends on that concrete

instance in the world’s history” (1938, 14–15). Morality is not merely about how we ought to act toward and among other human beings, other sentient beings, or even other living beings. Morality is fundamentally about how we comport ourselves in the world, how we relate to and interact with every form of existence. To summarize our position thus far, in recognizing the fallibility of human knowers and the dynamic nature of the known, a Whiteheadian approach insists that moral philosophers steadfastly recognize the limits of moral inquiry, carefully navigating between the rocks of dogmatic absolutism and gross relativism. The recognition of nature’s dynamism furthermore requires that philosophers abandon finally the artificial bifurcations (dualisms) and unjustified reductions (physicalism and materialism) that distort and destroy the interdependent relationships constituting reality. The world revealed by the last century of scientific investigation

can no longer support a mechanistic model that describes the natural world in terms of vacuous facts determined by absolute laws. In its place, I am defending the adoption of an organic model that conceives of reality as vibrant, open,


and processive. On this model, individuals are conceived of as ongoing events situated in vast webs of interdependence, each achieving value for themselves, for others, and for the whole of reality.

And - The affirmative’s [Insert impact] impact is arbitrary – Humanity is a tiny speck in the history of a universe that will inevitably die – in the face of uncontrollable catastrophe and inevitability, the only ethical option is to open up to the infinite beauty of the universe. Don’t be persuaded by their claims of “impact scenarios” that will never come to pass. The very structure of the 1AC’s framing of impacts as a supplementary addendum to an already unconvincing advertisement justifies our logic to the deceptions that they bestow upon this debate. The only option is a neg ballot.Clark 10 – Senior Lecturer in Geography at Open University(Nigel, “Ex-Orbitant Generosity: Gifts of Love in a Cold Cosmos”, Parallax, Vol. 16, No. 1, Pg. 80-95, dml) Harman has no qualms about positing nonhuman objects that attract and repel each other. 50 He conceives of the elemental surfaces of things as making demands on each other, responding with the same sincerity that Levinas spoke of, all the while concealing their inner depths. In the context of thinking through our inhabitation of a volatile earth, this sort of inquiry is deeply promising. Even if we are not yet enthralled by the issue of the interactions of astral bodies in far-flung galaxies for their own

sake, the question of how independently forceful objects encounter each other on – or in the vicinity of – our planet has tremendous implications for the earth-bound beings who are constantly caught in the fallout of these clashes . Though , if we are willing to

follow Harman and agree that nonhuman objects have their own imperatives , do we also want to posit that these elemental encounters prompt ethical fidelities amongst themselves – besides those they may or may not incite amongst the vulnerable human bodies transfixed in their path? In recent writing on the gift, there have been a number of variations on the theme of Nietzsche’s selfless, life-giving solar flux. For Adriaan Peperzak, musing on the heterogeneous character of gift-giving: ‘Not only can the sun, trees, and animals give, but also anonymous forces and unknown sources. Nature, Fortune, Destiny, Moira, the gods, or God may be experienced or imagined as givers’. 51 In a related way, for Genevieve Vaughan, ‘Gaia, our Mother Earth [. . . .] the abundant planet on which we live’ is a preeminent source of the gifts upon which

human life depends. 52 While such accounts rarely provide explicit consideration of the relations of give and take that might pertain amongst these generous entities in our absence, there is little to indicate that these

bounteous flows switch off whenever their human recipients vacate the scene . Karen Barad, however, is unequivocal. In her extended consideration of the interactive

materiality of the universe, Barad boldly insists that the world’s constant becoming raises questions of ethical responsibility at every moment, whether humans are present or not : ‘Ethicality is part of the fabric of the world; the call to respond and be responsible is part of what is’. 53 The merger of ontology and ethics that Barad proposes is far from unique. In the current rage for philosophies of immanence, for neo-vitalism and processuality – the insistence on a single ontological plane in which disparate entities engage in streams of transmutation generally presupposes that the ethical is implicated in the all-encompassing creative flux. This does not imply creativity or becoming is painless, however. In Deleuze’s influential take on pure immanence, life may flow on indomitably, but there

is nonetheless plenty of wounding as encounters between bodies trigger violent and unpredictable transformations . Thus: ‘every dynamism is a catastrophe . There is necessarily something cruel in this birth of a world which is a chaosmos ’. 54 For Deleuze, and those in his orbit, the ethical is not

primarily a response to the suffering that arises out of wrenching change – or any kind of response or obligation at all. As the affirmation of the transformative possibility that inheres in encounters and interactions, ethics is an immanent evaluation of the process of becoming. Although the usual term in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings for the driving force of creative transformation is ‘desire’, John Protevi accentuates the ethical-ontological fusion by picking up those instances in their work when this is referred to as ‘love’: ‘When bodies join in the mutual experimental deterritorialisation that is love, we find Deleuze and Guattari’s most adventurous concept: the living, changing, multiplying virtual, the unfolding

of the plane of consistency. Love is complexity producing novelty, the very process of life’. 55 In this way, desire or love is becoming, and generosity is generativity - which makes it, to borrow a formulation from Ray Brassier, òntologically ubiquitous’.56 Effectively, there is no need for a distinctive ethics to address the injuries of transmutation, because the catastrophe itself is ultimately productive. With the championing of pure process and incessant becoming that characterises much of the contemporary take on ìmmanence’, what counts is not so much the substantive bodies that happen to come into being, so much as the great overarching stream of generative matter-energy from which all individuated forms are bodied forth .Where the unlimited potential for becoming or change takes precedence over the limited and constrained condition of the actual bodies it gives rise to, there can be no absolute and irreparable loss. Whatever dissolution of bodily integrity takes place, what ever fate befalls actual beings, is less of a termination than a reconfiguration , a temporary undoing that facilitates a renewed participation in the greater flow. And with this prioritization of process over product, of virtuality over actuality, whatever fidelity is called for is to the `flux of invincible life’ itself

- rather than to its interruptions.57 `Catastrophe’, in this sense, is the speedy, if painful, passage to a fresh start, to a new life. If it is a crack that fissures the ontological universe, then it is ultimately a self- suturing one. But for some theorists who take the event of the cataclysm to heart, a non- annihilating disaster is not a disaster worthy of the name. As Edith Wyschogrod concludes of Deleuzo-Guattarian catastrophism: `Because there is nothing but the fullness of desiring production, they cannot, strictly speaking, explain disease and natural catastrophe....’ 58 For Ray Brassier, the fashionable avowal of pure process or immanence raises a more general issue: that of how such philosophies are to account for discontinuity at all, how they are to explain breaks in pure productivity or lapses into inactivity. This is a problem not just for

Deleuze, he suggests, `but for any philosophy that would privilege becoming over stasis’.59 Brassier’s engagement with solar extinction returns us to the literal exorbitance of an earth open and precarious in the face of an inhospitable cosmos and to the Levinasian theme of existence fissured by impassable rifts. Whereas Harman stresses the innumerable ruptures that punctuate a universe of heterogeneous objects, Brassier zeroes on the quandaries posed by one particular juncture. Against any philosophy that assumes the necessity of a thinking being to make sense of the world , and equally counter to any philosophical stance that posits an incessant stream of becoming, he draws out the significance of the moment when terrestrial life might be – or rather, will be - totally, irredeemably, extinguished. Playing off a discussion by Jean-François Lyotard about our sun gradually burning out and rendering the earth uninhabitable - an eventuality which scientists have predicted with some confidence – Brassier points up the certainty of non-existence that weighs upon all life . 60 For Levinas, the impossibility of self-identity, of synchronicity, and of the closure of reciprocity is signalled by the passage into the time of the


other: the interruption of self- presence by à time without me ’ .61 In his working through of the inheritance of Levinas, Derrida observes that love is always a rupture in the living present,

haunted by the knowledge that Òne of us will see the other die, one of us will live on, even if only for an instant’.62 This is love’s exorbitance, the impossibility of its recuperation into an economy of reciprocal, synchronous or symmetrical gestures. For

Brassier, that fact that terrestrial life is eventually doomed by solar catastrophe promises a time without me, without any of us, without thought or experience, without even the life that lends death its much-touted significance. This is a quite literal crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: objective scientific knowledge that propels thought on the impossible task of thinking thought’s own non-bein g . As Brassier announces: `Lyotard’s `solar catastrophe’ effectively transposes Levinas’s theologically inflected ìmpossibility of possibility’ into a natural-scientific register, so that it is no

longer the death of the Other that usurps the sovereignty of consciousness, but the extinction of the sun’.63 In the face of the other , in its exposure to the elements, we catch a glimpse of our own vulnerability and finitude.64 In the face of a cyclone, or the face of others traumatised by gale-force winds, we see forces strong enough to overwhelm communities, cities, entire regions. We may also in some opaque sense - but in a way that is currently subject to elucidation by the physical sciences - feel an intimation of energies that could overwhelm an earth. And ultimately annihilate every conceivable entity . In Brassier’s words: roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment. Every star in the universe will have burnt out , plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter . 65 Negating the consolation of endless becoming or

ubiquitous self-overflowing, this scenario implies that ethics too is ultimately doomed : the gift of the disaster pointing finally to the disaster of the gift. And yet, across a nation state that could have been any patch of the globe, ordinary folk offer beds to complete strangers, the townspeople of a backwater village ladle out lashings of Hurricane Gumbo to dishevelled company, and a million and one other obscure acts of love flare and fade away: tiny sparks of generosity that arc across the cracks in daily life. And keep doing so in spite of, because of, the perishability that characterises the gift, its giver and its recipient

alike. For John Caputo, who also gazes directly at the coming solar disaster, it is the very `face of a faceless cosmos’ that makes of an ethical opening to an other àn act of hyperbolic partiality and defiance’ .66 In this way, it is not just that each gift is an offering of flesh and the giving of a terrain, but that every gift carries the trace of the very extinguishing of existence . In its responsiveness to the inconsistency or the excessiveness of light, each generous reception murmurs against the dying of all light . Somewhere beside or beyond critical thought’s harsh cross-examination of compassion and the neo-vitalist extension of ethical dispositions into every corner of the cosmos, then, runs this other option, propelled by the very exorbitance, diachrony and asymmetry that severs being from thought and unhinges ethics from ontology . If it negates the radical passivity of generosity to demand that it enacts a moral cost accounting before it sets forth, so too does it rebuke the idea of a responsibility that is primordially receptive to declare that every spontaneous energetic or material discharge is in essence a gift . Demands might well emit from any object, but not every thing can give in or give out in response to a summons. As biologist Lynn Margulis and science writer Dorion Sagan put it: ̀ life is matter that chooses’ .67 Which appears to makes choice fairly rare in the known universe, as well as contingent and, in all likelihood, ephemeral. Like other living creatures, we humans `can turn away from faces as we can turn away from the surfaces of things’. Or choose not too. Even if it is not unique, perhaps our particularly pronounced capacity to vacillate between turning toward and turning away has a defining quality . If not us, then who?


2NR Overview

Someday everything will die – this inevitability is a reason you engage intentionality before material impacts – the 2NC Clark evidence provides framing for your ballot, evaluate the round through a lens valuing all forms of existence as equal – you have no right to determine the value of anything other than yourself, whether it is humanity, the world we live in, or the computer I am reading from – human life is a speck of dust on a spaceship hurtling through the cold cosmos – concluding that one form of existence is preferable to another quickly snowballs into the choice that certain forms of humanity are preferable to others – this calculable logic is what causes the problems they talk about – <explain> – only recognizing the infinite value of all forms of Being provides us a way to exist in harmony with the rest of the universe through recognizing that everything is wondrous and that life itself truly is beautiful


2NR Floating PIC

They can’t weigh the aff, they’ve conceded the Henning evidence – you can _________ in the world of the alternative – the alt does not care about what you choose to do to other forms of Being, we make you choose between doing something to technology and doing something with it


Random Links


Link – Warming/Environment

Joronen 11 – coordinator of the Geography graduate school at the University of Turku (Mikko, “Dwelling in the Sites of Finitude: Resisting the Violence of the Metaphysical Globe”, Antipode Volume 43, Issue 4, pages 1127–1154, September 2011, dml)

Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the need for non-violent resistance and power-free following of the abyssal earth is the contemporary event of global warming. While this devastating change is affecting all parts of the earth, even the

atmosphere, some of the most vulgar solutions, especially the geo-engineering proposals, aim at intentional, even global-scale, climate modification either by reducing the incoming radiation from the sun—for instance, by using the refractive screens or sunshade of autonomous spacecraft installed in space (Angel 2006), or by spraying cooling sulphate particle concentrations in the stratosphere (Crutzen 2006)—or by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—for instance, by increasing carbon sequestration with iron fertilisation of the oceans (Buesseler and

Boyd 2003). These various potential geo-engineering implementations seem to do nothing but follow the baseline of the gigantic machination, the subjugation of things into orderable reserve commanded to stand by so that they may be manipulated by the operations of calculation. Even though such geo-engineering may eventually mitigate the negative consequences of climate change, it offers a calculative moulding of the even more complex systems of orderings as a solution to the problem of global warming, which is itself subordinate to, as well as an outcome of, this manipulative and calculative subjugation of earth , the logic of circular self-overcoming in the ever-

greater modalities of exploitative power. As Malpas (2006:298) writes, although it is evident that more complex systems of orderings also increase the possibilities of their failure, machination always presents itself as a source for continuous improvements by simply viewing these failures as an indication of a further need for technological perfection. In other words, machination does not implicate an achievement of total ordering, but a drive towards total ordering where this drive itself is never under suspicion. Nevertheless, as contemporary climate change indicates, earth never allows itself to become captured, completely controlled or emptied into unfolding that frames it in terms of orderable and exploitable standing-reserve. Earth rather resists all attempts to capture it: it resists by pointing out the lack that leads to the failure of all systems of orderings. It is precisely this lack, the line of failure that has always already started to flee the perfect rationalisation and total capture of

things, which presents the earth aspect of Heidegger. Instead of the calculative engineering of technical solutions, non-violent resistance allows the earth to become a source of abyssal being, a source of self-emerging things that always retains a hidden element since the earth never allows itself to become completely secured though particular world-disclosures (see Harrison 2007:628; Peters and Irwin 2002:8). In other words, instead of mere calculative manipulation, we can resist the manipulative machination of earth and thus let the living earth become a source of abyssal being, an earth-site for our dwelling. Thirdly, it is the recognition of the

finitude, the limit, that allows a breakdown of our taken-for-granted ontological intelligibility of prevailing world-disclosure. Identification of the finitude affords a view into the possible absence of prevailing world-disclosure, a situation of distress Polt (2006:30) calls the “emergency of being”, where the world we are thrown into becomes unsettled, releases its hold and eventually allows us to “remember” its originary happening as a mere historical appropriation of limits from the groundless abyss. Moreover, compared with Heidegger's earlier notion about the recognition of our own finitude—our death—forcing us to face what stands as completely contrary to the meaning of being—the nothingness with empty-of-all-meaning—the notion about the finitude of being as such refers rather to the positive realm, to the abyssal reservoir of plenitude (Young 2002:190–192). Thus, the “nothing” is not excluded as the opposite of being, as a mere

negativity of empty nihilism; nothing rather belongs to the realm of being through the sense of possible absence it implies, absence (the possibility of finitude) in this case keeping the site opened for the play and “other beginning” of being. Planetary machination, however, and the calculative thinking it affords, do not allow this appearance of finitude: as a total positioning they destroy the earth upon which we dwell by changing it into an errant planet, into a globe in an astral universe without the earth-site for making manifest the limits of the happening of being. As Radloff (2007:36) sums up, “earth is not a planet”—earth is not a planet, because the planet belongs to the representational thinking that hides the fundamental openness of the abyssal earth-site through which the sphere of total gaze, the planetary globe, became possible in the first place . Eventually this globe, ordered through the networks cast upon the planet, opens neither paths nor possibilities, but a profound nihilism of calculative consumption and utilisation of the earth (see Joronen 2008:603–604). As Critchley (1997:12) writes, rather than simple transgression or restoration of the conditions that ground the contemporary situation, we need to experience their limit, to delineate them. The crucial point is that the contemporary ontic homelessness, the late modern nihilism of planetary machination, does not allow the fundamental sense of ontological finitude, the distress and emergency about the limitedness and finitude of the prevailing mode of being, to arise (Heidegger 1996:74–75; Radloff 2007:240). This ontological homelessness, the sense about finitude and play of being, can only be confronted through the happening of being, through being that presences through sites, which means that one can become opened to abyssal being to the extent that one first finds the finitude of the prevailing mode of being, its limits. Hence, Heidegger's notion about dwelling in the earth-sites, our “being-at-home” on earth, is

properly understood as a “homecoming” that takes place through ontological homelessness: out of the passage through what is foreign, we no more merely live through the given unfolding, but better, by “being unhomely in becoming homely” we become to sense the potential for human beings “to dwell on earth” with understanding about the finitude and givenness of the ruling unfolding (Heidegger 1996:120–121; on Heidegger's comparison between modern homelessness and Marx's notion of alienation, see Heidegger 1993a:243–244). Since the primary aim of this non-metaphysical and non-grounding dwelling is the recognition of the abyssal earth-sites, it neither proposes the chauvinism of provincial locality nor bounded “homeland” rooted in organic national family of blood and soil, as Thiele (1995:172–175) for instance misinterprets—all of these definitions, the “organic”, the “national” and the “blood”, are metaphysical determinations that presuppose a concept of collective subjectivity explicitly rejected by Heidegger (1993a:244–245; see also de Beistegui 2007:10; Radloff

2007:241–242). Instead, the possibility of a non-metaphysical dwelling in the sites of ontological finitude signifies a chance for an open and abyssal clearing on earth, an eco-poetic promise—ecological as opposed to violent exploitation of nature, poetic as opposed to the metaphysical violence of calculative rationality. As de Beistegui (2007:18) suggests, instead of bounded territorialism or cosmopolitanism, such “citizenship on earth” could perhaps be translated into something like “geopolitanism” (cf. Morin 2009; Turnbull 2006).4 Concluding Remarks: A Homecoming to Abyssal Earth As it has become evident, the contemporary nihilism and planetary homelessness of (late) modernity does not correspond with the primordial ontological homelessness based on dwelling in the finite earth-sites of abyssal being. The homelessness of technological calculation, which is now “coming to be the destiny of the world”, is a symptom of the oblivion of being—an abandonment of abyssal being in favour of metaphysical rationality of ideo-logic-ally and universally grounded conceptual systems—when the dwelling in the sites of finitude is a “homecoming” that founds our taken-for-granted belongingness to particular world-disclosure by unsettling and dislocating us from it (Heidegger 1993a:242, 243). At the end, we are left with a non-metaphysical sense of dwelling, with a resistance based on the finitude of being. Accordingly, resistance includes both power-free

dwelling on earth, and non-metaphysical sites based on finite and abyssal being. As I have tried to show, this sort of dwelling offers neither total unity of intelligibility, an ontologically bounded and grounded dwelling, nor alienation

based on planetary nihilism of willfull calculations, but a sense of finitude and thus a sense about the limits of the planetary unfolding of machination. It is a dwelling that remains open for abyssal being and hence for an Event, which as a play can never be mastered since mastering does not provide possibilities but necessities. As exposed to abyss, we human beings are exposed to the concealed “ab-ground” of being


—to the abysmal reservoir of abundant being—and so may turn into the power-free grounders of abyssal earth (cf. Sallis 2001:188, 194–195). One of the features of contemporary planetary homelessness of machination is precisely the lack of distress and emergency, the lack of mood that affords access to the openness of being via finitude (Heidegger 2000:266–267; see Haar 2002:157; Heidegger 1973:99). It is the sense of ontological finitude that is crucial to dwelling—without it dwelling turns into moulding

securing of being, into the metaphysical capturing of earth, when with the sense of finitude we are given both the earth-sites of dwelling and the finite unfolding of abyssal being. It is precisely the distress about the finitude of being that is able to block and cease the eternal machinery of “will to will” and hence the endless productisation and organisation of all in the names of capital accumulation, winning-valuing and profit-making. Without a sense of finitude, limitation and dependence, thinking is not just lack of genuine questions concerning our finite existence and ontological situatedness “in-the-world”, but also in danger of encouraging the “ontological violence” of boundless measurement and complete control . As Zimmerman writes, by affording realms of “personal and collective craving for immortality” such violence generates a ground for the “new oppressive social institutions and nature-dominating projects” of ecological aggressiveness (Zimmerman 1994:107; cf. Taylor 1991:68, 1992:267). The dark side of the denial of finitude and impermanence is the structured aim for total control and measurement encouraging us to build immortal, megalomaniac and turgid monuments from violent authoritarianism and hierarchic cultures to the contemporary hegemony of capital

accumulation and nature exploitation. It is the finitude then that works against what Žižek calls the “fantasmatic illusion” maintained by the contemporary global “techno-capitalism”, the illusion that the world ruled by machination and its capitalist forces is ontologically complete and perfectly measured by its instrumental-pragmatist problem-solving calculations (Žižek 1999:204, 218; see also Brockelman 2008a:84, 2008b). It is precisely the functioning of everything and that this functioning drives further to more functioning which

implies lack of distress and emergency about the finitude and impermanence (of the calculative ground) of being. If everything operates so that there is no problem in view, there is no need for emergency and distress alike. Nihilist calculating and reckoning then do not just give us the nomadic homelessness of mankind (uniformly subjecting the living earth into the useable and disposable globe for the will to power) but also violent cults of power, control, violence, accumulation and oppression (with no other purposes aside from the strengthening and unbounded expansion of their own world-image, their “world-view”). These are just two sides of the

same coin of the manipulative and omnipotent power of calculative machination, a power without any distress about its lack of distress. In the end, machination raises a radical sense of making a “love affair to power”, as Taylor (1991:67) puts it. This all-doable makeability grows to new heights when the value of all becomes decided upon the point of calculative measuring, choosing and computing—upon a coercive reckoning promoted by the will that wills more power and control. In order to follow through Heidegger's opening to the notion of finitude, it is our possibility of a non-violent dwelling in the finite earth-sites of abyssal being that decides the question whether mankind is still, after planetary capitalism, nomadic humanity and coercive “enframing” and domination of nature, capable of calling the living earth a home.


Link – Climate Refugees

Their attempt to avoid migration concerns reinforces oppressive systems of national borders that shut out the Other – you should endorse the encounter with alterity provided by the climate refugeeClark 5 – Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the Open University(Nigel, “Abyssal Alterity and the Gift of Disaster”, http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/nigel%20clark.pdf, dml)

While the nation-state always already operates within an international system - which is to say it presupposes the existence of similarly constituted nation-states, accelerating globalisation is seen to intensify the processes of abjection . As Dillon's reference to global capitalism and environmental degradation suggests,

there are new impetuses to mobilisation which tend to push more and more people up against the contrived borderlines of the modern state. One side of this globalised manufacture of estrangement , then, is the increasing numbers of people world-wide who are dislocated by forces beyond their control , and find themselves without a state : a condition Dillon refers to as `radically de-worlded' (1999: 111). Hardt and Negri , on the other hand, while they fully acknowledge such dismal push factors, chose to play up another dimension of geopolitical estrangement which is the growing willingness of ordinary people to trump the pressures of

displacement by actively and positively desiring new forms of mobility. As they argue: what pushes from behind, is, negatively, desertion from miserable cultural and material conditions …but positively, what pulls forward is the wealth of desire and the accumulation of expressive and productive capacities that the processes of globalization have determined in the consciousness of every individual and social group…(2001: 213). But whether it is deemed to be propelled by need or desire, there is a shared assumption here that socio-cultural life is destined for mobility . In particular, the privileging of the èncounter' in the formation of collective and individual identities is generally taken to

imply that diverse groups of people come to meet and mingle because of at least some of them are moving about . And in this way it makes sense to speak òf the radical contingencies of space and identity' in one breath (Shapiro, 1999:80). Such an assumed congruity between the conceptualisation of space as open or indeterminate and the subject as mobile or mutable seems to emerge with the decline

of the vision of a single, unidirectional historical trajectory for social life. For many critical social theorists, both geographers and others, this opens the way to an exploration of the playfulness and indeterminacy of culture and subjectivity that is presented pre-eminently in `spatial' (or we might rather say horizontal) terms.(Barnett, 2005: 7, see

also Massey, 2005: 14 ). In this light, the most common definition of the stranger is that of a `body out of place' (Ahmed,2000: 39). And as Ahmed notes, `migration' comes to take on a special significance in the more general theorising of identity, in that crossing borders is equated with breaking the bounds of thought or experience (2000: 80). A similar logic applies to the treatment of the refugee as the one who is `(n)either in nor out' (Dillon, 1999: 101). In this context,

ìnbetweenness' with regard to distinct political territories comes to stand for the dislocation or èstrangement from itself' that is the unavoidable condition of every human subject, by virtue of its inherent heterogeneity (Dillon, 1999: 95,113). As Dillon puts it: the event of the refugee's alienness calls to mind the alienness of the human as such ; the very non-naturalness of the onto-plurality, the thrownness and responsibility of its abyssal freedom. For if the human were simply natural it would not have this freedom - with all its attendant burdens of decision - to be (1999: 118). But there is something else that seems to be going here that gives cause to ponder just how deep this àbyssal freedom' descends, or in relation to what such

freedoms are to be gauged. We need to ask what the implications are of ascribing `non-naturalness' to the plurality constitutive of the human . It is a similar question that might be raised whenever reference is made to culture's lack of grounding, when we are reminded that identities or institutions are not `set in stone' , or when we are prompted to scorn the idea that societies are `somehow rooted in the land , as if they need the soil' (Kieserling, cited in

Beck 2000: 80-1). For such assertions , while overtly highlighting the flux and plurality inherent in the human, more stealthily serve to impute an indivisiveness or immobility to that which is deemed beyond the human: whether it is nature, earth, land, rock, soil, or the living things that grow in that soil (see Kirby, 1999). The way that ideas of human or cultural multiformity draw their energy from an outside which does not share this profusion or mutability becomes clearer if we return to Dillon's example of the degradation of physical environments as a motivating force of human mobility. After an initial hesitancy to address environmental issues, many

critical theorists have now fully embraced the argument that human activity is destabilising ecological systems . It has become commonplace to assert not only that ecologically malign elements or effects overflow national borders, but that techno-scientific innovations are increasingly eroding the boundaries that once distinguished physical or biological bodies from each other. In an

argument associated most strongly with theorists of risk society, our era is characterised by technologies that intervene in physical systems at chemical, genetic and nuclear scales. But elements and entities modified at such previously unthinkable levels of intricacy turn out to have a marked tendency to escape containment , and with every accidental release they wend their way ùndelimitably' across physical and biological space (Beck, 1995: 109). , But what is clearly

apparent about this form of spatial mobility and boundary transgression is that it is presented as deeply undesirable . There is no sympathy or empathy for the material àbjects' of our technological society, no celebration of their flux or their escape from determination. At best they are described as ` creeping', ìnsidious', ìnexorable', and èxplosive' .(Beck, 1995; see Clark, 2004: 106), terms most critical theorists would balk at applying to displaced human beings or their cultural expressions . The horror with which

critical thought greets the `manufactured' dislocation of matter sends out a strong message that materiality , the elemental or physical stuff of the world should be kept firmly in its designated place , its preferred destiny and prescribed character being one of fixity rather than mobility , integrity rather than

excessiveness. And in this regard, the policing of borders and patrolling of stable categorisations so frowned upon in the socio-cultural sphere takes on a very different hue . For in the case of `the material' the call now becomes one of restraint, control, and more rigorous boundary maintenance: evidenced in support for `precautionary principles' which legislate that matter can not leave home until its credentials have been checked, its papers are in order, and all its future movements and interactions have

been accounted for. (Clark 2004: 106-7). In a purely practical or expedient sense, such strictures seem eminently sensible. Who after all would wish a warm welcome on seeping toxic waste or leaking radiation? From another angle, however, this generally unexamined but nonetheless pervasive division that severs human or socio-cultural flux from physico-material stasis has some fairly important ramifications. And these need to be made explicit. While most contemporary critical theorists would recoil at the charge that traces of a dualistic constitution of culture and nature can be discerned in their work, it is difficult to avoid seeing the residues of western philosophy's most enduring binary at work across the various takes on the geopolitics of alterity and estrangement. Without implying a one to one mapping, I want to propose that

http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/nigel%20clark.pdf


this discrepant treatment of culture and its physical or material others is closely implicated with the tendency in much recent critical

thought, discerned by Massey, Barnett and others, to rely heavily on a certain conception of spatiality. As we saw earlier, contemporary discussions about estrangement are couched largely in terms of spatial displacement, ìn-betweenness', èxclusion' and other `spatial tropes' (see Barnett, 2005: 18). No less than the celebrated flux of human identity or culture, the disavowal of stray materiality seems to be expressed predominately in terms of being in or out of

place. But whereas the lateral mobilisations of human selves and their cultural expressions are construed as a deviation which are the norm, the corresponding wanderings of matter remain deviations from the norm. Culture, in short, is elected for incessant spatial play, while nature's default setting is assumed to be a no less spatialised stasis. It is revealing, in this regard, that amongst the many forces which Dillon refers to as generative of the radical displacement of the

refugee, the ordinary instability or variability of earth processes does not feature., In the writing of the geopolitics of estrangement, the self which is `fissured' , the human freedom which its àbyssal' appear divorced from the very physical processes to which these metaphors refer. And this suggests some severe limitations when it comes to addressing an excessiveness, an internal divisiveness which is that of the earth itself; when it is the human presence that stays in place, and the ground that shifts and fractures.


Link – Asteroids/Longer Clark

The affirmative’s [Insert impact] impact is not significant – Humanity is a tiny speck in the history of a universe that will inevitably die – in the face of uncontrollable catastrophe and inevitability, the only ethical option is to open up to the infinite beauty of the universeClark 10 – Senior Lecturer in Geography at Open University(Nigel, “Ex-Orbitant Generosity: Gifts of Love in a Cold Cosmos”, Parallax, Vol. 16, No. 1, Pg. 80-95, dml) Harman has no qualms about positing nonhuman objects that attract and repel each other. 50 He conceives of the elemental surfaces of things as making demands on each other, responding with the same sincerity that Levinas spoke of, all the while concealing their inner depths. In the context of thinking through our inhabitation of a volatile earth, this sort of inquiry is deeply promising. Even if we are not yet enthralled by the issue of the interactions of astral bodies in far-flung galaxies for their own

sake, the question of how independently forceful objects encounter each other on – or in the vicinity of – our planet has tremendous implications for the earth-bound beings who are constantly caught in the fallout of these clashes . Though , if we are willing to

follow Harman and agree that nonhuman objects have their own imperatives , do we also want to posit that these elemental encounters prompt ethical fidelities amongst themselves – besides those they may or may not incite amongst the vulnerable human bodies transfixed in their path? In recent writing on the gift, there have been a number of variations on the theme of Nietzsche’s selfless, life-giving solar flux. For Adriaan Peperzak, musing on the heterogeneous character of gift-giving: ‘Not only can the sun, trees, and animals give, but also anonymous forces and unknown sources. Nature, Fortune, Destiny, Moira, the gods, or God may be experienced or imagined as givers’. 51 In a related way, for Genevieve Vaughan, ‘Gaia, our Mother Earth [. . . .] the abundant planet on which we live’ is a preeminent source of the gifts upon which

human life depends. 52 While such accounts rarely provide explicit consideration of the relations of give and take that might pertain amongst these generous entities in our absence, there is little to indicate that these

bounteous flows switch off whenever their human recipients vacate the scene . Karen Barad, however, is unequivocal. In her extended consideration of the interactive

materiality of the universe, Barad boldly insists that the world’s constant becoming raises questions of ethical responsibility at every moment, whether humans are present or not : ‘Ethicality is part of the fabric of the world; the call to respond and be responsible is part of what is’. 53 The merger of ontology and ethics that Barad proposes is far from unique. In the current rage for philosophies of immanence, for neo-vitalism and processuality – the insistence on a single ontological plane in which disparate entities engage in streams of transmutation generally presupposes that the ethical is implicated in the all-encompassing creative flux. This does not imply creativity or becoming is painless, however. In Deleuze’s influential take on pure immanence, life may flow on indomitably, but there

is nonetheless plenty of wounding as encounters between bodies trigger violent and unpredictable transformations . Thus: ‘every dynamism is a catastrophe . There is necessarily something cruel in this birth of a world which is a chaosmos ’. 54 For Deleuze, and those in his orbit, the ethical is not

primarily a response to the suffering that arises out of wrenching change – or any kind of response or obligation at all. As the affirmation of the transformative possibility that inheres in encounters and interactions, ethics is an immanent evaluation of the process of becoming. Although the usual term in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings for the driving force of creative transformation is ‘desire’, John Protevi accentuates the ethical-ontological fusion by picking up those instances in their work when this is referred to as ‘love’: ‘When bodies join in the mutual experimental deterritorialisation that is love, we find Deleuze and Guattari’s most adventurous concept: the living, changing, multiplying virtual, the unfolding

of the plane of consistency. Love is complexity producing novelty, the very process of life’. 55 In this way, desire or love is becoming, and generosity is generativity - which makes it, to borrow a formulation from Ray Brassier, òntologically ubiquitous’.56 Effectively, there is no need for a distinctive ethics to address the injuries of transmutation, because the catastrophe itself is ultimately productive. With the championing of pure process and incessant becoming that characterises much of the contemporary take on ìmmanence’, what counts is not so much the substantive bodies that happen to come into being, so much as the great overarching stream of generative matter-energy from which all individuated forms are bodied forth .Where the unlimited potential for becoming or change takes precedence over the limited and constrained condition of the actual bodies it gives rise to, there can be no absolute and irreparable loss. Whatever dissolution of bodily integrity takes place, what ever fate befalls actual beings, is less of a termination than a reconfiguration , a temporary undoing that facilitates a renewed participation in the greater flow. And with this prioritization of process over product, of virtuality over actuality, whatever fidelity is called for is to the `flux of invincible life’ itself

- rather than to its interruptions.57 `Catastrophe’, in this sense, is the speedy, if painful, passage to a fresh start, to a new life. If it is a crack that fissures the ontological universe, then it is ultimately a self- suturing one. But for some theorists who take the event of the cataclysm to heart, a non- annihilating disaster is not a disaster worthy of the name. As Edith Wyschogrod concludes of Deleuzo-Guattarian catastrophism: `Because there is nothing but the fullness of desiring production, they cannot, strictly speaking, explain disease and natural catastrophe....’ 58 For Ray Brassier, the fashionable avowal of pure process or immanence raises a more general issue: that of how such philosophies are to account for discontinuity at all, how they are to explain breaks in pure productivity or lapses into inactivity. This is a problem not just for

Deleuze, he suggests, `but for any philosophy that would privilege becoming over stasis’.59 Brassier’s engagement with solar extinction returns us to the literal exorbitance of an earth open and precarious in the face of an inhospitable cosmos and to the Levinasian theme of existence fissured by impassable rifts. Whereas Harman stresses the innumerable ruptures that punctuate a universe of heterogeneous objects, Brassier zeroes on the quandaries posed by one particular juncture. Against any philosophy that assumes the necessity of a thinking being to make sense of the world , and equally counter to any philosophical stance that posits an incessant stream of becoming, he draws out the significance of the moment when terrestrial life might be – or rather, will be - totally, irredeemably, extinguished. Playing off a discussion by Jean-François Lyotard about our sun gradually burning out and rendering the earth uninhabitable - an eventuality which scientists have predicted with some confidence – Brassier points up the certainty of non-existence that weighs upon all life . 60 For Levinas, the impossibility of self-identity, of synchronicity, and of the closure of reciprocity is signalled by the passage into the time of the other: the interruption of self- presence by à time without me ’ .61 In his working through of the inheritance of Levinas, Derrida observes that love is always a rupture in the living present,


haunted by the knowledge that Òne of us will see the other die, one of us will live on, even if only for an instant’.62 This is love’s exorbitance, the impossibility of its recuperation into an economy of reciprocal, synchronous or symmetrical gestures. For

Brassier, that fact that terrestrial life is eventually doomed by solar catastrophe promises a time without me, without any of us, without thought or experience, without even the life that lends death its much-touted significance. This is a quite literal crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: objective scientific knowledge that propels thought on the impossible task of thinking thought’s own non-bein g . As Brassier announces: `Lyotard’s `solar catastrophe’ effectively transposes Levinas’s theologically inflected ìmpossibility of possibility’ into a natural-scientific register, so that it is no

longer the death of the Other that usurps the sovereignty of consciousness, but the extinction of the sun’.63 In the face of the other , in its exposure to the elements, we catch a glimpse of our own vulnerability and finitude.64 In the face of a cyclone, or the face of others traumatised by gale-force winds, we see forces strong enough to overwhelm communities, cities, entire regions. We may also in some opaque sense - but in a way that is currently subject to elucidation by the physical sciences - feel an intimation of energies that could overwhelm an earth. And ultimately annihilate every conceivable entity . In Brassier’s words: roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment. Every star in the universe will have burnt out , plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter . 65 Negating the consolation of endless becoming or

ubiquitous self-overflowing, this scenario implies that ethics too is ultimately doomed : the gift of the disaster pointing finally to the disaster of the gift. And yet, across a nation state that could have been any patch of the globe, ordinary folk offer beds to complete strangers, the townspeople of a backwater village ladle out lashings of Hurricane Gumbo to dishevelled company, and a million and one other obscure acts of love flare and fade away: tiny sparks of generosity that arc across the cracks in daily life. And keep doing so in spite of, because of, the perishability that characterises the gift, its giver and its recipient

alike. For John Caputo, who also gazes directly at the coming solar disaster, it is the very `face of a faceless cosmos’ that makes of an ethical opening to an other àn act of hyperbolic partiality and defiance’ .66 In this way, it is not just that each gift is an offering of flesh and the giving of a terrain, but that every gift carries the trace of the very extinguishing of existence . In its responsiveness to the inconsistency or the excessiveness of light, each generous reception murmurs against the dying of all light . Somewhere beside or beyond critical thought’s harsh cross-examination of compassion and the neo-vitalist extension of ethical dispositions into every corner of the cosmos, then, runs this other option, propelled by the very exorbitance, diachrony and asymmetry that severs being from thought and unhinges ethics from ontology . If it negates the radical passivity of generosity to demand that it enacts a moral cost accounting before it sets forth, so too does it rebuke the idea of a responsibility that is primordially receptive to declare that every spontaneous energetic or material discharge is in essence a gift . Demands might well emit from any object, but not every thing can give in or give out in response to a summons. As biologist Lynn Margulis and science writer Dorion Sagan put it: ̀ life is matter that chooses’ .67 Which appears to makes choice fairly rare in the known universe, as well as contingent and, in all likelihood, ephemeral. Like other living creatures, we humans `can turn away from faces as we can turn away from the surfaces of things’. Or choose not too. Even if it is not unique, perhaps our particularly pronounced capacity to vacillate between turning toward and turning away has a defining quality . If not us, then who?


Blocks


Generic Stuff


AT: Framework

Our framework is the Aff must defend the value judgments of the 1AC. The ballot should evaluate the round through a lens valuing all beings as equal.

It’s most predictable – the 1AC was 10 seconds of plan text and 7:50 of value judgments about the status quo – make them defend those judgments

Their framework limits out the Other – engaging alterity as unknown is the precondition to ethical politics and should be first priorityJones 9 (Rachel, University of Dundee, “On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be,” As presented at ‘On Not Knowing’, a Symposium hosted by Kettle’s Yard and New Hall College, Cambridge, 29th June 2009, to accompany the exhibition ‘Material Intelligence’, Kettle’s Yard, 16 May – 12 July 2009)

Thus described, wonder is the passion that can accompany not knowing, providing we recognize that the object we encounter is not the same as what we already do know. Wonder arises before we know enough to make any utilitarian calculation about whether an object might be pleasing or useful to us (or not). For Descartes, as for Aristotle, it could therefore be said that philosophy begins in wonder, for this passionate state of not knowing is what makes us think , ask questions,

and seek to understand. Wonder is the ‘first of all the passions’ not only because it is our initial response to something new and unknown, but because it implies that other passions will follow, as we find out more about what we have encountered. 3. Although she critiques Descartes’ model of a self-founding subject, Luce Irigaray takes up his notion of wonder in a short essay where she writes (second quote): ‘In order for it

[wonder] to affect us, it is necessary and sufficient for it to surprise, to be new, not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known . Still

awakening our passion, our appetite, our attraction to that which is not yet (en)coded, our curiosity (but perhaps in all senses: sight, smell, hearing? etc) vis-à-vis that which we have not yet encountered or made ours.’ 3 The as-yet-unknown is here aligned with that which we have ‘not yet encoded’, not yet translated into the conceptual and symbolic frameworks we use to make sense of the world ; at the same time, the passage hints at an entirely different way of coming to know someone or something, involving an attunement of the senses to that which is other and irreducible to those frameworks. While we may still go on to grasp and appropriate the unfamiliar, Irigaray calls on us to cultivate the sense of wonder that can inhabit all our encounters, 4

providing we remain attentive to the unique singularity of others, to the ways in which, no matter how much we know about someone else, they remain irreducibly different from us. Wonder thus remains the first of all the passions, not simply because it is the first we experience, but because it has an ethical priority . Cultivating wonder is a way of remaining open to the otherness of the other without seeking to appropriate or assimilate them . For Irigaray, the difference to which wonder holds us open is first and foremost the difference between the sexes; sexuate difference is for her the first difference in the same sense as wonder is the first passion. Wonder is thus essential to the possibility of an erotic encounter in which each desires the other without seeking to own or appropriate.

However, as well as love, the wonder that arises from not knowing is, she says, ‘the passion that inaugurates … art. And thought.’ 5 4. Art, thought, and not knowing are linked in a long and complex history, from which I have selected only one particular moment here, albeit a particularly influential one. In Kant’s account of genius, he emphasises that genius works without knowing what it is doing, insofar as no rule could be formulated in advance for producing a truly original artwork. Rather, the rule must be abstracted after the fact, to the extent that works of genius come to serve as examples for others. In fact, Kant’s genius works in a delicate balance between knowing and not

knowing, for while the artist is unable to use concepts or rules to fully determine what will emerge from their creative activities, for these to be productive of more than mere nonsense, they must nonetheless draw on other kinds of knowledge . This includes the technical knowledge or skills required to work with their materials as well as knowledge of preceding aesthetic traditions – which true genius will always both break and reinvigorate. For those of us not blessed with what Kant calls genius however, not knowing remains an essential component of what he describes as the most intense kind of aesthetic experience, that of the sublime. One trigger for the sublime is the encounter with something which seems infinite to us – an ever-receding mountain range or the vastness of

the ocean. Our faculties struggle to grasp such apparent infinities, for the moment we try to take them in and represent them in a single image, we place a limit on them and thereby lose the suggestion of infinity which attracted us to them in the first place. In ways that recall the poster for this symposium, we experience sublimity when we are all at sea (though the image also pokes gentle fun at the overly serious language of the sublime, as it shows someone all at sea in a pedal-boat). On Kant’s

account, even though we cannot represent infinity, our very failure to grasp it makes us all the more aware of our ability to think that which we cannot know, to have an idea of that which goes beyond anything we can take in via the senses. Thus he writes: ‘[N]othing that can be an object of the senses is to be called sublime. [What happens is that] our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so [the imagination], our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacy itself is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power … Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.’ 7 Note the movement that characterises Kant’s account of the sublime, which begins with a sense of awe at nature’s apparent infinities, but ends with a similar sense of awe at our own rational faculties. On Kant’s model, the disruptive moment of not knowing is recuperated in ways that re-affirm the powers of the subject, and reinforce his ability to separate himself from and transcend the material world of the senses. 5. Despite this, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, writing nearly 200 years after Kant, recognises the potential in Kant’s account of the sublime for a more radical challenge to

the knowing subject. For Lyotard, as for Kant, the sublime occurs when we encounter something we cannot represent, but unlike for Kant, this does not have to be the grand

horizons of seemingly limitless oceans or mountain ranges. Rather, the infinite is contained within the most immediate and subtle of sensations, insofar as any sensation is

infinitely unique, irreplaceable by any other. Hence, any attempt to grasp a sensory event, to make it present to ourselves by re-presenting it, will inevitably erase that which we were seeking to capture. Rather than recoup this inability via our power to think the infinite, Lyotard places the emphasis more on the value of this temporary

incapacitation. It is only when we are thus undone as knowing subjects that we are able to remain open to the singularity of the material event, which Lyotard describes in terms of: ‘a singular, incomparable quality – unforgettable and immediately forgotten – of the grain of a skin or a piece of wood, the fragrance of an aroma, the savour of a secretion or a piece of flesh, as


well as a timbre or a nuance. All these terms … designate the event of a passion, a passability for which the mind will not have been prepared, which will have unsettled it’. ‘Nuance or timbre are the distress and despair of the exact division … From this aspect of matter, one must say that it must be immaterial. … The matter I’m talking about is

‘immaterial’, anobjectable, because it can only ‘take place’ or find its occasion at the price of suspending [the] active powers of the mind.’ 8 Though Lyotard does not describe the sublime in terms of wonder here, perhaps wonder is still present in the ‘passion’ and ‘passability’ that allow us to remain open to the material event. Such events are immaterial to the knowing subject who can

only betray their incomparable uniqueness by trying to grasp them via familiar forms and concepts. For Lyotard, as for Irigaray, the moment of not knowing thus holds an ethical promise , that of being able to do justice to the singular by letting go of the desire to know , and allowing ourselves to be unsettled into bearing witness to the incomparable and irreplaceable. 6. Allowing oneself to be thus undone is, for Lyotard, the very condition of thought , and hence, the condition of doing philosophy. Learning how to think means letting go of everything one thought one knew, so as to think again with an open and questioning inventiveness; teaching someone how to think means learning how to unlearn, so as to enter with them on the journey of a question. 9

Teacher and pupil both must be prepared to return to a state of unpreparedness and unknowing that he calls infancy : ‘You cannot open up a question without leaving yourself open to it. You cannot scrutinize a ‘subject’ ... without being scrutinized by it. You cannot do any of these things without renewing ties with the season of childhood, the season of the mind’s possibilities.’ 10

The inventiveness of infancy allows us to judge without criteria, where there are no rules to follow and no one to tell us what to do. Lyotard counsels us to nurture and renew the potency of infancy, the ‘childhood of thought’ that remains with us in adulthood and that grants human beings a capacity to begin again, to find new ways of thinking and being. Such infancy, he argues, is at odds with the contemporary emphasis on ‘performance’ which insists that our inventiveness must be quantifiably productive and refuses to tolerate a questioning that does not know where it is going or whether answers will be found. What Lyotard calls ‘the stifling busyness of performativity’ 11 cannot bear the idea of not making progress, nor find any value in the possibility of failure: from this perspective, having to begin again is a sign of time wasted, rather than

of a capacity for renewal. Yet without the risk of failure, of getting lost or ‘being adrift’, 12 there is no real openness to the unknown, to the new thoughts that might emerge from the as yet unthought: ‘We write before knowing what to say and how to say it, and in order to find out, if possible. … We recommence, but we

cannot rely on it getting to the thought itself, there, at the end. For the thought is here, muddled up in the unthought, trying to sort out the impertinent babble of childhood.’ 13 To foreclose this impertinent time of infancy is to foreclose the possibility of recommencing, of thinking again and beginning anew .

Their education isn’t germane – newspapers and government classes solve

Reduction of debate to purely political concerns guarantees atrocity – we must infuse ethics into our decisionmakingIntrona 5 – Professor of Organization, Technology and Ethics at Lancaster University(Lucas, “Justice, ethics and piracy: on doing the right thing”, http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/management/documents/research/research-units/cppe/conference-pdfs/levinas/introna.pdf, dml)

For Levinas, ethics is happens —or not— when the self-certain ego becomes disturbed (shaken, questioned) by the proximity, before me, of the absolute Other, the absolute singular (the Infinite). The wholly Other that takes me by surprise , overturns and overflows my categories, themes and concepts; it shatters their walls , makes their evident sense explode into non-sense . For Levinas the claim of conventional ethics (Ethics with a big ‘E’ as Caputo calls it) that we can know, the right thing to do, is to claim that the absolute singular can become absorbed into, domesticated by, the categories of my consciousnes s. Once the Other , this singular face before me, has become an instance in my categories or themes it (the face) can no longer disturb the self-evidentness of those categorie s . Nothing is more self-evident than my categories, and likewise with the singular now absorbed as an instance of them. As jew,

nigger, rich, poor, homeless, rapist, criminal, capitalist, idealist, realist, (and every other category we care to name) the singular disturbing face disappear in the economy of the category. In the category, we can reason about rights , obligations, laws and principles, and yet ethics may never happen — actual faces starve, die, are humiliated, scorned as they circulate in the economy of our categories. They fall through the cracks of our debates, arguments and counter-arguments, and yet we feel justified— we have our reasons; it was the right thing to do after all .

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/management/documents/research/research-units/cppe/conference-pdfs/levinas/introna.pdf

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/management/documents/research/research-units/cppe/conference-pdfs/levinas/introna.pdf


AT: Owen

This isn’t responsive, Owen just criticizes abstract postmodernists and focusing on the different “ologies” – we don’t do that, our ethical critique has material dimensions – that’s Introna from the framework debate

Owen votes neg – the capacity to reflect on ethics must come first – this is from a later portion of their articleOwen 2 – Reader of Political Theory at the University of Southhampton(David, “Re-orienting International Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning”, Millennium – Journal of International Studies July 2002 vol. 31 no. 3 653-673, dml)

From a processual rather than teleological standpoint, it is precisely this free activity, this capacity to critically reflect on and transform our ethical orientation to —and practical relations with—government that matters and it is this process , this operation of intelligence, that IR conceived as practical philosophy serves. Second, one might worry that taking

growth as the end itself fails to distinguish between different forms of growth, for example those that we consider ethical and those that we do not. The problem with this objection is that it does not think through what taking growth as the end itself entails. There are two points to note here. First, that growth is conceptualised by Dewey in terms of our capacity for critical intelligence, that is, our capacity for discriminating judgement and action. Thus, for example, an increase in our capacities for ignoring inconvenient evidence , for wilful blindness and for wishful thinking is not growth in terms of Dewey’s use of this concept. Second, taking growth as the end itself means discriminating between forms of growth in terms of the degree to which they support or undermine the further growth of our powers of critical intelligence .


AT: Tuathail/Reps Focus Bad

That’s not the link, we’re not a critique of discourse, we’re talking about the way they engage with beings in the world, the Introna evidence on framework indicates that this is a material critique with real implications

Ethics is separate from and precedes discourseJovanovic and Wood 4 (Spoma and Roy, Communications/Rhetoric Professors at Denver University and U North Carolina, Philosophy and Rhetoric Vol 37 no 4, 2004, 317-334, dml)

To consider these opening facts of communication is to conceive of language or discourse in a wholly different realm from intentional, predetermined,

strategic enterprise where the other is but an object in the self's plans for mastery. Levinas accentuates this by unveiling the properties of communication as ethical encounter, or saying. .One can, to be sure, conceive of language as an act, as a gesture of behavior. But then one omits the essential of language: the coinciding of the revealer and the revealed in the face. (1969, 67). For Levinas, ethics precedes discourse in disclosure . That is, before we even conceive of a freedom that would enable us to choose ethics, there is already the imperative Yes! that signals our submission and sacrifice to the other (Levinas 1996c). Why are we pulled toward the other as Levinas suggests? Under what conditions can it be, and matter, that ethics precedes discourse? For Levinas, being for the other provides an important insight into how our moral obli gation is grounded not in specific altruistic activity, thorough understanding, or adherence to universal laws. Alphonso Lingis, a translator of many of Levinas.s

works, describes the ethical nature of communication succinctly: .What is said is inessential; what is essential is that I be there and speak. (1994, xi). Speech is first and

foremost the acknowledgment of sociality that signifies the importance of the encounter with the other . Speech for Levinas is not, as

we have been conditioned to think, the link to participation that seeks comprehension of the other (1996a). This limited reading of speech represents for Levinas totality and closure rather than infinity and alterity. Richard Cohen, another of Levinas.s translators, questions in his introduction to Ethics and Infinity the role of speech altogether. “Ethics occurs. . . across the hiatus of dialogue, not in the content of discourse , in the continuities or discontinuities of what is said, but in the demand for response” (Levinas 1985, 12). Actually, Cohen points to the force of communication without naming it as such. Transcending dialogue there is ethics, but to instantiate ethics requires communication, whether in the hiatus, the response, or the approach. Ethics evokes then, rather than defines, and in so doing defies our propensity to codify, compare, and commit to a certain course of action prior to engagement . For Levinas, the face of the other (the other we recognize

and the others we do not) is an interruption that arouses a desire to move toward the other, not knowing what may come. The desire and its accompanying responsibility are indicative of a turn outward toward a communal life.


AT: Perm

Permutation is impossible – the 1AC staked out a particular model of ethics that makes certain value judgments about the world – the 1NC was an indict of those judgments – they should be forced to defend them – that’s Introna

Severing their ethical standpoint is a voting issue – makes it impossible to garner stable ground because they can spike any link – it also kills discussion of 90% of the 1AC, makes clash impossible which is the key internal link into good advocacy skills

Their starting point is flawed which is a reason their ethic and the alternative are mutually exclusive – incorporation of the alt into legislation dooms the struggleTaylor 98Prue 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]

The question 'are ecocentric ethics really necessary?' is frequently asked. Could we not, for example, achieve our environmental

goals by more rigorous environmental legislation? Obviously much could be improved as a consequence of tighter controls, but two important limitations would remain. First, the question of 'how clean is clean' would continue to be answered solely by reference to human needs and standards. Thus water quality would he determined by interests such as human welfare, recreation needs and aesthetic values. The interests of nature and the needs of fully functioning ecosystems, which full below a human-centred threshold, would be left unprtxected. By taking into account a much larger and

more complex set of ecocentrically determined interests, tougher environmental standards would he achieved.217 Second, as Bosselmann points out, decision - makers would not be able to make the important paradigm jump to protecting nature for its own sake . Worse, in cases where decision-makers felt morally

committed to such a jump, they would be forced to find constrained logic to justify their decisions. The variety of ethical approaches to environmental decision-making has raised the question of moral pluralism. Stone, for example, has suggested that situations can be resolved according to either anthropocentric or ecocentric views depending on the nature of the problem. Thus

decision makers are able to switch from one value system to another. Such a process is rejected by commentators such as 3.

Baird Callicott who believes that ecocentric ethics are 'not only a question of better rational arguments but the expression of a fundamentally changed

attitude to nature. Callicott reminds Stone that anthropocentric attitudes and ecocencric ethics represent quite different paradigms. That in reality people do not follow anthropocentric attitudes in the morning, only to switch to ecocentric ethics after lunch . In the context of New Zealand's primary environmental legislation, this debate is currently being worked through in practice. The Resource Management Act 1991 (1RMA') is guided by 'sustainable management', a concept which is defined in both anthropocentric and ecocentric terms, leaving room for tension between the supporters of alternative approaches." 221 To date the RMA has been largely dominated by anthropocenisic interests due to a failure by key authorities, such as the Environment Court and local government, to make the significant changes in attitude required by the Act's ecocentric principles. It has been suggested that this tension, evident in implementation of the RMA, can only be resolved by an interpretation of sustainable management' which is ecological.

The permutation is an attempt to codify the other into calculation – this means it can’t solve the alternative. Introna 10 – Professor of Organization, Technology and Ethics at Lancaster University(Lucas, “The ‘Measure of a Man’ and the Ethos of Hospitality: Towards an Ethical Dwelling with Technology”, AI and Society Vol 25 no 1, pg 93-102, dml)

It is exactly this simultaneous presence of the Other and all other Others that gives birth to the question of justice. The urgency of justice is an urgency born out of the radical irreducible asymmetry of every ethical relation with the Other. Without such a radical asymmetry, the claim of the Other can always in principle become determined and codified into a calculation , justice as a calculation and distribution. Thus, justice has its standard, its force, in the ethical

proximity of the singular Other. As Levinas (1991[1974], 159) asserts: ‘‘justice remains justice only, in a society where there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest. The equality of all is born by my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights. The forgetting of self moves justice’’ (emphasis added). This formulation of the aporia between ethics and justice by Levinas highlights the tension, one may say the profound ‘paradox’ of hospitality in the relation between the

quest and the host. We can welcome the guest (the wholly Other) unconditionally but we must simultaneously assert that the host (and all other possible guests) are also, and need also be taken as, radically singular Others. Without this impossible possibility


ethics and justice (or rather hospitality) will not have the urgency of an ethics that really matters . Buts what does this mean for Data and all other artificial beings? 6 Responding

to the wholly Other One may respond by claiming that an ethics of hospitality leaves us in a dead-end with nowhere to go . Yes, it does leave

one in an impossible possibility but that is exactly its strength. It is when we believe that we have ‘sorted’ ethics out that violence is already present. Conversely, it is when we become unsure, when we are full of questions, when our categories fails us, and we need to think afresh, start all over again, that it becomes possible for us to be open to the questioning appeal of the otherness of the Other, to be truly hospitable . Where does

this leave us? What do we concretely do? I will suggest—in following Derrida and Levinas—that an ethics of hospitality could be based on, but not limited to, the following aporia: • The suspension of the law

(unconditionally) • Letting the Other speak • Undecidability and impossibility • Justice for all Others (for every third whatsoever) 6.1 The suspension of the law (unconditionally) Derrida (1992) suggests, as was argued above, that

it is only when we suspend the law unconditionally (categories, codes, values, etc.) to make a ‘fresh’ judgement, that hospitality becomes possible. If the possibility of becoming unsettled by the otherness of the Other becomes circumvented by the self- evidence of the category, code, reasons, etc., then the law becomes a law onto itself —pure violence. Hospitality demands that we interrogate again and again the implicit judgements—inclusions and exclusions— already implied in the law. In the case of Data, the categories and judgements remained in tact in many interacting ways. It was Data that was on trial, not the humans. It was evident to everybody that he was the ‘lesser’

machine and that they had the right to decide his fate. The right of the humans to decide did not come up for consideration. Furthermore, once the court case started his friends ironically believed that his moral worth was in being ‘like them’. They did not suspend their categories of ‘machine’, ‘person’ and ‘sentience’ and asked the question ‘‘what is it about Data, as Data, that is signi ficant’’. One can most certainly question whether Data

really did find ‘justice’ in being spared because he was almost like them? Without radically unsettling the implicit judgements about ‘‘the measure’’ to be considered ethics did not happen . More generally, our human tendency to treat the inanimate, the artificial, as our instruments , as

being in our service, for our purposes, needs to be suspended unconditionally. Without such as step the possibility of an ethics of hospitality towards all beings is not possible .


AT: Utopian Fiat

No link – the alt isn’t fiated and we don’t claim spillover – the alternative is an ethical reorientation towards affirming equality, not a widespread movement

Fiat is just as utopian – they imagine that the government works together seamlessly to pass a controversial policy – this would never happen in the real world – proves the arbitrariness of this argument

Not a voting issue – it’s a reason to reject whatever parts of the alternative are utopian


AT: Vague Alts

No link – we’re not a vague alternative, we affirm an end to ethical hierarchies – Introna on framework proves this critique is situated in material conditions

K is an impact turn – we reject the idea that we should obsessively map out the world into clear structures

This isn’t a voting issue – if they’re unsure about the function of the alt they can ask us – cross-x checks any abuse


AT: Floating PIKs

They need to win plan focus good to win this – aff inclusive advocacies is the only check we have against tiny affs that don’t link to anything – otherwise debate devolves into stale generic links and bad Ks like Nietzsche

Counter-interpretation – we only get Ks that indict the method of the advantages as a whole – all of our offense on framework is reasons this is preferable

Hold them accountable – they picked their advantages for strategic reasons – there has to be an opportunity cost for designing their aff in a specific way, they have to defend their reps


Specific Stuff


AT: Case Outweighs/Util

They are in a double-bind – either they are making the kind of value judgments we critique or everything is equal and you vote neg because their impact does not alter the amount of matter in the universeEric Katz, Director of Science, Technology, and Society Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 1997[Nature as Subject p. 9-10]

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, a utilitarian calculation. According to this kind of position, the needs 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. A second alternative, highly tentative, is a movement away from a "want-oriented perspective" in ethical theory.

Rather than evaluat ing the moral worth of an action by the consequences which satisfy needs and desires in the humyn (or even nonhumyn) 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 preservation 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.

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.

The state of existence is irrelevant – eventually everything in existence will die – only the act of the alternative presents a truly revolutionary act of life-celebrationClark 10 – Senior Lecturer in Geography at Open University(Nigel, “Ex-Orbitant Generosity: Gifts of Love in a Cold Cosmos”, Parallax, Vol. 16, No. 1, Pg. 80-95, dml) For Deleuze, and those in his orbit, the ethical is not primarily a response to the suffering that arises out of wrenching change – or any kind of response or obligation at all. As the affirmation of the transformative possibility that inheres in encounters and interactions,

ethics is an immanent evaluation of the process of becoming . Although the usual term in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings for the driving force of creative transformation is ‘desire’, John Protevi accentuates the ethical-ontological fusion by picking up those instances in their work when this is referred to as ‘love’: ‘When bodies join in the mutual experimental deterritorialisation that is love, we find Deleuze and Guattari’s most adventurous concept: the living,

changing, multiplying virtual, the unfolding of the plane of consistency. Love is complexity producing novelty, the very process of life’. 55 In this way, desire or love is becoming, and generosity is generativity - which makes it , to borrow a formulation from Ray Brassier, òntologically ubiquitous’.56 Effectively, there is no need for a distinctive ethics to address the injuries of transmutation, because the catastrophe itself is ultimately productive. With the championing of pure process and incessant becoming that characterises much of the contemporary take on ìmmanence’, what counts is not so much the substantive bodies that happen to come into being, so much as the great overarching stream of generative matter-energy from which all individuated forms are bodied forth .Where the unlimited potential for becoming or change takes precedence over the limited and constrained condition of the actual bodies it gives rise to, there can be no absolute and irreparable loss. Whatever dissolution of bodily integrity takes place, what ever fate befalls actual beings, is less of a termination than a reconfiguration , a temporary undoing that facilitates a renewed participation in the greater flow. And with this prioritization of process over product, of virtuality over actuality, whatever

fidelity is called for is to the `flux of invincible life’ itself - rather than to its interruptions.57 `Catastrophe’, in this sense, is the speedy, if painful, passage to a fresh start, to a new life. If it is a crack that fissures the ontological universe, then it is ultimately a self- suturing one. But for some theorists who take the event of the cataclysm to heart, a non- annihilating disaster is not a disaster worthy of the name. As Edith Wyschogrod concludes of Deleuzo-Guattarian catastrophism: `Because there is nothing but the fullness of desiring production, they cannot, strictly speaking, explain disease and natural catastrophe....’ 58 For Ray Brassier, the fashionable avowal of pure process or immanence raises a more general issue: that of how such philosophies are to account for discontinuity at all, how they are to explain breaks in pure

productivity or lapses into inactivity. This is a problem not just for Deleuze, he suggests, `but for any philosophy that would privilege becoming over stasis’.59 Brassier’s engagement with solar extinction returns us to the literal exorbitance of an earth open and precarious in the face of an inhospitable cosmos and to the Levinasian theme of existence fissured by impassable rifts. Whereas Harman stresses the innumerable ruptures that punctuate a universe of heterogeneous objects, Brassier zeroes on the

quandaries posed by one particular juncture. Against any philosophy that assumes the necessity of a thinking being to make sense of the world ,


and equally counter to any philosophical stance that posits an incessant stream of becoming , he draws out the significance of the moment

when terrestrial life might be – or rather, will be - totally, irredeemably, extinguished. Playing off a discussion by Jean-François Lyotard about our sun gradually burning out and rendering the earth uninhabitable - an eventuality which scientists have predicted with some confidence – Brassier points up the certainty of non-existence that weighs upon all life . 60 For Levinas, the impossibility of self-identity, of synchronicity, and of the closure of reciprocity is signalled by the passage into the time of the other: the interruption of self- presence by à time without me ’ .61 In his working

through of the inheritance of Levinas, Derrida observes that love is always a rupture in the living present, haunted by the knowledge that Òne of us will see the other die, one of us will live on, even if only for an instant’.62 This is love’s exorbitance, the impossibility

of its recuperation into an economy of reciprocal, synchronous or symmetrical gestures. For Brassier, that fact that terrestrial life is eventually doomed by solar catastrophe promises a time without me, without any of us, without thought or experience, without even the life that lends death its much- touted significance. This is a quite literal crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: objective scientific knowledge that propels thought on the impossible task of thinking thought’s own non-bein g . As Brassier announces: `Lyotard’s `solar catastrophe’ effectively transposes

Levinas’s theologically inflected ìmpossibility of possibility’ into a natural-scientific register, so that it is no longer the death of the Other that usurps the sovereignty of consciousness, but the extinction of the sun’.63 In the face of the other , in its exposure to the elements, we catch a glimpse of our own vulnerability and finitude .64 In the face of a cyclone, or the face of others traumatised by gale-force winds, we see forces strong enough to overwhelm communities, cities, entire regions. We may also in some opaque sense - but in a way that is currently subject to elucidation by the physical sciences - feel an intimation of energies that could overwhelm an earth. And ultimately annihilate every conceivable entity . In Brassier’s words: roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment. Every star in the universe will have burnt out , plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter . 65 Negating the consolation of endless becoming or ubiquitous self-overflowing, this scenario implies that ethics too is ultimately doomed : the gift of the disaster pointing finally to the disaster of the gift. And yet, across a nation state that could have been any patch of the globe, ordinary folk offer beds to complete strangers, the townspeople of a backwater village ladle out lashings of Hurricane Gumbo to dishevelled company, and a million and one other obscure acts of love flare and fade away: tiny sparks of generosity that arc across the cracks in daily life. And keep doing so in spite of,

because of, the perishability that characterises the gift, its giver and its recipient alike. For John Caputo, who also gazes directly at the coming solar disaster, it is the very `face of a faceless cosmos’ that makes of an ethical opening to an other àn act of hyperbolic partiality and defiance’ .66 In this way, it is not just that each gift is an offering of flesh and the giving of a terrain, but that every gift carries the trace of the very extinguishing of existence . In its responsiveness to the inconsistency or the excessiveness of light, each generous reception murmurs against the dying of all light . Somewhere beside or beyond critical thought’s harsh cross-examination of compassion and the neo-vitalist extension of ethical dispositions into every corner of the cosmos, then, runs this other option, propelled by the very exorbitance, diachrony and asymmetry that severs being from thought and unhinges ethics from ontology . If it negates the radical passivity of generosity to demand that it enacts a moral cost accounting before it sets forth, so too does it rebuke the idea of a responsibility that is primordially receptive to declare that every spontaneous energetic or material discharge is in essence a gift. Demands might well emit from any object, but not every thing can give in or give out in response to a summons. As biologist Lynn Margulis and science writer Dorion Sagan put it: ̀ life is matter that chooses’ .67 Which appears to makes choice fairly rare in the known universe, as well as contingent and, in all likelihood, ephemeral. Like other living creatures, we humans `can turn away from faces as we can turn away from the surfaces of things’. Or choose not too. Even if it is not unique, perhaps our particularly pronounced capacity to vacillate between turning toward and turning away has a defining quality . If not us, then who?


AT: Predictions Good

You cannot evaluate predictions/calculations until you decide what is valuable – if we win a link argument it short-circuits the consequences debate because their anthropocentrism determines both the meaning of their impacts and their ability to know the world – that’s Introna.

Cross-apply Jones from framework – the Otherness of the universe approaches us prior to knowledge – your ballot is an ethical orientation and it should aim to open up new modes of being rather than acting within current onesAnthony Weston, Professor of Philosophy at Elon University, 2009[The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher p. 9-11]

If the world is a collection of more or less fixed facts to which we must respond, then the task of ethics is to systematize and unify our responses. This is the expected view,

once again so taken for granted as to scarcely even appear as a “view” at all. Epistemology is prior to ethics. Responding to the world follows upon knowing it—and what could be more sensible or responsible

than that? If the world is not “given,” though—if the world is what it seems to be in part because we have made it that way , as I have been suggesting, and if therefore the

process of inviting its further possibilities into the light is fundamental to ethics itself—then our very knowledge of the world, of the possibilities of other

animals and the land and even ourselves in relation to them, follows upon “invitation,” and ethics must come fi rst. Ethics is prior to epistemology — or, as Cheney and I do not say in the paper but

probably should have said, what really emerges is another kind of epistemology—“etiquette,” in our specifi c sense, as epistemology. But then of course we are also speaking of something sharply different from “ethics” as usually understood. We are asked not for a set of well-defended general moral commitments in advance, but rather for something more visceral and instinctual, a mode of comportment more than a mode of commitment, more fleshy and more vulnerable. Etiquette so understood requires us to take risks, to offer trust before we know whether or how the offer will be received, and to move with awareness, civility, and grace in a world we understand to be capable of

response. Thus Cheney and I conclude that ethical action itself must be “fi rst and foremost an attempt to open up possibilities, to enrich the world” rather than primarily an attempt to

respond to the world as already known . Cheney, true to his nature, also takes the argument on a more strenuous path, exploring indigenous views of ceremony and ritual. Once again the question of epistemology turns out to be central. Euro-Americans, Cheney says, want to know what beliefs are encoded in the utterances of indigenous peoples. We treat their utterances as propositional representations of Indigenous worlds. But what if these utterances function, instead,

primarily to produce these worlds? Cheney cites the indigenous scholar Sam Gill on the fundamentally performative function of language. When Gill asks Navajo elders what prayers mean, he reports, they tell him “not what messages prayers carry, but what prayers do .” More generally, Gill asserts that “the importance of religion as it is practiced by the great body of religious persons for whom religion is a way of life [is] a way of creating, discovering, and

communicating worlds of meaning largely through ordinary and common actions and behavior.”11 What then, Cheney and I ask, if this performative dimension of language is fundamental not just in indigenous or obviously religious settings, but generally? How we speak, how we move, how we carry on, all the time, also literally brings all sorts of worlds into being—and thus, again, the ethical challenge put mindful speech, care, and respect fi rst. Indeed we would now go even further. Here it is not so much that epistemology comes fi rst but that, in truth, it simply fades away. The argument is not the usual suggestion that the West has misunder- stood the world, got it wrong, and that we now need to “go back” to

the Indians to get it right. Cheney is arguing that understanding the world is not really the point in the fi rst place. We are not playing a truth game at all. What matters is how we relate to things, not what things are in themselves . Front, center, and always, the world responds. The great task is not knowledge but relationship .


AT: Calculations Good

No link – we do not preclude calculations such as those the plan makes – that’s Henning on the overview – the question of ethics must precede calculationsAnthony Weston, Professor of Philosophy at Elon University, 2009[The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher p. 9-11]

If the world is a collection of more or less fixed facts to which we must respond, then the task of ethics is to systematize and unify our responses. This is the expected view,

once again so taken for granted as to scarcely even appear as a “view” at all. Epistemology is prior to ethics. Responding to the world follows upon knowing it—and what could be more sensible or responsible

than that? If the world is not “given,” though—if the world is what it seems to be in part because we have made it that way , as I have been suggesting, and if therefore the

process of inviting its further possibilities into the light is fundamental to ethics itself—then our very knowledge of the world, of the possibilities of other

animals and the land and even ourselves in relation to them, follows upon “invitation,” and ethics must come fi rst. Ethics is prior to epistemology — or, as Cheney and I do not say in the paper but

probably should have said, what really emerges is another kind of epistemology—“etiquette,” in our specifi c sense, as epistemology. But then of course we are also speaking of something sharply different from “ethics” as usually understood. We are asked not for a set of well-defended general moral commitments in advance, but rather for something more visceral and instinctual, a mode of comportment more than a mode of commitment, more fleshy and more vulnerable. Etiquette so understood requires us to take risks, to offer trust before we know whether or how the offer will be received, and to move with awareness, civility, and grace in a world we understand to be capable of

response. Thus Cheney and I conclude that ethical action itself must be “fi rst and foremost an attempt to open up possibilities, to enrich the world” rather than primarily an attempt to

respond to the world as already known . Cheney, true to his nature, also takes the argument on a more strenuous path, exploring indigenous views of ceremony and ritual. Once again the question of epistemology turns out to be central. Euro-Americans, Cheney says, want to know what beliefs are encoded in the utterances of indigenous peoples. We treat their utterances as propositional representations of Indigenous worlds. But what if these utterances function, instead,

primarily to produce these worlds? Cheney cites the indigenous scholar Sam Gill on the fundamentally performative function of language. When Gill asks Navajo elders what prayers mean, he reports, they tell him “not what messages prayers carry, but what prayers do .” More generally, Gill asserts that “the importance of religion as it is practiced by the great body of religious persons for whom religion is a way of life [is] a way of creating, discovering, and

communicating worlds of meaning largely through ordinary and common actions and behavior.”11 What then, Cheney and I ask, if this performative dimension of language is fundamental not just in indigenous or obviously religious settings, but generally? How we speak, how we move, how we carry on, all the time, also literally brings all sorts of worlds into being—and thus, again, the ethical challenge put mindful speech, care, and respect fi rst. Indeed we would now go even further. Here it is not so much that epistemology comes fi rst but that, in truth, it simply fades away. The argument is not the usual suggestion that the West has misunder- stood the world, got it wrong, and that we now need to “go back” to

the Indians to get it right. Cheney is arguing that understanding the world is not really the point in the fi rst place. We are not playing a truth game at all. What matters is how we relate to things, not what things are in themselves . Front, center, and always, the world responds. The great task is not knowledge but relationship .


AT: Isaac/Moral Absolutism

Turn: They are the ones who want to keep their moral purity by avoiding extinction at all costs – cross-apply Henning – only the alternative is willing to recognize that death and destruction are an inevitably part of the universe.

This begs the question of the impact – if we win our role of the ballot arguments it’s a reason Isaac goes neg – they are the ones who evaluate their advantages in a vacuum without considering its effects on other forms of Being


AT: Human Focus Good

This is the link – their evidence presumes that humanity is different but there is no ethical standard that distinguishes the human from the animal from the machine – making value judgments to separate categories of Being necessarily promotes an ethically bankrupt moral standard – that’s Introna

Don’t buy their false dichotomy of organic and inorganic existence. The abiotic has its own trajectory of existence and value that must be affirmed Keekok Lee, Visiting Chair in Philosophy at the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster University, 2005[Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature ed. Heyd p 61-63]

Every naturally occurring entity or process has its own trajectory. The term “trajectory” is introduced to do the precise job of referring to the history as well as the character of each autonomous existence, whatever the entity or process may be. For example, a lake has its own trajectory. As a geological form, it is considered to be one of the most transient: it may dry out in a relatively short span of time, by becoming first a swamp and then, probably, a meadow. In the case of naturally occurring processes, these may be biotic, abiotic, or an interaction involving both. It is also the case that a species (for instance, canis lupus), as much as an individual member of the species (the particular wolf roaming at a particular time in a particular forest), may be said to have its own respective trajectories. One should immediately point out that the trajectory of the species is not necessarily identical to that of any of its individual members.18The use

of the term to cover both the biotic and abiotic domains does not entail, however, that their trajectories are identical, that what is true of the one is also true of the other. I have already noted that, as far as present evidence goes, the history of Earth shows that the abiotic long preceded the biotic on the planet. Present evidence also shows that without the continuing existence of a certain combination of abiotic conditions the biotic would

not, and could not, continue to exist. Two further points need to be emphasized. One concerns the crucial differences between the biotic and the abiotic; the other is to argue that, in spite of these differences, it is appropriate to use the notion of trajectory to talk about the entities and the processes in both domains. First, the crucial differences. In general, individual organisms go through certain recognizable stages from their beginning to their end: infancy, growth, maturity, senescence, and, finally, death. They also possess certain charac- teristics, depending on the particular stage of their existence or, indeed, of their sex. For instance, in the trajectory of a frog, it starts off life as an em- bryo, which soon develops into a tadpole and then an adult frog. The tadpole clearly looks very different from the adult frog, yet the former is but a stage in the growth of the latter. Similarly, the peahen looks very different from the peacock, yet both are members of the same species. By contrast, the mountain of granite remains a mountain of granite. Of course, even granite wears away over a large expanse of geological time. But granite does not mature to become something else: it might weather away to become soil, but it does not grow or develop to become soil in the same way that the tadpole becomes the adult frog. Granite may end up as soil, but soil is not granite: they are two very different things. In the case of the frog, how-ever, the tadpole and the adult frog belong to the same species and are simply different stages in the trajectory of individuals belonging to it. Another obviously important difference between the biotic and the abiotic is that the former appears to be an exception to the laws of thermodynamics, whereas the latter is not. But, of course, the appearance is only misleading. What misleads

one is that life manifests certain processes at work that are absent in the case of the abiotic. Individual organisms are autopoietic; they maintain their own functioning integrity because they engage in metabolical and physiological activities. They therefore appear to produce order out of chaos, so to speak.19 Again, by contrast, abiotic entities are not autopoietic or capable of

reproduction, as they do not possess any mechanisms analogous to those found in organisms.20 In spite of the admitted di ff erences , however, one may argue that the term “trajectory” may meaningfully be applied to both. Only the biotic may be said to be autopoietic, yet both biotic and abiotic nature may be said to be self-sustaining and self-generating in the larger senses of these terms.21 I shall concentrate

first on defending the assertion with regard to abiotic nature. Here, one must be a bit nuanced and distinguish among different sorts of abiotic nature and abiotic processes at work. For instance, mountains are self-generating (geologists call nature’s “making” of mountains “orogeny”) in the sense that certain geological processes, such as particular movements of tectonic plates, throw up mountains , like the Himalayan mountain range. But it is true that mountains are not self-sustaining; they wear down over the millennia through purely physical/chemical processes, which, however, are themselves self-generating and self-sustaining. On the other hand, other

abiotic phenom- ena are both self-sustaining and self-generating . For instance, if the Gaia hy- pothesis is correct (and increasingly philosophers and scientists are taking it

seriously), the maintenance of Earth’s atmosphere is both self-generating and self-sustaining. And in other cases, the interactive processes between biotic and abiotic nature are both self-generating and self-sustaining.

We are but one small speck in the universe’s existence – acknowledging the beauty of all material allows us to live in harmony with the rest of the cosmosSeed 88 – founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre(John, “Beyond Anthropocentrism”, http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Anthropo.htm, dml)

"Anthropocentrism" or "homocentrism" means human chauvinism. Similar to sexism, but substitute "human race" for"man" and"all other species" for "woman". Human chauvinism, the idea that humans are the crown of creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness. "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth , and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth on the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea;

into your hands they are delivered".(2) When humans investigate and see through their layers of anthropocentric self-cherishing, a most profound change in consciousness begins to take place.

Alienation subsides. The human is no longer an outsider, apart. Your humanness is then recognised as being merely the most recent stage of your existence, and as you

stop identifying exclusively with this chapter, you start to get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged from the rainforest. As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to them. What is described here should not be seen as merely intellectual. The intellect is one entry point to the process outlined, and the easiest one to communicate. For some people however, this change of perspective follows from actions on behalf of Mother Earth. "I am protecting the rainforest" develops to "I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking." What a relief then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature. That is, the change is a spiritual one, thinking like a mountain (3), sometimes referred to as "deep ecology". As your memory improves, as the implications of evolution and

ecology are internalised and replace the outmoded anthropocentric structures in your mind, there is an identification with all life, Then follows the realisation that the distinction between "life" and "lifeless" is

a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such a condescending air. It is they

that are immortal part of us. (4) If we embark upon such an inner voyage, we may find, upon returning to present day consensus reality, that our actions on behalf of the environment are purified and strengthened by the experience. We have found here a

http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Anthropo.htm


level of our being that moth, rust, nuclear holocaust or destruction of the rainforest genepool do not corrupt. The commitment to save the world is not decreased by the new perspective, although the fear and anxiety which were part of our motivation start to dissipate and are replaced by a certain disinterestedness. We act because life is the only game in town, but actions from a disinterested, less attached consciousness may be more

effective. Activists often don't have much time for meditation. The disinterested space we find here may be similar to meditation. Some teachers of meditation are embracing deep ecology (5) and vice versa(6). Of all the species that have existed, it is

estimated that less than one in a hundred exist today. The rest are extinct. As environment changes, any species that is unable to adapt, to change, to evolve, is extinguished. All evolution takes place in this fashion In this

way an oxygen starved fish, ancestor of yours and mine, commenced to colonise the land. Threat of extinction is the potter's hand that molds all the forms of life. The human species is one of millions threatened

by imminent extinction through nuclear war and other environmental changes. And while it is true that the "human nature" revealed by 12,000 years of written history does not offer much hope that we can change our warlike, greedy, ignorant ways, the vastly

longer fossil history assures us that we CAN change. We ARE the fish, and the myriad other death-defying feats of flexibility which a study of evolution reveals to us. A certain confidence ( in spite of our recent "humanity") is warranted. From this point of view,

the threat of extinction appears as the invitation to change, to evolve . After a brief respite from the potter's hand, here we are back on the wheel again. The change that is required of us is not

some new resistance to radiation, but a change in consciousness. Deep ecology is the search for a viable consciousness. Surely consciousness emerged and evolved according to the same laws as everything else. Molded by environ mental

pressures, the mind of our ancestors must time and again have been forced to transcend itself. To survive our current environmental pressures, we must consciously remember our evolutionary and ecological inheritance. We must learn to think like a mountain. If

we are to be open to evolving a new consciousness, we must fully face up to our impending extinction (the ultimate environmental pressure). This means acknowledging that part of us which shies away from the truth, hides in intoxication or busyness from the despair of the human , whose 4000 million year race is run, whose organic life is a mere hair's breadth from finished .(7) A biocentric perspective, the realisation that rocks WILL dance, and that roots go deeper that 4000 million years, may give us the courage to face despair and break through to a more viable consciousness , one that is sustainable and in harmony with life again.


AT: Transhumanism/Immortality

Still links – they try to use technology as a way to make the human body better than other bodies – allows for the elimination of any Other body – that’s Introna

We’ll impact turn this argument – living without strife destroys the reason to liveSmuts 11 – Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rhode Island College(Aaron, “Immortality and Significance,” Philosophy and Literature, 35:1 134–149, dml)

Through an examination of Borges’s “The Immortal” I argued that an immortal life would be unbearably light, as our actions would be without a crucial form of significance . In addition, the lack of risk and the shrinking range of significant new projects, combined with the threat of eternal frustration, would be motivationally devastating for those of limited powers. If our powers are limited, the number of significant projects that we are capable of completing is finite, but the time span of an immortal life is infinite. As for immortals of unlimited potential, it is equally difficult to fathom what would get the omnipotent out of bed in the morning . The same fundamental problem extends to all forms of immortality that could support anything even vaguely recognizable as a “human life”: Eternal existence would sap our experiences and decisions of significance. An immortal life would be either frustrating or boring, and long. Very long.

Immortality destroys agency and value to lifeSmuts 11 – Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rhode Island College(Aaron, “Immortality and Significance,” Philosophy and Literature, 35:1 134–149, dml)

Non-fixed Abilities: On the other hand, if the abilities of immortals were not fixed, then they would eventually become godlike, omnipotent beings, guaranteed of success in every

endeavor. Supposing that our best theory of personal identity would allow us to consider ourselves numerically identical with such radically transformed creatures, it is not clear that immortals capable of indefinitely expanding their powers would fare any better than those of fixed abilities . For those capable of infinite growth, all obstacles could be overcome,

except, of course, for those that were imposed by creatures of similar strength. If there were other equally powerful immortals with conflicting desires, then eternal frustration would again be the result. The godlike immortals would butt heads indefinitely. Eternal frustration would result in motivational collapse for gods and mortals alike. However, if the wills of omnipotent immortals were in harmony, they could accomplish anything that is logically possible . As for the desirability of the life of such gods, I hesitate to speculate—they certainly could not lead anything recognizable as a human life. But it is clear that none of their decisions could carry any weight, as they are nearly all revocable and altogether unsatisfying. Where is the satisfaction in exercising boundless powers? Of course, an omnipotent entity could always do something new, but it could not develop its powers any further. Although feeling one’s powers expand can be a source of great satisfaction, one can only move a mountain or destroy a galaxy so many times before it loses its novelty. An expanding range of abilities may be intoxicating to tyrants and gods alike, but unless one’s powers are ever-increasing, it is hard not to eventually sober up.


AT: Realism

This isn’t responsive – even if competition is inevitable, that doesn’t mean that value hierarchies are – make them prove how this applies and we’ll answer it more thoroughly

That being said, we probably solve – 1NC Introna indicates value judgments are the root of the inequalities which cause conflict – we solve the motive for competition


AT: Anthro Good

Their evidence relies on a false dichotomy between the human and the non-human – the warrant behind their evidence is that what humans do to animals is good, this is not intrinsic to an anthropocentric mindset – cross-apply the Henning evidence – it doesn’t matter what you do to the Other in the world of the alternative, it’s a question of how you value them

If we win our role of the ballot arguments this is irrelevant – cross-apply Seed – the rest of existence is vastly more complex, older, and bigger than us. Respect for its wonder gives our existence dignity in the face of extinction.

That being said, anthropocentrism is bad – cross-apply from the overview – evaluate their ethical commitment in a vacuum independent of other moral concerns – they create value hierarchies that inevitably create the conditions for genocide – that’s Introna – here’s more evidence, they necessitate the elimination of that which is different from usLee 99 (Keekok, Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Lancaster University, The Natural and the Artefactual, 1999)

To appreciate this dimension one needs to highlight the distinction between the artefactual and the natural. The former is the material embodiment of human intentionality--an analysis in terms of Aristotle's causes shows that all four causes, since late modernity,

may be assigned to human agency.'- The latter, ex hypothesi, has nothing to do with human agency in any of its four causes. This shows that the artefactual and the natural belong to two very different ontological categories--one has come into existence and continues to exist only because of human purpose and design while the other has come into existence and continues to exist independently of human purpose and design. In the terminology of this book, the artefactual embodies extrinsic/imposed teleology while the natural (at least in the form of individual living organisms) embodies intrinsic/immanent teleology. However, the more radical and powerful technologies of the late twentieth

and the twenty-first centuries are capable of producing artefacts with an ever increasing degree of artefacticity. The threat then posed by modem homo faber is the systematic elimination of the natural , both at the empirical and the ontological levels , thereby generating a narcissistic civilization. In this context, it is, therefore, appropriate to remind ourselves that beyond Earth, nature, out there,

exists as yet unhumanized. But there is a strong collective urge, not merely to study and understand that nature, but also ultimately to exploit it, and furthermore, even to transform parts of it into ersatz Earth, eventually making it fit for human habitation. That nature, as far as we know, has (had) no life on it. These aspirations raise a crucial problem which environmental philosophy ought to

address itself, namely, whether abiotic nature on its own could be said to be morally considerable and the grounds for its moral considerability If no grounds could be found, then nature beyond Earth is ripe for total human control and manipulation subject to no moral but only technological and/or economic constraints. The shift to ontology in grounding moral considerability will, it is argued, free environmental philosophy from being Earthbound in the millennium about to dawn. In slightly greater detail, the aims of this book may be summarized as follows 1. To show how modem science and its technology, in controlling and manipulating (both biotic and abiotic) nature, transform it to become the~ artefactual. It also establishes that

there are degrees of 'artefacticity depending on the degree of control and precision with which science and technology manipulate nature. An extant technology such as biotechnology already threatens to imperil the existence of biotic natural kinds. Furthermore technologies of the rising future, such as molecular nanotechnology , i~ synergistic combination with biotechnology and microcomputer technology,. could intensify

this tendency to eliminate natural kinds, both biotic and abiotic~ as well as their natural processes of evolution or change. 2. To consider the implications of the above for environmental philosophy, and in so doing, to point out the inadequacy of the extant accounts about intrinsic value in nature. By and large (with some honorable exceptions), these concentrate on arguing that the biotic has intrinsic value but assume that the~ undeniable

contingent link between the abiotic and the biotic on Earth would~ take care of the abiotic itself. But the proposed terraformation of Mars (and even of Earth's moon only very recently) shows the urgent need to develop a much more comprehensive environmental philosophy which is not merely Earthbound but can include the abiotic in its own right. 3. The book also raises a central inadequacy of today's approaches in environmental philosophy and movements. They concentrate predominantly on the undesirable polluting aspects of extant technologies on human an~ nonhuman life, and advocate the introduction of more ecologically sensitive technology (including this author's own earlier writing). If this were the most important remit of environmental philosophy, then one would have to admit that nature-replacing technologies (extant and in the rising future) could be the ultimate 'green' technologies as their proponents are minded to maintain in spite of their more guarded remarks about the environmental risks that ma' be incurred in running such technologies.' Such technologies would also~ achieve what is seemingly impossible, as they promise to make possible ~ world of superabundance, not only for the few, but for all, without straining and stressing the biosphere as a sink for industrial waste. But this book argue that environmental

philosophy should not merely concern itself with the virtuous goal of avoiding pollution risks to life, be that human or nonhuman It should also be concerned with the threat that such radically powerful technologies could render nature, both biotic and abiotic, redundant . A totally artefactual world customized to human tastes could, in principle, be designed and manufactured. When one can create artefactual kinds (from what Aristotle calls 'first. matter,' or from today's analogue, what we call atoms and molecules of familiar elements like carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc.) which in other relevant respects are indistinguishable from natural kinds (what Aristotle calls 'second matter'), natural kinds are in danger of being superseded. The ontological category of the artefactual would replace

that of the natural. The upholding of the latter as a category worth preserving constitutes, for this book, the most fundamental task in environmental philosophy. Under this perspective, the worrying thing about modem t echnology in the long run

may not be that it threatens life on Earth as we know it to be because of its polluting effects, but that it could ultimately humanize all of nature. Nature, as 'the Other,' would be eliminated. 4. In other words, the ontological category of the natural would have to be delineated and defended against that of the artefactual, and some account of 'intrinsic' value would have to be mounted which can encompass the former. The book argues for the need to maintain distinctions such as that between human/nonhuman, culture/nature, the artefactual/the natural. In other words, ontological dyadism is required, though not dualism, to combat the transformation of the natural to become the

artefactual. The book also argues that the primary attribute of naturally-occurring entities is an ontological one, namely, that of independence as an ontological value . Such an attribute is to be distinguished from secondary attributes like intricacy, complexity, interests-bearing, sentience, rationality, etc., which are said to provide the grounds for assigning their bearers intrinsic value. In this sense, ontology precedes axiology.


AT: Anthro Inevitable

Inevitability isn’t a reason to vote aff – if we said they’re racist and they said it’s inevitable that’s not a reason racism isn’t bad

It’s not inevitable – 1NC Introna indicates the alternative is a radical break from western metaphysics which creates a new form of ethics – allows us to engage the Other genuinely


AT: May

We turn this, May is saying that trying to change the world gives value to the self – begs the question of how they change the world – if we win a link argument May functions as an internal link for us because their engagement with existence is comparatively worse

Here’s more evidence – their world-changing projects only matter if we have an ethical engagement with the OtherChristensen-Scheel 12 – Faculty of Technology, Art, and Design at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science(Boel, “The ethic-aesthetic way of wonders”, InFormation Vol 1 no 1, pg 19-38, dml)

Several philosophers have however proposed an alternative viewpoint where sociality and interhumanity are more a fact, a point of departure, than an infliction or a discussion 8 . Existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s is one of these – her philosophy is

based on the singular subject and her fight for freedom. Nevertheless she says that the other’s “ appeal ” necessarily concerns us, because our individual projects become meaningful only through others . This however, requires the other individual to be free to appeal/respond and we likewise. The freedom of subjects as an ethical dimension, as a condition for being able to engage, motivate and help, is thus not only an individual concern, it is a common and collective concern indicating the always ambiguous, paradoxical relationship between self and others. This ambiguity constitutes the essence of de Beauvoir’s

ethics, making the subject fundamentally social and fundamentally ethical (de Beauvoir, 1947; Pettersen, 2009). If the subject is defined as social and ethics as a necessity, the marginalized existence of others concerns each subject directly . Arne Næss says: “Equal right to unfold potentials as a principle is not a practical norm about equal conduct towards all life forms. It suggests a guideline limiting killing, and more generally limiting obstruction of the unfolding of potentialities in others. ” (Næss, 1989, p.167).

While this is an ideal, it also relates directly to practice . And as we now turn to examine three ecosophical art projects, we do so from the perspective of a non-moralistic and fundamentally relational ethicality.


AT: Schwartz

We internally link turn Schwartz – yes value is subjective and no we should not determine it for others – but only the alternative brings this idea to its logical endpoint – your ballot should not decide the value of the Other – the affirmative attempts to fit humanity, outer space, and ______ into an ethical hierarchy which inevitably devalues those below us and causes them to circulate as standing reserve – that’s Introna

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