More good stuff from Roger: On the PICs/Conditionality hypothetical, I think the most insightful post so far has been Dallas’s. Like him, I think I would fall in the probably small minority of judges who would still vote negative. My answer, slightly different from his, is that in saying that a counterplan is “unconditional,” one is saying that the counterplan will be one’s sole policy advocacy PROVIDED THAT ONE IS PERMITTED TO ADVOCATE IT. But if affirmative theory arguments deny the negative the advocacy of the counterplan, it seems more reasonable to revert to the status quo as a point of comparison with the plan rather than to endorse the plan by default. Again, in terms of the hypothetical, we know at the end of the round that voting for the plan will make the world worse (relative to what now exists), and this is certainly not a comfortable position to be placed in if one attempts to model debate judgihng on the standards of rational real world decision making.
This last caveat is, of course, one which most contemporary debate judges would reject, game theory (broadly construed) having come to trump argument theory and rational choice theory within our activity. I also don’t think that the idea of a totally “unconditional” counterplan makes sense from a rational choice standpoint, since a rational decision maker would (almost) always have the option of rejecting two bad proposals for change in favor of a less disadvantageous status quo. So, I can see an argument that the negative should be punished for defending a less than totally rational theory construct. Still, the correction to this lapse of requiring the judge to vote for a known evil (the plan) seems only to compound the irrationality. -- Ross K. Smith Director of Debate Wake Forest University 336-251-2076 (c) 336-758-5268 (o) http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/ http://www.DebateScoop.org _______________________________________________ CEDA-L mailing list [email protected] http://www.ndtceda.com/mailman/listinfo/ceda-l
