1

The modern University is an institution that circulates representation and illumination to

generate a façade of progress. The tyranny of transparency renders everything visible and
coherent, producing a militaristic gaze bent on the incorporation of other into the interior,
where it can be eliminated and fed into capitalist production. Students are trapped, endlessly
reflecting blips of information that are endlessly reflected between themselves as meaning is
constantly devoured in the process
Hoofd 17 (Ingrid “Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The Disintegration of University Teaching and Research. Chapter 1, Pages 28-33, 2017) // IES
Like Lyotard, Virilio suggests in the second chapter of The Vision Machine that there is a dialectical relationship between the arts (or narrative) and the sciences, and that both are involved in a kind of interplay as long as they
presuppose their fundamental context of “prime ignorance” and the necessity of unknowability or of the mythical for research. Likewise, since “for the human eye the essential is invisible” so that “since everything is an illusion, it

The moment that scientific research or philosophical

follows that scientific theory, like art, is merely a way of manipulating illusions” (1994, 23).

enquiry gets caught up in a totalisation of knowledge via the near-perfect mechanisation of

vision or a postulation of the total objectivity of ‘reality,’ this dialectical play between the arts and the sciences gets eroded and even rendered near
impossible. With this ongoing “depersonalization of the thing observed but also of the observer,” we thus enter the era of what Virilio calls “the paradoxical logic” of

the image, in which near-total illumination, while presenting itself as a democratisation , in fact
signals the end of public representation in all its radical diversity (1994, 30 and 63). Virilio further illustrates the functioning of this
paradoxical logic in the third chapter, stating that “ omnivoyance, Western Europe’s totalitarian ambition, may here appear as

the formation of a whole image by repressing the invisible” (1994, 33). Everything and everyone now
must be subjected to the violence of illumination, and nothing is sacred anymore. Interestingly, Virilio suggests
that famous philosophers like Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes, all admitted to a sensation of fear or terror in relation to their “obsession with the un-said going hand-in-glove with a totalitarian desire for

clarification” (1994, 34). Virilio terms the new media technologies’ propensity for instilling terror by falsely
propagating progress as modern society’s “Medusa Syndrome,” first unleashed in the
nineteenth century on the lower classes and the colonised peoples, and now coming to hit
home in the location where it was first conceptualised: academia (1994, 42). What we therefore live today, both
inside and outside the university walls proper, is according to Virilio the “technological outcome of that
merciless more light of revolutionary terror” (1994, 44). I suggest that we indeed notice here the fundamental
relationship between academia’s role in incessant capitalistic productivity and its twin
companions of hope and fear by way of a new ‘tyranny of transparency.’ The compulsion for
the performance of intellectual optimism and hope incessantly functions to cover over the
fear and sense of terror that the neo-liberalisation of the university via new media
technologies has subjected their staff (and of course many other groups in contemporary society) to. This is also to stress again that
any solution to this situation can and should not lie in ‘protecting’ or walling off the university’s
functioning from this onslaught of neo-liberalisation, as this would not only temporarily protect
merely the intellectual classes from this economic logic, but would also disregard the ways in
which the university has always been involved in the acceleration of this onslaught that was
first unleashed on the dispossessed classes by way of their ‘total illumination’ (via census-
taking, the statistical social sciences, and finally the hooking up to pervasive electronic
databases and predictive algorithms). Once again, protecting some kind of ‘freedom for basic research
and from quantification’ only for those within the university in the fashion Zielinski and Dittrich propose would be
profoundly disingenuous and disloyal to those already long-dispossessed groups. The penultimate chapter of Virilio’s
book, itself titled “The Vision Machine” as if now signalling the crux of its analysis, deals with the state of scientific and philosophical enquiry in our current
era that is saturated with the technologies of seeing and discerning of all kinds. The chapter presents the reader with a distinct
change of style as well: while the previous chapters were more in a classically descriptive style, this fifth chapter contains more of the rapid-fire effect of all caps and quasi-conclusive statements. I take this to be significant in terms
of the style emulating the ‘logistics of perception’ today in which the reader, researcher, or spectator is ‘bombarded’ with techno-scientific propaganda, but also as a style that seeks to forego the dominant mode of philosophical
reasoning by putting the poetic element of modern writing technologies back into play. While one may be tempted to assume that Virilio still abides by the logic of theoretical representation paralleling ‘reality,’ especially via his
phenomenological descriptions of the supposed essence of human sensibility and morality, this fifth chapter nonetheless arguably engages in a much more speculative poetics. I read Virilio’s fifth chapter as an illustration of how

the unknowable aspect necessary for any type of knowing does perforce return in the
assumptions, concepts, and axioms of modern science and philosophy, as it is in these that the
auto-immunity of the university project shows itself despite (and because of) its totalitarian
and omniscient ambitions. Virilio is therefore, I suggest, illustrating how hope and despair—just like control and accident,
as well as the visible and the invisible—are always fundamentally immanent to one another . It is
perhaps due to the fact that Virilio’s works mirror our own terror that they are unpleasant texts for some; but their main use, I propose, is precisely because it largely abandons the

‘compulsory optimism’ that so much academic writing today suffers from. University research
that seeks and even arrogantly claims total understanding and visibility, notably in the sciences
via its ‘vision machines’ and the uncoupling of those sciences from its ideational and religious
foundations, must therefore have fallen prey to a profound scientific and moral blindness. Digital technologies for Virilio therefore create a “sightless vision,” in which the exceeding cutting-off from the subject’s
mnemonic capacities in turn creates an obsession in modern society with “fore-seeing” or prediction via

computerised quantification (1994, 61). It is such ‘foreseeing’ that seeks to close off the possibility of the
unknown returning in the near future, while paradoxically also producing more
unknowability. A provocative illustration is Virilio’s postulate that the return or metamorphosis of the unknowable aspect via the transformation of Newtonian physics to quantum physics took place via
Einstein’s theory of relativity. I offer this example also as a precursor to some of my own examples later on in this book of social science’s auto-immunity. In short, Virilio notes that Einstein’s idea of relativity emerges precisely at
the moment when the militaristic proliferation of vision machines and virtual images generated both deception and confusion about the status of the real as such, and can hence be pinpointed as a distinctive moment of the
deconstruction of science by itself. In this moment, as quantum theory likewise admits, it becomes impossible to say with certainty whether the change, pattern, or energy observed is “observed energy or observation energy,” and

that subject and object

this conundrum will indeed only become more profound in the sciences at large as they ‘progress’ (1994, 73). This conundrum, I concur with Virilio, thus signals the fact

have always existed in a dialectical relationship, in which it is finally the object which contains
an amount of agency, intention, and trickery that thinkers like Descartes sought to banish via a
conception of a God that would not mess with the senses. The very attempt in physics to erase uncertainty via the
accumulation of knowledge that both follows and generates its fundamental theories
therefore eventually only exacerbates uncertainty. It is therefore the “automation of
perception that is thr3eatening our understanding,” and as a collateral of the totalitarian quest
that underlies this threat comes also the increasingly discriminatory effects of such
automations (1994, 75). As a note on the side, it is this logic that Baudrillard in his work terms ‘the uncertainty principle,’ and it is my intention in this book to show how this
principle—the contemporary exacerbation of auto-immunity in a university which can be grasped as

both an allegory and functional description of the vision machine—returns in a variety of

pedagogical, managerial, and theoretical goings-on and even in its activist ideals of seemingly disparate institutional instances in the East and the West. Since
the obscuring logic of digital technologies relies on a repression of the necessarily unknowable aspect of all meaningful experience, such a dissociation can, according to Virilio, nonetheless be challenged by unearthing its

militaristic, Enlightenment-based, and Christian grounds. This also implies, as I proposed earlier, that the blasphemy or corruption was present in the university
project from its inception. This in turn means that the obscuring function of any technique of rational and empirical analysis is constitutive of its own supposedly ‘objective’ claims. One may again
wonder to what extent Virilio is toying with us by, for instance, providing objective historical ‘stages’ and ‘descriptions’ of all perceptual technologies—as Baudrillard also tends to do—by thus finally presenting academic writing
and teaching as full of ruses. Perhaps The Vision Machine, and with it the institution that is its near-perfect embodiment, is finally an intellectual scam, designed to force this undecidability around the status of its truth upon us
readers? Either way, with his critical analysis, which seeks to shed light on the ‘dark’ aspect of contemporary technologies and their influence on thought and seeks to unearth its precedents, Virilio has nonetheless one foot firmly
placed in the Christian and Enlightenment project, even if the other foot is playing on the borders of meaningful academic analysis and argument. It is such a historical unearthing that all of Virilio’s books relentlessly present us

Baudrillard
with, and which offers a slightly different strategy from Baudrillard’s writing (even if their conceptual premises are much the same) which is rather one of ridicule of this project. I therefore argue that

provides a necessary addendum to Virilio’s still patently serious and moralistic descriptions,
since the former has abandoned the realm of traditional critical analysis in favour of a thought
that considers reality to be the fundamental illusion vis-à-vis which it can posit its own
imaginative and preposterous illusions. The constitutive blindness of the sciences (as well as critical theory) for Baudrillard resides in the fact that, for instance, social
research indeed constitutes an object (like ‘society’) that is a simulation from the onset. In other words,
Baudrillard’s work helps us to push Virilio’s argument of unknowability to its logical conclusion.
All that modern media, rendering transparent ‘society’ by foregrounding their own increasing
ubiquity, then eventually do, is prove that all representation is in fact fabrication. Baudrillard therefore in turn suggests for
instance in The Perfect Crime that it is always possible to put the dialectic between the arts and sciences back into play once one

radically considers the role of thought (or concepts, theories, abstractions) as no longer requiring accuracy,
objectivity, or realism—its compulsion to imbue the world with the optimism of a progressive
ideology. This more “radical” thought ceases to assume itself identical to the world, and
abandons the teleological Enlightenment project in favour of what Baudrillard calls a “fatal
strategy” (2004, 104). It is for this reason, namely that thought would eventually circle back to the conclusion that it is singular and dialectical (and not representational), that Baudrillard exclaims in The Perfect Crime:
“Thinkers, one more effort!” (2004, 97). What this may mean for my analysis of the university today, I will for now, in the spirit of Baudrillard’s enigmatic provocation, leave undecided until the concluding chapter. What I take with

me for the moment into the following chapters is that Virilio allows us to keep an eye on the immoral treatment of academia’s
‘outside’—its militaristic politics of transparency—while Baudrillard allows us to challenge
academia’s delusions ‘inside’—its ill-gotten claims to universalism by way of its scientific and
theoretical traditions. We have come a long way via these four remarkable critical humanists to what constitutes the central tension and problem of the contemporary university—a problem that
extends far beyond simplistic indictments of the sole evil of its neo-liberalisation. For now, I would like to conclude that the current university and its new forms of

violence are an outflow of ‘outdated’—because complicit—humanist ideals and goals whose internal
tensions and contradictions have become usurped and accelerated by neoliberal capitalism
and its machinery of perception and acceleration. This state of affairs consists of what the book will from now on
provisionally call ‘speed-elitism,’ which term serves to indicate the intensification and the displacement of

Eurocentrism discussed above via all kinds of self-targeting ‘vision machines.’ The concepts of speed-elitism and the vision machine will hence be used as
shorthands to mobilise this book’s radical perspective, itself also paying heed to a yet more ‘originary responsibility,’ to draw out the near-blindness and the morally as well as logically contradictory research claims and pedagogical

University research and teaching has become the victim of its own
modes that emerge from the contemporary university.

idealised vision machine. Of course, each subsequent epoch of the university, in each different geographical and economical context, is bound to
exemplify such injustices in ways that remain partly characteristic to its unique history and context. The book nonetheless claims that especially today in the neo-liberal
West, in highly developed South America, and in post-colonial Southeast Asia, from which it will take its more concrete examples in Chaps. 2 , 3 , and 4 around actual research and pedagogy, the problem
of the university indeed consists of the acceleration of its unfinishable ideals by way of an
enmeshment with the technologies of calculation, vision, and prediction . This is also to say that it does not make sense
these days anymore to see for instance the Asian developments around higher education as necessarily antagonistic or subversive of the accelerated version of Eurocentrism that is pervasive today; rather, speed-elitism, as the

that a
book will show in the next three chapters, has also usurped or transformed the supposed difference between the West and Asia. But the book will eventually also display a seemingly paradoxical optimism

university falling prey to its own fatal forces will mark the opening up to a radically different
future for global society at large, in which the ideal and instantiation of total transparency shall
eventually be seen as one of the most serious yet ultimately misguided end goals ever to be
chased by so many followers across so many centuries and countries. And after all then, since this book is faithfully chasing the definitive rendering transparent of the contemporary university, who can tell whether the
book’s claim about the equivalence between accelerated vision machines, society at large, and the university is not itself—to rephrase Virilio—partaking in a fatal exacerbation of the confusion between the ‘observed pattern’ and
the ‘pattern of observation?’

The Academia is messed up – situating the debate community as a site for progressive change
ignores the material violence that made the material convergence of this space possible – the
violence enacted upon the children that mined the minerals in our laptops and sweatshop
workers that made our clothes is obfuscated by their moralization of an inherently passive
and apathetic academic enterprise—thus the alt is to reject the 1AC performance
Anonymous UC Berkeley Student 10 [“The University, Social Death, and the Inside Joke,” http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?
story=20100220181610620]

Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, yet this does not detract
from the great deal of military and corporate research, economic planning and , perhaps most
importantly, social conditioning occurring within their walls . Furthermore, they serve as intense
machines for the concentration of privilege; each university is increasingly staffed by overworked
professors and adjuncts, poorly treated maintenance and service staff. This remains only the top of the pyramid, since a hyper
educated, stable society along Western lines can only exist by the intense exploitation of
labor and resources in the third world. Students are taught to be oblivious to this fact; liberal
seminars only serve to obfuscate the fact that they are themselves complicit in the death and
destruction waged on a daily basis. They sing the college fight song and wear hooded sweatshirts (in the case of hip liberal arts colleges, flannel serves the same purpose). As the
Berkeley rebels observe, “Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of

meaning.”[43] Our conception of the social is as the death of everything sociality entails; it is the failure of
communication, the refusal of empathy, the abandonment of autonomy. Baudrillard writes that “The cemetery no longer exists
because modern cities have entirely taken over their function: they are ghost towns, cities of death. If the great
operational metropolis is the final form of an entire culture, then, quite simply, ours is a culture of death.”[44] By
attempting to excel in a university setting, we are resigning ourselves to enrolling in what Mark Yudoff so
proudly calls a cemetery, a necropolis to rival no other. Yet herein lies the punch line. We are studying in the cemeteries

of a nation which has a cultural fetish for things that refuse to stay dead; an absolute fixation with zombies.
So perhaps the goal should not be to go “Beyond Zombie Politics” at all. Writes Baudrillard: “The event itself is counter-

offensive and comes from a strange source: in every system at its apex, at its point of perfection, it
reintroduces negativity and death.”[45] The University, by totalizing itself and perfecting its
critiques, has spontaneously generated its own antithesis. Some element of sociality refuses
to stay within the discourse of the social, the dead; it becomes undead, radically potent . According to
zombies mark the dead end or zero degree of capitalism’s logic of endless consumption and
Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body, “

ever expanding accumulation, precisely because they embody this logic so literally and to such excess.”[46] In that sense, they
are almost identical to the mass, the silent majorities that Baudrillard describe as the ideal form of resistance to the social: “ they know that there is no liberation, and that a
system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into excessive practice
which is equivalent to a brutal amortization.”[47] Zombies do not constitute a threat at first, they shamble about their
environments in an almost comic manner and are easily dispatched by a shotgun blast to the face. Similarly, students
emerge from the university in which they have been buried , engaging in random acts of symbolic
hyperconsumption and overproduction; perhaps an overly enthusiastic usage of a classroom or cafeteria
here and there, or a particularly moving piece of theatrical composition that is easily suppressed. “Disaster is consumed as cheesy
spectacle, complete with incompetent reporting, useless information bulletins, and inane attempts at commentary:”[48] Shaviro is talking about Night of the Living Dead, but he might as well be referring to the press coverage of

Other students respond with horror to the encroachment of dissidents: “the living characters are
the first California occupations.

concerned less about the prospect of being killed than they are about being swept away by mimesis – of returning
to existence, after death, transformed into zombies themselves.”[49] Liberal student activists fear the incursions the most, as they are in many ways the most invested
in the fate of the contemporary university; in many ways their role is similar to that of the survivalists in Night of the Living Dead, or the military officers in Day. Beyond Zombie Politics claims that

defenders of the UC system are promoting a “Zombie Politics”; yet this is difficult to fathom. For they are
insistent on saving the University, on staying ‘alive’, even when their version of life has been stripped
of all that makes life worth living, when it is as good as social death. Shaviro notes that in many scenes in zombie films, our conceptions
Zombie Politics are something to be
of protagonist and antagonist are reversed; in many scenes, human survivors act so repugnantly that we celebrate their infection or demise.[50] In reality, “

championed, because they are the politics of a multitude, an inclusive mass of political subjects, seeking to
consume brains. Yet brains must be seen as a metaphor for what Marx calls “the General Intellect”; in his Fragment on Machines, he describes it as
“the power of knowledge, objectified.”[51] Students and faculty have been alienated from their labor, and, angry and zombie-like, they seek to destroy the means of their alienation. Yet, for

Shaviro, “ the hardest thing to acknowledge is that the living dead are not radically Other so much as they serve to
awaken a passion for otherness and for vertiginous disidentification that is already latent within our
own selves.”[52] In other words, we have a widespread problem with aspiring to be this other, this powerless mass. We
seek a clear protagonist, we cannot avoid associating with those we perceive as ‘still alive’. Yet for Baudrillard, this
constitutes a fundamental flaw: " at the very core of the 'rationality' of our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every
other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and
serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death. "[53] In Forget Foucault, we learn the sad reality about
biopower: that power itself is fundamentally based on the separation and alienation of death from the reality of
our existence. If we are to continue to use this conception, we risk failing to see that our very lives have been
turned into a mechanism for perpetuation of social death: the banal simulation of existence. Whereas
we see a return to a reevaluation of society and of death; a
socialized death is a starting point for Foucault, in Baudrillard and in recent actions from California,

possible return to zombie politics. Baudrillard distinguishes himself as a connoisseur of graffiti; in Forget Foucault, he quotes
a piece that said “When Jesus arose from the dead, he became a zombie.”[54] Perhaps the reevaluation of zombie
politics will serve as the messianic shift that blasts open the gates of hell, the cemetery-university.
According to the Berkeley kids, “when we move without return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war.”[55] Baudrillard’s words about semiotic
insurrectionaries might suffice: "They blasted their way out however, so as to burst into reality like a scream,
an interjection, an anti-discourse, as the waste of all syntatic, poetic and political development, as the
smallest radical element that cannot be caught by any organized discourse . Invincible due to their own poverty,
they resist every interpretation and every connotation, no longer denoting anyone or
anything."[56]
 2
CP: Vote negative to endorse the content of the 1AC but refuse them the ballot.
The aff can neither change the state of the world nor the state of debate – debates are
insulated, makes judges the authorities to decide the validity of struggle and acceptableness
of their deviance which’s oppressive – no spillover
Bankey 13 (BRENDON BANKEY – A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Communication August 2013 – Bankey holds an BA from Trinity and now holds an MA from Wake Forest. This thesis was approved
by: Michael J. Hyde, Ph.D., Advisor; Mary M. Dalton, Ph.D., Chair; R. Jarrod Atchison, Ph.D. THE “FACT OF BLACKNESS” DOES NOT EXIST: AN EVOCATIVE CRITICISM OF RESISTANCE RHETORIC
IN ACADEMIC POLICY DEBATE AND ITS (MIS)USE OF FRANTZ FANON’S BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS – From Chapter Two – footnoting Atchison and Panetta and consistent with Bankey’s
defense of an aspect of their position – http://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/bitstream/handle/10339/39020/Bankey_wfu_0248M_10473.pdf)

For Atchison and Panetta , “the ballot” a judge casts at the conclusion of a debate should signify nothing more or less than that person’s decision “to vote for the team that does the best debating.” This understanding encourages
judges to limit their analysis of a debate to the arguments presented within each team’ s allotted times to speak. It would exclude decisions focused on resolving external abuses such as: determining the appropriateness of
statements or events between a team or program that occurred outside of the immediate debate; challenging a school’s succ ess at “recruiting minority participants”; criticizing the civil rights legacy of participants’ academic

institutions; or increasing the presence of underrepresented bodies in elimination debates. By contrast, some non - traditional teams interested in
challenging the marginalizing effects of policy debate formats have begun to advocate what I call a “ballot as currency”
model for judges to evaluate debates. While the specific terminology is not universally employed, the “ballot as currency” approach establis
hes that a judge’s ballot signifies what bodies and practices she deems appropriate for policy debate. Within this model, a non - traditional team’s ability to

accumulate wins is a referendum on the perceived acceptableness of their bodies for academic
spaces. Beyond the structural factors that limit the visibility of any individual debate, Atchison and Panetta identify
two problems with the “ballot as currency” method for evaluating debates. First, the “ballot as currency” approach presents the dilemma of “ asking a judge to vote to solve a

community problem ” with very “few participants ” (generally the other people in the room) allowed to take a stake in the process. This places
the course of community change on the shoulders of those who judge debates between
traditional and non - traditional teams and excludes those “coaches and directors who are not preferred judges and, therefore, do not have access to many debates.”
Furthermore, it excludes those “who might want to contribute to community conversation, but are not

directly involved in competition.” Prioritizing the “ballot as currency” approach fails to recognize that
“debate community is broader than the individual participants” of a given debate and risks the creation of “an
insulated community that has a ll the answers” without ever engaging those concerned individuals who do not attend every competition. The result is that a very narrow set of

judges, usually those that often judge Framework debates, are granted the authority to
determine the outcome of communal change. 21
Vote neg to oppose the further codification of minds desire by capitalism. We recognize we
can’t solve for capitalism or even solve for all codification of desire within education spaces.
But we can prevent its spread in THIS debate. The aff creates no change.
 3
[1] The role of the ballot is to determine the truth or falsity of the resolution –
A] TT is a binary that prevents intervention by minimizing the extent to which judges can
insert how true they think arguments are based on preference for weighing arguments – o/w
and destroys fairness bc then judges could just hack every round. TT solves since it’s solely a
question of if something is true or false, there isn’t a closest estimate.
B] Necessity- All statements assert implicit truth value i.e. if I say “I smell violets” that is the
same as saying “It is true that I smell violets.” Double bind - either my opponent asserts the
truth value of their indicts to truth testing meaning they implicitly accept truth testing as a
paradigm or they don’t assert the truth value of their indicts which means that they are false
and truth testing is true anyways
The standard is consistency with the standpoint of the skeptic.
1] Performativity – The process of debating requires taking a skeptical approach to your
opponents’ arguments and attempting to disprove their most basic principles, which means
to say skeptical orientation is bad would deny your ability to respond to my arguments.
2] It’s better for debate
A – Ground – It’s the only standard that has equal quality and quantity ground on both sides
since if another framework is normative it would prescribe an absolute correct obligation to
do either the aff or neg, but skep allows debaters to make arguments without a truth quality
to them which means its purely a test of skill
B – Phil ed – All moral frameworks begin from the question of how to resolve skepticism
which means it controls the internal link to all other framework education
3] Holding ourselves to a standard of absolute truth is necessary:
A – Culpability – Truth is the standard to which we hold people accountable for their actions,
absent an understanding of the way the world actually is, people could make up their own
understandings which makes it impossible for us to every justify why something someone did
was bad, incorrect, etc and tell them to change
Skepticism is correct –
1] Motivation – Ethical principles must be intrinsically motivational otherwise agents have no
commitment to following principles. Absent this ethics can’t guide action as I could agree X is
bad yet still imply that I am going to do X regardless. However, no universal motivation exists.
2] Culpability – Ethics must hold agents culpable as otherwise we cannot be responsible for
moral wrongdoings since they occur externally to our wills and will happen regardless of
whether we advise against them. However, willing fails and agents lack control.
Coyne 12 Jerry Coyne, [Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago], “Why You Don’t Really Have
Free Will,” USAToday, January 1st, 2012 https://www.ethicalpsychology.com/2013/12/why-you-dont-really-have-free-will.html?m=1

we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of
The first is simple:

physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine
the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the
"choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and

your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in
your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics. True "free

will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify
how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because " we" are simply constructs of our brain . We can't impose a
nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its
program.

3] Empirics – the competition between competing ethics has been going for centuries.
Leiter 2 Leiter, Brian. Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement: Developing an Argument from Nietzsche. March 25, 2010.
With respect to very particularized moral disagreements — e.g., about questions of economic or social policy — which often trade on obvious factual ignorance or disagreement about complicated empirical questions,

for over two hundred years, Kantians and utilitarians have [developed] been developing
this seems a plausible retort. But

increasingly systematic versions of their respective positions. The Aristotelian tradition in moral philosophy has an even longer history. Utilitarians [They] have become particularly
adept at explaining how they can accommodate [others] Kantian and Aristotelian intuitions about particular cases and issues, though in ways that are usually found to be systematically unpersuasive to the competing

traditions and which, in any case, do nothing to dissolve the disagreement about the underlying moral criteria and categories. Philosophers in each tradition
increasingly talk only to each other, without even trying to convince those in the other
traditions. And while there may well be ‘progress’ within traditions — e.g., most utilitarians regard Mill as an improvement on
Bentham—there does not appear to be any progress [towards] in moral theory, in the sense of a consensus that

particular fundamental theories of right action and the good life are deemed better than their predecessors. What we find now are simply the competing
traditions — Kantian, Humean, Millian, Aristotelian, Thomist, perhaps now even Nietzschean — who often view their competitors as unintelligible or morally
obtuse, but don’t have any actual arguments against the foundational principles of their
competitors. There is, in short, no sign — I can think of none — that we are heading towards any
epistemic rapprochement between these competing moral traditions. Are we really to believe that hyper-rational and
reflective moral philosophers, whose lives, in most cases, are devoted to systematic reflection on philosophical questions, many of whom (historically) were independently
wealthy (or indifferent to material success) and so immune to crass considerations of livelihood and material self-interest, and most of whom , in the modern era, spend

professional careers refining their positions , and have been doing so as a professional class in university settings for well over a century — are we really
supposed to believe that they have reached no substantial agreement on any foundational moral principle because of ignorance, irrationality, or partiality
Thus, the skeptic would negate the resolution.
1] The skeptical conclusion being true triggers permissibility: It denies that moral obligations
exist. That negates – A) Semantics – Ought is defined as expressing obligation 1 which means
absent a proactive obligation you vote neg since there’s a trichotomy between prohibition,
obligation, and permissibility and proving one disproves the other two. Semantics o/w – a)
it’s key to predictability since we prep based on the wording of the res and b) it’s constitutive
to the rules of debate since the judge is obligated to vote on the resolutional text. That
justifies doing the entirety of the 1AC but deny the moral obligation behind the statement. B)
Safety – It’s ethically safer to presume the squo since we know what the squo is but we can’t
know whether the aff will be good or not if ethics are incoherent C) Logic – Propositions
require positive justification before being accepted, otherwise one would be forced to accept
the validity of logically contradictory propositions regarding subjects one knows nothing
about, i.e if one knew nothing about P one would have to presume that both the “P” and
“~P” are true.

1
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ought
 4
Interpretation: The aff must explicitly specify a comprehensive role of the ballot in the form
of a text in the 1AC where they clarify how offense links back to the role of the ballot, such as
whether post-fiat offense or pre-fiat offense matters and what constitutes that offense with
implications on how to weigh
Violation: they don’t
Standards:
1. Engagement – Knowing what counts as offense is a prerequisite to making arguments, so
its impossible to engage the aff. Our interp ensures that I read something relevant to your
method, and knowing how to weigh gives us a standard. Especially true since there is no
norm on what “performative engagement” like there is for util offense
Few impacts:
a) Education – When two ships pass in the night we don’t learn anything - This also guts
novice inclusion because now they can never learn arguments in round.
b) Turns the aff – Your impacts are premised on engaging with issues of oppression, but no
one will take seriously a position that can’t be clashed with
c) Strategy Skew – You can recontextualize your ROTB to make up reasons why my offense
doesn’t link in the 1AR
Drop the Debater—a) Deters future abuse—empirically proven by disclosure and spec shells
b) Rectify time lost on theory—anything else proliferates in round abuse by baiting theory—
also answers the RVI.
No RVIs—a) Illogical to win for being fair— winning only for being fair would makes non t
round irresolveably - time skew is non-unique b) Discourages good norming—which
outweighs since it spills into multiple rounds.