Ridge Debate

JW 2012 Stock AC Yale

I affirm that the United States ought to extend its non-citizens accused of terrorism the same due process protections as it grants its citizens. I value morality as denoted by the word ought in the resolution. The resolution should be evaluated through a normative lens rather than a realist lens because realism exempts people from morality on the basis of ignorance. Realists believe that moral facts just exist out in the world. But, it is impossible to hold people accountable if they did not know the moral facts in the first place. Practical rationality is the only meta-ethic that can account for higher-level human thinking as it explains why we can reach beyond the actual facts. C.S. Lewis,

If you take a thing like a stone or

a tree,

it

is what it is and there seems no sense in saying it ought to have been

stone is "the wrong shape" if you want to use it for a rockery, or that a

otherwise. give you convenient

Of course

you may say a shade

as you expected.

tree is a bad tree because it does not

stone or

as much

But all you mean is that the You

really

tree does not happen to be the tree could not

for some purpose of your own. You are not, except as a joke, blaming them for that.

know,

that, given the weather and the soil,

have been any different.

What we, from our point of view, call a "bad" tree is obeying the laws of its nature just as much as a "good" one.

Now have you noticed what follows? It follows that what

we usually call the laws of nature-the way weather works on a tree for example-may not really be laws in the strict sense, but only in a manner of speaking. When you say that falling stones always obey the law of gravitation, is not this much the same as saying that the law only means "what stones always do"? You do not really think that when a stone is let go, it suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the ground. You only mean that, in fact,

it does fall. In other words,

you cannot be sure that there is anything over and above the facts

themselves, any law

about what ought to happen, as distinct from what does happen.

Nature, in fact, does." But if you turn to

The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean "what

the Law of Human Nature,

the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter. That law certainly does not mean "what human beings, in fact, do"; for

as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature

tells you what

human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts.
whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of

the universe there need not be anything but the facts. Electrons and molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results follow, and that may be the whole story. (*) But men behave in a certain way and that is not the

And, practical rationality allows us to do this because it allows us to choose which reasons we act on separate from our desires. Christine Korsgaard,

It is the problem of the normative. For

[O]ur

capacity to turn our attention onto our own mental activities is

also

capacity to distance ourselves from them and to call them into question.

I perceive, and I find myself with a powerful impulse to

believe. But I back up and bring that impulse into view and then I have a certain distance. Now the impulse doesnt dominate me and now I have a problem. Shall I believe? Is this perception really a reason to believe? I desire and I find myself with a powerful impulse to act. But I back up and bring that impulse into view and then I have a certain distance. Now the impulse doesnt dominate me and now I have a problem. [but] Shall I act? Is this desire really a

Ridge Debate
JW 2012 Stock AC Yale

reason to act? The reflective mind cannot settle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason. Otherwise, at least as long as it reflects, it cannot commit itself or go forward. If the problem springs from reflection then

the solution must do so as well. If the problem is that our perceptions and desires might not withstand reflective scrutiny, then the solution is that they might.

We need reasons because our The normative word reason

impulses must be able to withstand reflective scrutiny. refers to

a kind of

We have reasons if they do.

reflective success.

If good and right are also taken to be intrinsically normative words then they too must refer to reflective success. And they do. Think of what they mean

when we use them as exclamations: Good! Right! There they mean: Im satisfied, Im happy, Im committed, youve convinced me, lets go. They mean the work of reflection is done. Reason then means reflective success.

So if I decide that my desire is a reason to act, I must decide that on reflection I endorse that desire.