Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2AC PERMUTATION
Perm solves --- combining tech thought and their ontological reorientation opens
spaces for new interpretations of being
Sawicki 87 --- Faculty of Philosophy @ Williams College (Jana, heidegger and foucault: escaping
technological nihilism, Philosophy Social Criticism, 13:155, Sage Publishing)//trepka
Heidegger also responds to the danger of technology by reviving the pre-modern understanding
of technology as craft or art (techn). His reference to the Greek definition of techn as a form of
poi6sis (bringing forth) may be interpreted in several ways. An interpretation that links his
method to Foucaults would suggest that Heidegger refers to pre-modern technology simply to
highlight and circumscribe modern technology and thereby release us from its grasp. But there
is also a basis in Heideggers writings for interpreting the revival of techn as a call for us to
supplement and enrich modern technological ways of revealing with those of an artful praxis
that is both technical and contemplative . As Don lhde has pointed out, artistic
technologies reveal objects without reducing them to serviceability. They defamiliarize the
real and utilize imagination to proliferate the possibilities for how things can
appear.2
The permutation solves --- engaging with the standard operation of technology
first is key to effectively engage essence
Pistone 10 --- Faculty, Writing Program, Rutgers University (Renee, A Critical Examination of Heideggers
Thoughts: Technology Places Humanity in Shackles Hindering Our Natural Thinking Process and Our Connection to Being,
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/cis/article/view/5182/4782)//trepka
3.1 Technology and Superficiality Rojcewicz (2006) chronicles the use of language to describe technology and its superficiality in the
seminal work entitled, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger. Clearly, Heidegger desires to carefully articulate his
reasoning that technology is an obstacle to humans re-connecting with Being (Rojcewicz, 2006). Heidegger defines technology
utilizing specific words as one scholar suggests, Heidegger
Permutation solves --- by combining the frenzied rationality of the plan with a
speculative questioning, the essence of technology is brought more effectively to
the forefront
Heidegger 77 --- German Philosopher (Martin, The Question Concerning Technology, http://simondon.ocular-
witness.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/question_concerning_technology.pdf)//trepka
The poetical brings the true into the splendor of what Plato in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most
purely. The poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of coming to presence into the beautiful. Could it be that the fine
arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may
expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our look into that which grants and our trust in it?
Whether art may be granted this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of the extreme danger, no one can tell. Yet we can be
astounded. Before what? Before this other possibility: that the frenziedness of technology may entrench
itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout every- thing technological, the
essence of technology may come to presence in the coming-to-pass of truth. Because the essence
of technology is nothing technological, essential reflec- tion upon technology and decisive
confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of
technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But certainly only if
reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning. Thus questioning, we
bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupa- tion with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art. Yet the more
questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes. The closer we come to the
danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For ques- tioning
is the piety of thought.
Heidegger insists, is not to be supplanted by meditative thought. It has its own great
usefulness , and remains indispensable : we cannot , and should not, do away with the
type of thought that plans and investigates. Similarly, it would be foolish to attack technology
blindly , and short-sighted to condemn it as a work of the devil. We depend on technical devices, which make our
lives more practical and easier. But we should not find ourselves so shackled
we fall into bondage with them.
1AR PERM
Permutation enables us to rethink technology in the face of existential threats --this solves ontological reorientation
Nemes 11 (Naomi, On Martin Heideggers The Memorial Address, WordPress, http://naomi-n-
nemes.com/about_collegewriting_memorial.html)//trepka
Heidegger is not optimistic about man's ability to escape his thoughtless fate. He sees technology as virtually unstoppable at this
point, and is not actually suggesting that technology be abandoned all together, as if he were some nature idealist in a trite morality
play. He is not encouraging man to "destroy the evil computers before they enslave us all." In fact,
http://gradworks.umi.com/34/80/3480046.html)//trepka
Heidegger is often said to be the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, but the political import of his thought is by no
means easily discernible. He has been associated with a striking variety of political positions, from left to right, West to East,
peaceful to violent. This dissertation argues that this variety is best understood as deriving from two
product of arbitrary and willful historical human activity and thus calls for a revolutionary
retrieval of unexhausted resources from a people's ownmost history. The quietist-awaiting
inflection, however, regards the existing status quo as having been granted by the unfathomable
endowments of Being and therefore entails a submission to the political order as it has been
determined and a quietist waiting for a new dispensation of Being. Through supplying textual
interpretations of several of Heidegger's most important writings, the dissertation argues that the ambiguous political
import of Heidegger's thought derives from his characteristic approach to fundamental
ontology. It concludes that Heidegger's bequest to his successors is the requirement, for which his thought does not supply
adequate means, to negotiate the tension between the demand for the revolutionary transformation of
politics and the retreat from politics.
AT: ONTOLOGY
No impact to ontology and security is key to uphold Being
Orr 14 (BEING AND TIMELESSNESS, EDITH STEINS CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGERIAN TEMPORALITY, Modern Theology,
https://www.academia.edu/4104510/Being_and_Timelessness_Edith_Steins_Critique_of_Heideggerian_Temporality)//trepka
Stein agrees that Daseins experience of anxiety (Angst) signals that it has been brought face-to-face
with nothingness itself. But she is quick to deny Heideggers claim that this mood is dominant,
insisting that prior to it lies a more prevalent mood of fundamental existential
security : normally, she notes, we go through life almost as securely as if we had a real grip on
our existence.39 Yet according to Heidegger, this attitude to life is to be dismissed as entirely
unreasonable given Daseins exposure to nothingness. What this would imply, claims Stein, is that
the fundamental sense of existential security reveals Dasein to be in the grip of a delusion, so
that the rational human approach ought to consist in (again quoting Heidegger) a passionate ...
consciously resolute anxiety-stricken freedom toward death.40 She strongly rejects this inference
by reverting to the earlier account of the perduring quality of the Ichleben that withstands
and unifies the ceaselessly fluctuating character of conscious experience. Heidegger rejects the selfs
sense of existential security as a superficial mark of Daseins lostness in the One (das Man). But for Stein, it is in fact an entirely
warrantedand more phenomenologically crediblecounterpoint to the anxiety that Heidegger takes to be Daseins existentially
determinative mood. It is here that one reaches the very core of Steins disagreement with Heideggers interpretation of the
transcendental temporality that frames Dasein: The undeniable fact that my being is limited in its transience
from moment to moment and thus exposed to the possibility of nothingness is counterbalanced
by the equally undeniable fact that despite this transience , I am, that from moment to
moment I am sustained in my being, and that in my fleeting being I share in enduring being ...
This security [is] the sweet and blissful security of a child that is lifted up and carried by a strong arm For if a child were
living in the constant fear that its mother might let it fall, we should hardly call this is a rational
attitude.41 Stein proceeds to position her account of the selfs awareness of temporal contingency as the first premise in an
argument that seems to have been adapted from Aquinas argument for Gods existence from the contingency of creaturely
existence.42 The temporal contingency of the I that introspection lays bare suggests an ultimate
reliance on a source of being that is not itself contingent: The security which I experience in my
fleeting existence indicates that I am immediately anchored in an ultimate hold and ground.
Everything temporal is as such fleeting and therefore needs an eternal hold or support.43 Furthermore, since the ultimate
source of received being cannot itself receive being, it follows that no separation can be
drawn between what it is and that it is: this being, Stein concludes, must be its very act of
existing .44
2AC LATOUR
No impact to Being and only the K destroys it --- prevents constructive engagement
with the world
Latour 12 --- professor at Sciences Po Paris (Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press,
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=xbnK8NzMsm4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=being+authenticity+heidegger+latour&ots
=_SdPdms6-f&sig=kFWXvvaLNSgZsMiwOfBsBKJmW1M#v=onepage&q=who%20has%20forgotten%20being&f=false)//trepka
Who has forgotten Being? No one, no one ever has, otherwise Nature would be truly available as
a pure stock. Look around you: scientific objects are circulating simultaneously as subjects objects
and discourse. Networks are full of Being. As for machines, they are laden with subjects and
collectives. How could a being lose its difference, its incompleteness, its mark, its trace of Being? This is
never in anyones power; otherwise we should have to imagine that we have truly been modern, we should be taken in by
the upper half of the modern Constitution. Has someone, however, actually forgotten Being? Yes: anyone
who really thinks that Being has really been forgotten. As Levi-Strauss says, the barbarian is first and formost
the man who believes in barbarism. (Levi-Strauss, [1952] 1987, p. 12). Those who have failed to undertake
empirical studies of sciences, technologies, law, politics, economics, religion or fiction have lost
the traces of Being that are distributed everywhere among beings. If, scorning empiricism, you
opt out of the exact sciences, then the human sciences, then traditional philosophy, then the
sciences of language, and you hunker down in your forest then you will indeed feel a tragic
loss. But what is missing is you yourself, not the world! Heideggers epigones have converted that
glaring weakness into a strength. We dont know anything empirical, but that doesnt matter,
since your world is empty of Being. We are keeping the little flame of Being safe from
everything, and you, who have all the rest, have nothing. On the contrary: we have everything, since
we have Being, and beings, and we have never lost track of the difference between Being and
beings. We are carrying out the impossible project undertaken by Heidegger, who believed what
the modern Constitution said about itself without understanding that what is at issue there is
only half of a larger mechanism which has never abandoned the old anthropological matrix. No one can forget
Being, since there has never been a modern world, or, by the same token, metaphysics. We have
always remained pre-Socratic, pre-Cartesian, pre-Kantian, pre-Nietzschean. No radical
revolution can separate us from these pasts, so there is no need for reactionary counterrevolutions to lead us back to what has never been abandoned. Yes, Heraclitus is a surer guide than Heidegger: Einai gar kai
entautha theous.
good at the service of the person. It is said that human life, as such, is not a basic human good, and is merely a necessary means
utilised in the promotion of other goods. When human life itself fails to live up to our expected requirements, it can ultimately be
dispensed with. Merely being a living member of the species, Homo sapiens, is considered to offer no valid ground for ascribing to all
humans an inviolability that protects them from being intentionally killed.16 Lying behind such accounts are forms
of threshold sufficiency criteria used to establish whether or not individual human beings are
able to qualify as human persons. On one side of the threshold is considered to be a human life worthy of being valued
since that life instantiates feature(s) X . . . Z. A human life with feature(s) X . . . Z is alone considered
worthwhile, since it instantiates that which is sufficient to attribute real value to human existence. Thus, there are effectively
two primary categories of human life to be identified: personal life manifesting feature(s) X . . . Z, and non-personal life that is
incapable of manifesting feature(s) X . . . Z. Human life is valued as long as it is capable of instantiating the feature(s) sufficient to
constitute personal life. Mere non-personal life (not worth living and thus not worthy of full protection from intentional killing) is
thus heavily contrasted with personal life (worth living and thus alone worthy of full protection from intentional killing). Jonathan
Glover, James Rachels, Peter Singer, Helga Kuhse and John Harris all subscribe to the notion that what is truly valued is not human
life as such but personal life, life that is capable of manifest- ing the sufficient feature(s) X . . . Z rationality, self-awareness,
consciousness, etc., or some composite thereof.17 They therefore identify certain attributes that alone are
sufficient to warrant the classification of being a person. The voice of John Locke can be seen to echo strongly in
these approaches, for he defined a person as a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as
itself.18 In the conclusions reached by the above-mentioned authors, all would argue that patients suffering from advanced forms of
senility, or the permanently comatose, cannot be regarded as persons, and will not therefore be classified as being possessed of lives
truly worth living. Since they are not properly capable of being categorised as persons, they cannot be accorded the same protections
that we ascribe to those we do identify as persons.19 The principal difficulty with such theories of the worth of
human life, however, stems from an inadequate justification upon which to make such a
determination that an individual human life Y must contain those sufficient feature(s) X . . . Z in
order to qualify for the status of being regarded by others as a person.20 With regard to non-
philosophical usage, people in general do not make a distinction between attributions of the status person and attributions of the
status human being. Basic patterns of usage point not to the widespread understanding of being a person as actually having selfawareness . . . X . . . Z but rather to a widespread under- standing that being a person is treated synonymously with being a
particular kind of being (by virtue of his or her membership in that distinct class of being). Y is a human being, and not, say, a horse
or a cat, is interchangeable with Y is a person, since Y is recognisably one of us.21 This assertion of an interchangeable
understanding between person and human being, is borne out by the prevailing definitions offered by the Oxford English
Dictionary, where the noun person is viewed as referring to (1) an individual human being, and (2) human beings distinguished
from other things, especially lower animals. Of 1 course it is right to be wary of dictionary definitions. They are clearly not definitive.
Nevertheless, I think that the patterns of usage wit- nessed by the OED are supportive evidence for the proposition that people
generally do not use person and human being to refer to differences in kind between human persons and human non-persons,
such that the former are entitled to have their lives regarded as worthy of being fully protected by negative prohibitions while the
latter are not.22 Consider further a common reaction to patients suffering from advanced senility, or
to patients in a permanent vegetative state. Often we will say that the patient is in a profoundly damaged/disabled
condition, or that a patients quality of life is at a minimum, and so on. Often we will be deeply disturbed by the gap that exists
between the condition of the patient and his or her flourishing as a human being. No one (except the perverted) would want to be
placed in such a condition. Human life is very imperfectly manifested in such a condition.23 Yet, it simply
does not follow that we would generally seek to infer from this debilitated state of being that the
patient has ceased to be a person and has therefore undergone such a change in kind that we now regard the
patient as a non-person.24 Our ready ability to identify with human non-persons in a way that we do
not seem able to identify with non-human non-persons seems to offer additional testimony as
to why we continue to view such human non-persons as persons simpliciter despite their
profoundly damaged state of being.25 This ready ability to make such identification helps to make sense of the
observation that people can and do seek to defend and promote human life without seeking an explanation for protecting or
preserving human life in those who are profoundly damaged beyond an appeal to that good itself (i.e. when asked to
explain actions such as continuing to feed a severely demented Alzheimers patient).26 As such a
basic good, an indispensable constituent of our being, human life itself is capable of providing
an adequate explanation for rendering actions of this kind properly intelligible to us in a way that
actions of this kind cannot be explained for non-human non-persons.27 Still, it can be argued that the above account is simply the
product of muddled conventional thinking, conventional thinking spurred on by the impact of understandable but ultimately
irrational sentiment concerning the state of patients in those kinds of condi- tion.28 There is, however, good philosophical
reason to affirm that those pre-philosophical apprehensions that we have concerning the use of the terms
person and human being, are indeed sound. This can be achieved by positing a credible account of what it is to be a human person
by virtue of being a member of the species, Homo sapiens. It explains why our basic identification with
be a person, as stated by Boethius. A person is an individual substance of a rational nature.30 The definition offered by Boethius is
inherently more satisfactory than the definition offered by John Locke, for it is able to account for our understanding of what can be
termed our species solidarity a solidarity that points against the classification or treatment of profoundly damaged human beings
as sub-personal (semihominem) and whose lives are consequently judged to be of less worth than the rest of us.31 Rather than
focusing on the idea that the individual must be actually rational (conscious, self-aware, etc.) in order to be thought of as a person
(as with John Locke), this definition clearly points to a second basic understanding of what it is to be a person.32 A person is an
individual who is a member of a class of being characterised by those attributes. When we reflect on
the nature of our species Homo sapiens, it is clear that our species is a kind that is rational, self-aware, and so on. This holds true
even if some members of that species are incapable of rational thought, lack self-awareness, and so on.33 Jenny Teichman supports
this central line of argumentation when she states that the idea that a creature can have a rational nature
without being rational . . . does not appear to me to be any more intrinsically problematic than
the idea that all cattle are mammals even the bulls.34 Teichman, therefore, challenges the idea that the way in
which we classify our own kind ought to be treated any differently from the way we classify other things. Does a dog cease to be
classified as a dog when it has lost its bark? Does a pail cease to be classified as a pail when it is no longer capable of holding water
due a large hole in its bottom? If not, why should the very senile or the permanently comatose be classified as non-persons even if
they are deeply defective with respect to an exercisable capacity for rational thought or a capacity for self-awareness?35 We can
therefore credibly argue that non-persons in a state of severe impairment are still fully members of the same species to which we all
belong. The very senile or permanently comatose do not become members of a different species. Through their natural kind they
still speak to us as members of the same species via a common shared human nature and continue to make many of the same moral
claims upon us, for example, a right not to be intentionally killed by other persons in acts of non-consensual euthanasia.36 When
Aristotle stated that we are by nature rational animals, he was not making a statement particular to those fully functional members
of the human species at the height of their faculties. He was, rather, defining the essential universal nature of the species.37 He was
pointing out what the nature of being a member of the human species entails simply by being a recognisable member of that species.
It is a credible principle of reasoning to state that by virtue of the basic kind of being a thing is, the archetypal characteristics of that
kind can be ascribed to any member of that kind, even though not every member of that kind, may, as a matter of fact, actually
manifest those archetypal characteristics.38 Therefore, it can be stated that all members of our species can justifiably be said to
participate and share in the rightful protection offered to the archetypal members of our species because of what they essentially are,
irrespective of the particular circumstances of any given member.39 Why then should being profoundly damaged detract from the
moral status of certain human beings if they are by virtue of their nature as fully human as the most fully flourishing members of our
species? Such damage does not render them a member of a different species, for differences between
humans concerning levels of intelligence, levels of consciousness, levels of coherence or incoherence in thoughts, etc. are all questions of degree and not of kind.40 It is not a question of a
decline in, or non-presence of, an ability that is capable of rendering a substantial change in the
nature of a human being. Rather, it is only the event of death itself that is capable of bringing
about a substantial change in the kind of thing that we are. It is death that brings about a
fundamental ontological change in status, for a corpse is no longer an individual with a
human kind of nature.41 By virtue of the status of being a member of the human species, then, that status can indeed be said
to be one of being a person simpliciter. All persons are entitled to the same basic types of immunity from intentional killing as are
accorded the archetypal mature members of the species. It
reserve only for humans who are actually capable of individually exercising those attributes of our kind. Lifes Inherent Value A
common link is drawn between a patients right to refuse treatment and the right of a patient to assess the quality of his or her own
life. Such a right, it is claimed, is tantamount to an assessment of the worth of life, such that a patient with a low life quality can
commit suicide, be assisted in that goal, or be euthanised.42 Here, I would argue, that this train of thought posits a mistaken frame
of reference for the moral evaluation of the duties we have towards the preservation of human life. It carries plausibility, firstly,
because it trades partly on the looseness or open texture of language, and secondly, because it expands upon an appropriate sphere
of decision-making in which patients are indeed intimately involved in the assessment of the burdens and benefits of treatment.43
No reasonable person would say that a life of less complete, less perfect, human flourishing is better than a life of more complete,
more perfect, human flourishing.44 A life endowed with more flourishing, that realises more profusion in various horizons of
possibility, is a fuller life than a life that is impaired in its ability to flourish. In that sense there can be said to be more quality, a
an
answer by posing a common denominator to reckon with these factors, but the com- plexity of human
value, most significantly the incommensurability of certain goods, defies all such levelling attempts.47 W. D. Ross, Charles Fried,
Ronald Dworkin, and other proponents of mixed consequentialist systems, simply propose prima facie duties without explaining
exactly what it is about the nature of the process of human reasoning that determines the strength of certain values, such that the
duty to respect them is overridden in some situations, but not in others.48 Perhaps an appeal to convention may provide some sort
of guide. However, this just retreats into a form of sub- jectivity, taking comfort in the fact that a practice may be widely spread.
This will not do when we consider the course of human history that has thrown up radically evil
forms of convention, e.g. eugenics, mass killing , etc.49 Again, if a life is judged not worth living, what is it
about death that is supposed to be judged objectively commensurable to staying alive? How is it calculated? Perhaps intuition can
attempt to supply an answer. However, a thoroughgoing appeal to intuition here simply negates the ability we have to use practical
reason to inform our decision-making and guide our choices. But this will not do, for it is tantamount to saying that in the very
situations where human reason is most crucially needed it is of no use to us! In reality, such a thoroughgoing appeal to intuition
readily degenerates into a form of a posteriori rationalisation to justify choices already opted for on the basis of sub-rational
emotion.50 While use of language sometimes leads us to suspect that lives are often evaluated in terms of their overall worth, we
should nevertheless be very suspicious of attempting to extrapolate from statements that (1)
doing X is a valuable part of As life and that As life is diminished by not being able to do X, to (2) As life is no
longer worth living and it is therefore right to intentionally end it because A cannot do X. Such inferences only seem
plausible because there is a shift in the correct locus of evaluation, especially in the framework of medical decision-making, from the
worthwhileness of certain treatments to the worthwhileness of certain lives.51 The correct question to be focused upon, should be
whether a proposed treatment for a patient would be worthwhile; not whether a patients life would be worthwhile. The distinction
between the worthwhileness of certain treatments and the worthwhileness of certain lives is no mere semantic ploy, for it
legitimately seeks to address what the scope of decision-making concerning the preser- vation of life and health should be. In doing
so, it provides for a sphere of delimitation where patient choice concerning treatment can reasonably be made.52 The responsibility
for safeguarding and promoting the good of health lies primarily with the patient and not with the medical profession. That patient
assessment should be centred squarely on the impact of proposed treatments, however, is not tantamount to endorsing the idea that
we can truly judge the worth of our own lives. The capacity to choose crucially brings with it the responsibility of making choices that
do in fact serve to promote rather than under- mine the ends of integral human flourishing. Given the diversity of choices that are
consistent with human flourishing, there will often be considerable leeway in a patients deliberation. Yet, leeway does not endorse
license, and there are limits on the shaping of reasonable choice concerning the refusal or withdrawal of treatments.53 The nonconsequentialist framework being espoused here is not one advocating the nave preservation of life at all costs, for in many cases it
is indeed licit to withhold or withdraw life-preserving treat- ment.54 More precisely, there cannot be said to be a duty to undergo a
treatment that is not worthwhile (offering no reasonable hope of benefit to the patient), or that is considered medically futile.55
Without offering any exclusive listing of factors, Germain Grisez and Joseph Boyle helpfully list several factors that would offer
reasonable grounds for justifying the withdrawal or non-provision of a medical treatment: a risky or experimental treatment;
avoidance of significant further pain or trauma associated with treatment; the impact that 52 a treatment may have on the patients
participation in activities or experiences the patient values; conflicts with deep-seated moral or religious principles to which the
patient is committed to; a treatment psychologically repelling or repugnant to the patient; compelling burdens on family or
finances.56 Such a framework for decision-making can indeed be abused and can result in the refusal of treatments that would seem
to offer considerable benefits to patients without significant burden being attached to them. This will come as no surprise, and
indeed can result in decisions that are directly suicidal in nature. However, the question that needs to be faced here is that there
need be no essential incompatibility between, on the one hand, placing severe restraints on interference with the persistent choice of
patients, even though they are intentionally suicidal, and yet, on the other, still uphold the respect due to the good of human life.57 It
is a brute fact that interference would be visited with all manner of difficulty, not least the fact that successful treatment usually
requires the active co-operation of the patient. The problems that would be visited by enforcing treatments against the vehement will
of a patient would be immense. Effects on the morale of the patient, family, and professions would be considerable. One only has to
consider the impact of force feeding against a persons will to see the traumatic means that may have to be resorted to. Further than
that, the imposition of such an overt act of countermanding a patients decision, would serve only to undermine the already tested
repu- tation of the medical profession in the eyes of the public, suspicious of paternalistic interventionism by physicians, and with it,
a concomitant perception of disregard for the dignity of the individual patient.58 For those reasons, then, the general decision not to
overrule a patients suicidal intent to end life by refusal or withdrawal of treatment, other than by means of, say, persuasion, will
sometimes happen. Yet, this does not amount to a policy of condoning the aiding and abetting of a suicide. Rather, it represents
a principled decision to intentionally act for a good objective, the common good of patients, and the
community generally. This good objective being acted for may practically permit the consequence of resultant death as an
unintended yet fair side effect of a good intention. This is a sensible and principled way of responding to the reality, particularly in
the context of medicine, that in order to prevent the execution, even of a serious wrong, there is only so much that can reasonably be
done to protect patients from the consequences of their own wrongful decisions. Better off Dead? A Concluding Caveat Supporters of
suicide and assisted suicide claim that we can justifi- ably argue that it makes sense to say that a person would be better off dead
rather than continuing to live, say, a life of severely diminished quality. Such value judgements, it is said, are compara- tively
sound.59 Yet, how is it possible for death to benefit the person who dies? Death destroys the person.
How can we produce a benefit, therefore, if we destroy the self, the potential beneficiary? One of the commonest lines of
argumentation made here is termed the deprivation account. Key exponents include Thomas Nagel, Harry Silverstein and Fred
Feldman.60 The argument advanced basically trades on a parallel question concerning death, arguing that a person can be
posthumously harmed by his or her future loss, even though death means that the person is no longer actually in existence to
experience it.61 For example, suppose Charles Dickenss life would have included more literary achievement if he had lived for a few
more years. Because literary achievement is a good, Dickens can be said to have had a less good life overall than he would have had if
he had lived longer. Living a less good life is a harm to the person. By excluding those future possible achievements, then, Dickenss
death can be said to be a harm to him, for it prevented a life that would have been better than it was.62 Trading on this parallel, it is
then argued that death can be a benefit in a comparison of future possible lives. Suppose a persons life would go on containing
severe suffering and pain. That person would be better off having a shorter life than having a life of prolonged misery. Since living a
better life is a benefit, it is said that living the shorter life, here, is a benefit, since it is the better life. By interfering with the infliction
of evils, the persons death can therefore be said to be a genuine benefit to him or her, since it prevents a worse life being lived.63
about death to understand important impli- cations of the choice being opted for. Unlike Devine, I
think that the unreasonableness of opting for death arises precisely because we do know enough about what is being chosen to make
it an objectively irrational choice.71 What we can know about death, based on natural human reason
alone, is that it results in the destruction of the self. There will no longer be a human
being in existence. There will be no carrier of value or disvalue. There will be no
subject in existence that is capable of bearing any of the kinds of predication typical of living
human beings. Death is an event that results in the non-being of the human person that was.72 Unlike Devine, I would argue
that an intention to bring about this non-state, given the relevant (if incomplete) knowledge we have about it, points to the
incoherence behind the idea that death can really be said to be a benefit for the person who is dead, as argued for by contemporary
deprivation authors.73 When we assert that a person is harmed or benefited by a state, this requires that there is actually a subject in
existence who is capable of being the bearer of the value or disvalue. If a person must actually exist in order to be the subject bearer
of harms and benefits that happen, then how can there be said to be a subject who is capable of being benefited posthumously by his
or her death? This line of argumen- tation against deprivation accounts (that death can be a benefit) is convincingly argued for by
John Donnelly and J. L. A. Garcia. If a person succeeds in killing himself or herself, there can be no betterment ascribed to the
person. For Donnelly, it is muddled to argue that a person can be said to be posthumously benefited or
harmed if the person must first be destroyed as a prerequisite for the benefit.74 The irrationality of
thinking that death can be a benefit for a person is further addressed by Garcia.75 If it is good to be without pain, as indeed it is
under most circumstances, this presupposes the existence of the subject in order to instantiate that good (any good). If a person
can be better off dead, then the continued existence of the person must continue after deat h. Yet
no one on the basis of reason alone can justifiably claim that death can allow for the
continuation of the person qua person. To realise goods and to minimise evils requires the presence of that single
constant, a live human being, who can possibly make sense of such value statements. For Garcia, therefore, it is quite illicit to jump
from the evaluation of means to minimise, or be free from, the evils of suffering and pain, to the conclusion that the destruction of
the subject itself can make a person in any meaningful sense better off. Consequently, all that can reasonably be
done is to seek to benefit persons in their present lives, that is to improve as best we can the
extent of their flourishing within the framework of humanitarian means available at our
disposal.76 Contrary to Donnelly and Garcia, Nagel argues that there are plausible exceptions that render such accounts sensible
to us, notwithstanding the destruction of the subject. For example, Nagel argues that a person can be harmed posthumously by
having his or her reputation harmed, and can therefore be said to be posthumously benefited by having his or her reputation
restored. When all is said and done, therefore, it seems that we can reasonably talk of benefiting the dead.77 In reply, it can be
stated that there are other plausible explanations of what is meant by the dead being subjected to harms and benefits that do not
presuppose that the dead can actually be said to experi- ence those harms or benefits. Thus, to take Nagels example con- cerning
posthumous reputation, we can plausibly state that it is the reputation of a former person that is harmed, say, by an act of slander,
and not a person as such.78 Similarly we can say that the reputation of a former person is benefited by nice things being said about
the former person. The living seek to protect their reputations because they, while alive, identify with them and realise that the
reputations they identify with are capable of being posthumously harmed or benefited.79 If the above arguments are
sound, (1) that we can have enough relevant knowledge of what death would entail, and (2) that
the dead cannot really be said to be harmed or benefited, then I think they severely undermine
the contemporary deprivation accounts of death. Contrary to those accounts, I would argue that it is death per
se that is really the objective evil for us, not because it deprives us of a prospective future of overall good judged
better than the alter- native of non-being. It
exist , for no person actually suffers from the sub-sequent non-participation. Rather, death in itself is an evil to us
because it ontologically destroys the current existent subject it is the ultimate in
metaphysical lightning strikes .80 The evil of death is truly an ontological evil borne by the
person who already exists, independently of calculations about better or worse possible lives. Such
an evil need not be consciously experienced in order to be an evil for the kind of being a human person is. Death is an evil because of
the change in kind it brings about, a change that is destructive of the type of entity that we essentially are. Anything, whether
caused naturally or caused by human intervention (intentional or unin- tentional) that
is a radical
interference with the current life process of the kind of being that we are. In consequence, death itself can
be credibly thought of as a primitive evil for all persons, regardless of the extent to which they
are currently or prospectively capable of participating in a full array of the goods of life.81 In
conclusion, concerning willed human actions, it is justifiable to state that any intentional rejection of human life
itself cannot therefore be warranted since it is an expression of an ultimate disvalue for the subject,
namely, the destruction of the present person; a radical 79 ontological good that we cannot begin to weigh objectively
against the travails of life in a rational manner. To deal with the sources of disvalue (pain, suffering, etc.) we
should not seek to irrationally destroy the person , the very source and condition of all
human possibility .82
approach to managing the human activities that affect marine ecosystems [1]. This approach goes
beyond traditional management based on single species and single sectors [2] and recognizes deep connectivity
amongst all elements of the ecosystemincluding humans [3]and the underlying processes of
producing the services people need and want [4,5]. It is place-based and requires a coordinated effort
to sustainably manage the human activities that impact ecosystems [2,5,6]. Although there have been
various efforts to define the key aspects, principles and guidelines [2,3,7] of what EBM is and requires, there is still a gap
between theory and practice [4,7,8]. Managers face political, legal, social and scientific difficulties in
implementing the complex concepts of EBM, which has come to be seen as daunting and expensive [4,7,9]. More
science will not necessarily lead to the implementation of EBM [7]. This is reflected in research studies, which argue that the main
challenges for the implementation of EBM include building a collective vision and objectives for EBM, designing metrics to evaluate
the accomplishment of the objectives and creating ocean governance frameworks [2], as well as bridging the gap
between scientific concepts and operational goals [4]. Successful initiatives aimed at implementing
EBM (e.g., Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Puget Sound in United States, and Raja Ampatin
Indonesia) show that meaningful involvement of stakeholders in the definition of objectives and in
monitoring processes have been key elements for success [4,9]. Put differently, environmental management is
never an exclusively science-based undertaking. Human values, articulated and pursued within appropriate governance processes,
are at the heart of why EBM is important and they define what EBM should achieve [10]. Because management is the
process of making decisions [11], the implementation of EBM requires a participatory and
systematic framework to identify the values of the constituents with respect to EBM and to make
decisions that best satisfy those values. This framework would help managers anticipate and address the concerns of
stakeholders and make more informed decisions about the use of natural resources [12]. In addition, if stakeholders see their values
reflected they are more likely to trust the process and/or support its implementation [12]. 1.1. The need to improve
decision-making processes EBM proponents have suggested the Integrated Ecosystem Assessments
(IEAs) developed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as the most useful
decisionmaking framework for marine management that integrates science to assist
decisionmakers [13]. This framework, increasingly seen as central to EBM, is rooted in the decision analysis field [9,13], and it
implicitly recognizes the importance of systematic decision-making. The six steps of IEA include the following: (1)
definition of objectives, threats to ecosystems and ecosystem management drivers; (2) development of indicators
for ecosystem state; (3) establishment of thresholds for each indicator; (4)risk analyses to evaluate how indicators respond to human
and environmental disturbances and the probability that indicators will reach an undesirable state;(5) evaluation of
management strategies to predict the effects on the indicators; and(6) monitoring management
strategy outcomes [9,13]. Although IEA suggests stakeholder involvement [9,13], it does not require it; and although it
suggests a systematic decisionmaking process, it does not pay detailed attention to the definition
of objectives and of indicators specifically related to stakeholder values or objectives. Lack of
attention to these aspects may contribute to the observed inconsistency between values, objectives, indicators and management
decisions. For example, objectives may dismiss important values, scientists may suggest lists of indicators for EBM that may not be
useful for managers to make decisions, or may not even reflect management objectives and stakeholders values [10,14]. Structured
decision-making(SDM) is a systematic process that can help stakeholders and managers construct the framework for EBM based on
the values of the participants, which can be used to create, evaluate and select between alternatives [15]. Structured decision-
making refers to applied decision analysis conducted with stakeholders and technical specialists
to gain insight of and guide management decisions. Since it is a well-explored field for multiple stakeholder
planning processes, it provides methodologies and approaches for each stage of the process. Additionally, it can help integrate
science in a way that is useful for decision makers and meaningful for stakeholders.
Cost-benefit analysis is key to inform governmental policy --- protects the marine
environment
Palumbi et al 8 --- Department of Biology, Stanford University (Stephen, also Paul Sandifer, David Allan,
Michael Beck, Daphne Fautin, Michael Fogarty, Benjamin Halpern, Lewis Iczne, Jo-Ann Leong, Elliot Norse, John Stachowicz, and
Diana Wall, Managing for ocean biodiversity to sustain marine ecosystem services, http://mcbi.marineconservation.org/publications/pub_pdfs/Palumbi_etal_Frontiers_2009.pdf)//trepka
Using diversity to manage multiple, conflicting services Here, we propose a fundamental shift in orientation, one
that would move us away from management of one service at a time and allow us to focus
instead on the conservation of multiple services through protection of natural biodiver- sity. Biodiversity would
become the central element tying management of different sectors together, constraining some sectors for the benefit of others, but
ultimately pro- ducing a net benefit for all sectors. We argue that consistent management across agencies to
sustain natural biodiversity via conservation of species richness, genetic diversity, species
composition, and habitat diversity will help to maintain ecosystem integrity and stability. Our
approach establishes the maintenance of natural biodiversity (sus- taining all of an ecosystems biological
parts at functioning levels) as a common core principle, guiding decision mak ing in agencies at local,
state, and federal levels. The suite of services provided by marine ecosystems can create
management conflict and overuse of the environ- ment through cumulative impacts, if
different managers are required to optimize for different services. For example, if improving waste management demands changes
that decrease fisheries yield, then separate management for these services may generate regulatory conflict and the inability of either
management body to reach its goals (Figure 3). Thus, a management focus on one service at a time may compromise the
multifunctionality of the ecosystem. So, how can managers balance conflicting needs for a given ecosystem, to produce many
complex, linked services? We suggest an approach based first on the link between diversity and
ecosystem function and, second, on experi- mental studies showing that increased biodiversity can
simultaneously increase and stabilize multiple measures of ecosystem functioning (Hooper and
Vitousek 1998; Duffy et al. 2003; Worm et al. 2006). In this approach, different agencies, regardless of their primary focus (eg
fisheries, water quality, coastal zone management), would also be required to manage for sustained biodiversity, because sustained
biodiversity would increase the likelihood that multiple, important ecosystem services would be sus- tained as well (Figure 3). Such
clear mandates will proba- bly need to come in the form of amendments to existing laws or new laws, or could be
incorporated into compre- hensive ocean area-based management. Although politi- cally difficult,
development of such mandates would gen- erate broadly parallel management goals in different agencies, creating much-needed
coordination, as agen- cies would be managing for similar outcomes. Coupled
Implementation would require a governance structure that coordinates among sec- toral
managers.
Their critique of technology is too essentializing --- plan creates a productive use
Hongladarom 12 --- Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University,
Bangkok (Soraj, Don Ihde: Heideggers Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives, Fordham University Press,
Springer)//trepka
Here one can see Ihdes view on science and technology in a nutshell. Ihde
historically prior to science shows that science itself is so imbued with technology, with certain ways of looking at the world, that it
would be a folly to look 0
36at it as a disinterested body of knowledge as the older philosophy of science tends to do. By doing this, Ihde is painting a picture of
Heidegger as perhaps a precursor of the social scientific study of science and technology. Here is perhaps Heideggers
positive contribution to both philosophy of science and philosophy of technology. His negative
contribution for Ihde is of course that of essentializing technology and his failure (though hardly a fault of his)
to see the development of newer technologies in the past two or three decades. That Ihde keeps on repeating that Heidegger fails to
see how technologies develop after his death perhaps is intended to show that there are still some scholars who act as if Heidegger
were alive today. There could be some who still employ Heideggers tools to comment on and criticize
these newer technologies. There is a reason for this. If one believes that Technology (with capital T) has an enframing
essence, then it has the essence timelessly. Consequently, these philosophers presumably would look at the newer technologies (the
Internet, the genome project, etc.) as yet other manifestations of the essence of Technology. But that would be too
restrictive, and doing so would result in a rather complete failure to see how technologies
interact with the changing times and how technologies and their social and cultural contexts
depend on one another in a very dynamic way.
Problem solving and science are good --- allows ideas to progress beyond their
original constructions that they criticize
Reisinger and Steiner 5 --- Florida International University, USA AND Central Queensland
University, Australia (Yvette and Carol, RECONCEPTUALIZING OBJECT AUTHENTICITY, Science Direct)//trepka
INTRODUCTION According to Kuhn, a basic concept within any discipline is an idea accepted
once and for all by all members of its community (1970:17-18). The myriad discussions of authenticity within
tourism literature, earlier surveyed by Wang (1999), indicate that, in Kuhnian terms at least, it is not yet a basic concept, a singular
idea accepted once and for all. Authenticity has not yet become a black box in tourism, a fact whose origins and constructed
nature have disappeared (Latour 1987:1-17). According to both Latour and Kuhn, the role of discipline black
boxes or basic concepts is to allow progress in the development of knowledge. Once a research
community agrees on what certain terms mean, it can use those terms to address and solve new
problems, generate new concepts, and take the field in new directions. Kuhn says a basic concept
allows research to progress, partly because it ends the constant reiteration of fundamentals and partly because the
confidence that they were on the right track encourages [researchers] to undertake more precise, esoteric
and consuming sorts of work (1970:17).
2001; Tilman et al. 2001; Wall et al. 2004; MA 2005; Sala and Knowlton 2006; Worm et al. 2006; Butler et al. 2007; Hector and
Bagchi 2007). In principle, such knowledge should be useful in guiding a national ocean policy that
maintains the services provided by oceans into the future. But does know- ing the link between diversity and services usefully inform
policy? We argue that management to sustain biodiversity could provide a critical foundation for a
practical, ecosys- tem-based management (EBM) approach to the oceans. Globally, 60% of
ecosystem services are degraded (MA 2005). These ecosystems provide food, shelter,
recycling, and other support mechanisms that human communities require, but fundamental
services are declining as ecosys- tems are unraveled by human impacts (Palmer et al. 2004).
Marine ecosystems (Figure 1) provide a constellation of services: they produce food , receive and
regulate the climate and atmosphere , generate tourism
income, and provide recre- ational opportunities (Covich et al. 2004; MA 2005). The extraordinary diversity of the
worlds oceans across the different levels of ecosystems, habitats, species, functional roles, and genetic diversity (Carpenter et
al. 2006; Sala and Knowlton 2006) and the interconnections of marine, coastal, freshwater, and terrestrial
ecosystems make manag- ing ocean ecosystems crucial for long-term prosperity. Although degradation of
ecosystems might be reversed through appropriate policies (MA 2005), there are sub- stantial information gaps in our
understanding of ecosys- tem processes (Carpenter et al. 2006), which impede prac- tical ideas about implementing
policy. EBM involves incorporating knowledge of ecosystem processes into management, but
assimilate wastes, protect shorelines from storms,
defining EBM and speci- fying how it can be implemented has been difficult, par- ticularly for marine ecosystems (Arkema et al.
2006). Grumbine (1994) surveyed 33 definitions of EBM, and Arkema et al. (2006) detailed 17. However, even with this large
number of definitions, fewer than 10% of plans created by resource managers addressed priority EBM
criteria, such as sustainability (Arkema et al. 2006). Despite increasing agreement on the principles and criteria of EBM
among academics, managers do not include these in current plans (Arkema et al. 2006). Calls for EBM usually
include the need to create a balance between services and to incorporate input from all stakeholders, managers, and policy makers
(Arkema et al. 2006). However, this com- plex balancing act requires a high level of coordination, a great deal of cooperation, and
the ability of managers to enforce trade-offs among different services. How can such positive interactions best be achieved? We posit
that a common focus on management to conserve natural biodi- versity could provide a
foundation for such interactions and a practical basis for beginning EBM.
about the meaning of Being, Heidegger argues, one needs first a theory of how this meaning
could be understood, that is, a theory of human understanding as the mode of access to Being .
A theory of human understanding, though, is possible only in the context of a
general theory of what it is to be human . Given Heideggers view about the way in which traditional
language and concepts distort the question of Being, he believed he needed to invent a whole new vocabulary for
describing human life and our forms of understanding. He uses the term Dasein (being-there)
to designate what we humans are. Dasein is thus to replace such previous terms as rational
animal, thinking thing, conscious- ness, and spirit. The analysis of human life and of our forms of
understanding is, therefore, for Heidegger analysis of Dasein . In Being and Time Heidegger discusses six
features of Dasein , each of which re fers to a way in which a human being is
different from the ways in which something (e.g. a chair, an animal, a stone)
which is not a human being is. First, the essential features of Dasein are answers to the question who? rather
than (as is the case with non-human things) what? Second, Dasein is a kind of being for whom Being is at issue, or is a concern.
This means both that Dasein is defined by its concern for Being (part of this being its concern with asking and answering the
question What is Being?), and that Dasein is essentially concerned with its own Being, that is, with who
(or what kind of person) it is. Third, Dasein is in each case irreducibly individual, is in each case my own. Fourth, Dasein
is its possibilities. Whereas a stone has certain real properties, and these are what it is important for
us to know about if we want to know what the stone is, what it is important for us to know about
a human being is that human beings possible ways of being or acting. Just as it is central to this stone, let
us say, that it weighs one kilo, it is central to being John Jones that he can speak French, can control himself in certain ways, can be
generous, etc. Fifth, Dasein is always characterised by a complex kind of understanding of Being, of itself, its own possibilities, the
world it lives in, things in its world, other people, etc. The understanding in question is not a matter of having the correct set of
beliefs, bu tof being able to deal with the thing in question, whatever it is (myself, the world, other things), in a certain way. To be a
person of a certain kind is to be an entity with certain possible ways of existing, and correspondingly certain way sofu nderstanding.
Finally, Dasein is always being-in-a-world: this means that a human always exists as a person who is thrust into
a set of already existing objects, projects, and arrangements and one who is always already
engaged in complicated dealings with the entities in such a world. To be a human, Heidegger
claims, is to be a thrown project, by which he means what is important in specifying who Dasein is is the set of projects
it has. To have projects means always to be running ahead of oneself to a future in which the next step of the project exists. It means
understanding oneself and ones world in ac ertain way and having (or rather being) certain possibilities. To be me means to
have the project of eating lunch soon, finishing this chapter, going to the cinema this evening.
What I am now cannot be understood except by reference to these ways in which I am oriented
towards an inherently uncompleted future. On the other hand these projects are not the free creation of Dasein ,but
are taken over from the world into which it is thrown. I can only have the project of writing a book if the institution book exists, and
it is not an institution I brought into existence
1AR ANTHRO
Alt cant solve Heidegger doesnt account for life forms like bacteria and viruses
Heine 90 -- Professor of Religion and History as well as Director of the Institute for Asian
Studies (Steven, "Philosophy for an 'Age of Death': The Critique of Science and Technology in
Heidegger and Nishitani," JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdfplus/1399227.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdCon
firm=true//SL)
Heidegger's views are similar to the idea of emptiness found in Christian mysticism and
Buddhism. Buddhist and Christian mysticism maintain that dualism is an illusion associated
with identifying either with the ego or with the body in which the ego is "housed" So long as one
thinks that one is either ego or body, one will spontaneously struggle to defend them against
threats posed by the "extemal" world. Moving beyond this defensive view of self requires that
one experience oneself not as a "thing" at all, but rather as the emptiness or opening in which all
things appear, including the intemal relations that constitute things.Once it is revealed that to
be human means to be the openness in which things can manifest themselves and thus "be," it
becomes possible to identify with and to care about all things, not just the ego body.
Paradoxically, when one becomes "nothing" (the openness), one simultaneously becomes
"everything," in the sense that one no longer identifies with and defends a particular
phenomenon of the ego body but rather can identify with all things and "let them be." Mystics
argue that their path is not a flight into otherworldly abstraction, but instead the most concrete
way of encountering things. Spinoza, for example, maintained that at the most realized level of
awareness one discems that each particular thing is God. Presumably, such ontological
realization would elicit major changes in one's everyday treatment of things! Many deep
ecologists shy away from the term mysticism, preferring instead to speak of profound intuition.
Whatever term is used for this nondualist sense of connectedness, it may pose some problems
for deep ecology. For one thing, the intuition that all things are interrelated manifestations of
God (or, as Naess sometimes says, Atman) may support the ideal of "radical ecocentric
egalitarian- ism," but what then is the decision procedure to be followed in the face of dilemmas,
e. g., the altemative saving either a child or a deer? Naess maintains that our primary obligation
is to our "nearest and dearest," including members of our own species. He also argues,
nevertheless, that adjudication of conflicts between the needs of humans and nonhumans would
he very different if we realized that we have a relationship with and obligation to not only
humans but all forms of life. While appealing, however, such an idea does not address what is to
be done with the many "life forms" that are so deadly to human beings, including viruses and
bacteria.
2AC NAZIS
Heideggers philosophy is inherently anti-semitic --- recent developments and
experts prove
Oltermann 14 --- Guardian and Observer's Berlin correspondent (Philip, Heidegger's 'black notebooks'
are asking whether the antisemitic tendencies of the author of Being and Time ran deeper than
previously thought. The philosopher's sympathies for the Nazi regime have been well documented in the past: Heidegger
joined the party in 1933 and remained a member until the end of the second world war. But antisemitic ideas were
previously thought to have tainted his character rather than touched the core of his philosophy
not least by Jewish thinkers such as Hannah Arendt or Jacques Derrida, who cited their debt to Heidegger. This week's
publication of the "black notebooks" (a kind of philosophical diary that Heidegger asked to be
held back until the end of his complete work), challenges this view. In France the revelations have been
debated vigorously since passages were leaked to the media last December, with some Heidegger scholars even trying to stop the
notebooks' publication. In Germany, one critic has argued that it would be "hard to defend" Heidegger's thinking
after the publication of the notebooks, while another has already called the revelations a "debacle" for modern continental
philosophy even though the complete notebooks were until now embargoed by the publisher. The most controversial passages of
the black notebooks are a series of reflections from the start of the second world war to 1941. While distancing himself from the
racial theories pursued by Nazi intellectuals, Heidegger argues that Weltjudentum ("world Judaism") is one of
the main drivers of western modernity, which he viewed critically. "World Judaism", Heidegger writes in the
notebooks, "is ungraspable everywhere and doesn't need to get involved in military action while
continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of
our people". In another passage, the philosopher writes that the Jewish people, with their "talent
for calculation", were so vehemently opposed to the Nazi's racial theories because "they
themselves have lived according to the race principle for longest". The notion of "world Judaism" was
propagated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish plan for world domination.
Adolf Hitler stated the conspiracy theory as fact in Mein Kampf, and Heidegger too appears to adopt some of its central tropes.
"Heidegger didn't just pick up these antisemitic ideas, he processed them philosophically he
failed to immunise his thinking from such tendencies," the notebooks' editor, Peter Trawny, told the Guardian.
Nazism disad --- their view of being in the world locks in discriminatory
practices
Brody 14 --- New Yorker (Richard, WHY DOES IT MATTER IF HEIDEGGER WAS ANTI-SEMITIC?,
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/03/why-does-it-matter-if-heidegger-was-anti-semitic.html)//trepka
According to Thomas Assheuer, writing in Die Zeit, The Jew-hatred in Black Notebooks is no afterthought; it
forms the foundation of the philosophical diagnosis. In other words, these newly published writings show that,
for Heidegger, anti-Semitism was more than just a personal prejudice. In the Guardian, Philip Oltermann
offers some choice passages: World Judaism, Heidegger writes in the notebooks, is ungraspable
everywhere and doesnt need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its
influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people. In another passage,
the philosopher writes that the Jewish people, with their talent for calculation, were so
vehemently opposed to the Nazis racial theories because they themselves have lived according
to the race principle for longest. The French philosopher Emmanuel Faye picks up on one notably insidious term in the
new publications: We know that [Heidegger] speaks in his Black Notebooks of the worldlessness of Judaism. Jews arent
just considered to lack a homeland, they are said definitively to be worldless. Its worth recalling
that worldlessness is an expression that Heidegger doesnt even use for animals, which, in a
1929 lecture, he calls world-poor. In this complete dehumanization of Judaism, the Jews no longer have a
place in the world, or, rather, they never had one. We also discoverthat the Heideggerian idea of being-inthe-world which is central to Being and Time can take on the meaning of a discriminatory term with an
anti-Semitic intent. Oltermann adds that Heidegger also argues that like fascism and world judaism, Soviet communism
and British parliamentarianism should be seen as part of the imperious dehumanising drive of western modernity. Yet, in the
magazine Prospect, the philosopher Jonathan Re attempts to defend Heidegger by minimizing the significance of this idea: One of
his arguments is that Judaism, like Bolshevism and Fascism, participates in the corrosive calculative culture of modernity, even
though it goes back thousands of years. This makes me wonder about Re as well: Isnt
it a priori anti-Semitic to
consider Judaism corrosive? And wouldnt that idea, as Oltermann suggests, place antiSemitism at the core of Heideggers philosophical conception of history?
Rejecting anti-semitism is a moral imperative
Tezyapar 14 --- political and religious commentator, peace activist and an executive producer
at a Turkish TV (Sinem, MUSLIMS MUST DENOUNCE THE HOLOCAUST AND FIGHT AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM,
http://www.sinemtezyapar.com/muslims-must-denounce-the-holocaust-and-fight-against-anti-semitism.html)//trepka
Darwinism, and its false implication that human beings are mere animals, classified as superior, inferior or non-human is the
basis for the pseudo-science of racism. When Hitler said, Take away the Nordic Germans and
nothing remains but the dance of apes, he was referring to the falsehood of Darwinist ideas . (Carl
Cohen, Communism, Fascism and Democracy, Random House, New York, 1972, p. 408-409) While certainly, there are differences
between people,
1AR NAZIS
Heidegger is bad he implies that all technological advancement is bad, and
strongly associates with Nazism
Feenberg, 2000 - holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the
School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (Andrew, Constructivism
and Technology Critique: Replies to Critics, Taylor Francis ) DS
I. Heidegger or Marcuse ... or Both
I thank Iain Thomson for his generous and lucid explanation of some of the more obscure
aspects of my book. The historical background he offers is accurate and useful, and I can agree
with most of his interpretation of my contribution. It is true that I am deeply influenced by both
Marcuse and Heidegger and that is something of a paradox given their quarrel. I have two points
I want to make here in response to Thomson, and I will make them as briefly as I can, since I
have far more disagreements with David Stump to deal with in the second part of this article.
My first concern has to do with Thomson's attempt to portray Heidegger as a non-essentialist
thinker with a historical theory of technology that can guide us today. I am not surprised that
Thomson, who studied with Hubert Dreyfus, should come to the defense of Heidegger. Dreyfus
himself has written several interesting articles in which he attempts a similar salvage operation.
Like Dreyfus, Thomson refers us to a passage in Heidegger's essay, 'Building Dwelling Thinking',
where the modern highway bridge functions as a 'thing' in Heidegger's eminent sense of the
term (Dreyfus 11995, pp. 102-3J). It is true that in this passage Heidegger discusses modern
technology without negativism or nostalgia and suggests an innovative approach to
understanding it. Combining this unique example with his many obscure and ambiguous
statements on technology in general, one can construct connections between Heidegger and
Woodstock, as does Dreyfus, or, more plausibly, Heidegger and the Amish, as Thomson suggests
here. But how plausible are these interpretations, really?
I will admit to having learned something from looking at Heidegger in this way. His
phenomenology of action suggests an understanding of technology as a lifeworld rather than a
mere instrumental means, and this is a valuable contribution. There is something right about
the notion of Gelassenheit loo, freely interpreted. As a result I do not condemn Heidegger
absolutely as do many critics of his awful politics, and I have tried to make use of certain aspects
of his thought in my own questioning of technology. But I am always held back from full assent
to these redemptive views of Heidegger by two other aspects of his thought.
On the one hand, his defenders have to admit that the highway bridge passage is the one and
only instance in his whole corpus of a positive evaluation of a modern technology. Alongside this
passage, there are dozens of others that reek of volkisch nostalgia for the good old days of thatch
roofed huts, silver chalices, quill pens, humble jugs, wooden shoes, and suchlike trappings of the
elitist anti-modernism of right-wing German intellectuals in the Weimar and Hitler period.
There is even an amusing passage in the Parmenides lectures where Heidegger attacks the
typewriter for alienating the hand from the word, apparently to the amusement of his students
whom he asks for forebearance. (Thomson discusses this passage and tries to find in it an
anticipatory critique of word processing. I am not persuaded.)
I believe that this is not merely a nervous tic of an old mandarin, but theoretically significant. Its
significance lies in the fact that one finds no criteria for the transformation of modern
technology anywhere in Heidegger. Despite all the efforts to complicate the picture with learned
reflections on the word Wesen, the fact is that Heidegger envisages only three ways of making
things, art, craft, and modern technology, and his critique of the latter for challenging nature
and storing up its powers implies that almost everything we associate with industrial
society is bad . This was a common view in Heidegger's conservative academic milieu, as Hans
Sluga convincingly argues, and Heidegger fits right in (Sluga [ 19931). This is not to reject out of
the
boundary between life and death. Individuals can survive for decades without consciousness and individuals whose
whole brains are dead can be supported for extended periods. One suggested response is to redefine death,
justifying a higher brain criterion for death. This argument fails because it conflates two distinct
notions about the demise of human beings - the one, biological and the other, ontological. Death
is a biological phenomenon . This view entails the rejection of a higher brain criterion of
death. Moreover, I claim that the justification of the whole brain (or brain stem) criterion of death is also cast into doubt by these
advances in medical science. I proceed to argue that there is no need to redefine death in order to identify which treatments ought to
be provided for the permanently and irreversibly unconscious. There are already clear treatment guidelines.
Death is always worse than a loss of being --- even Heidegger agrees
CUPFS 12 ---- Cardiff University Philosophy and Film Society (SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK, Charlie
Kaufman, http://zooetrope365.wordpress.com/tag/death/)//trepka
If we are to live authentically, according to Heidegger, we must continually project our existence towards the horizon of
our death. We need to acknowledge that we are essentially finite; that our
in-the-world, is something we must face totally alone because it can never grasped by a Being-still-there.
Even when we experience the deaths of others, we are brought no closer to an understanding of what death means for us. To be
authentically we must recognise that death is our own unavoidable potentiality (2). We must confront the fact that we are always
thrown towards possibilities which are ultimately our own because only we can be responsible for facing up to death and making
sense of our existence as a Being-towards-death. Heidegger argues that this entails cultivating a mood of anxiety a mode of living
founded upon an anticipation of death which fully recognises ones finitude and individuality, and refuses to conform to the common
attitudes the idle talk of the they or the consolations of religion which tranquilize us about these facts. Whilst some
aspects of Heideggers position may not be entirely convincing his rejection of the significance the death of
others may have for our own self-understanding, for example the idea that an acknowledgement of our finitude
can profoundly affect our self-interpretation strongly resonates. In Synecdoche, New York, the character of
Caden is painfully aware of his own mortality. His body seems to be turning against him and talk of or references to death abound in
his world. This raises an important point although the Epicurean imploration not to fear death is most probably sound advice, to
cast death from our minds as nothing to us seems an even more difficult feat for the ill person who is acutely aware that the end
may come sooner than hoped. Caden quite readily acknowledges that he is a Being-towards-death. However, this does not
mean that he is leading what Heidegger would call an authentic existence. It seems that rather
than cultivating a mood of anxiety and anticipating death in a way that leads him to an
appreciation of life as transient, towards recognition of the temporality of Being, he desperately clings to
the reality of the everyday by representing and recreating it again and again as a piece of theatre.
Caden even hires an actor, Sammy, to play himself in his life-drama, deferring the responsibility of honestly confronting death onto
another person. Were all hurtling towards death, Caden says, yet here we are for the moment, alive.
Each of us knowing were going to die, each of us secretly believing we wont. It seems that although
Caden is able to accept that death is the horizon towards which we all are thrown, he fails to appreciate that all our living moments
are unique, irreversible and leading us closer to the end. In the film, months and years seem to pass Caden by without him noticing
that life has moved on. In his attempt to capture a moment of absolute truth in art before it is too late, he neglects to project himself
into a future which cannot be held back. The
alienated from his mode of existence. He realises that in life, unlike in theatre, there are no rehearsals, there are no
second chances, and there is no director or audience there to validate your performance. Synecdoche, New Yorkhas quite a
reputation for being divisive in the responses it provokes. Some find it depressingly bleak. One film professor, Daniel Shaw (3)
argues that as a film it is profoundly deadening. For Shaw, the character of Caden desperate for meaning yet embittered by the
world represents the passive nihilism which Nietzsche so derided. Professor of philosophy and religion David Smith disagrees (4).
He sees Kaufmans mix of tragic insight and comic farce as a platform to inspire reflection upon strategies for a sort of naturalistic
transcendence in our ways of relating to the basic limits of human existence; namely, death and the impossibility of adequately
representing our world linguistically. Personally, I would say that to experience the film as profoundly deadening suggests that one
has missed out on its invitation for us to think about our lives differently. Although
2AC WOLCHER
The alternative devolves into endless naval gazing over every instance of
calculation - technological thinking can be good the permutation binds a
reformist criticism to the aff
Wolcher 04 Writing in the Washington Law Review (The End of Technology: A Polemic
Louis E. Weber http://projects.ischool.washington.edu/lawsymposium/docs/wolcher.pdf)
//J.N.E
With all due respect to Martin Heid egger, who tended to disparage the 10. language of means
and ends, 13 the question of technologys ultimate end is the right one to ask because it selfconsciously appropriates the terminology of technological thinking (the means-end
relationship) in order to question technology on its own terms. If there is something about
the essence of modern technology that has inflicted a wound on humanity, then it
alone is the sword that can heal that wound . For the essence of modern technology is
, it is in us and around us in the
form of our world. In an operational and result-oriented world like ours, a fact is the projection
of a method for finding it, and a method is the projection of a human purpose. 14 This double
insight into the intimate relation between facts and purposes, Is and Ought, gives critical reason
the chance to disentangle the terms of the relati on, interrogate the mostly hidden purposes of
modern technology for their meaning, and yes, also assess modern technologys ultimate
rationality. The questionability of technologys cont ribution to ultimate ends is an ancient
theme. In the Charmides , 15 one of his earliest dialogues, Plato describes Socrates as expressing
considerable doubt about the ultimate end of technological progress. After discussing with
Critias the meaning of the kind of wisdom that knows where its own knowledge ends, and hence
where its ignorance begins, Socr ates relates a troubling dream that he had. The dream concerns
a society where everything is extremely well ordered, technologically speaking. Unable to tell
whether the dream came through the horn or the ivory gate 16 (that is, whether its content was
bad and false, or good and true) Socrates goes on to describe what he dreamt: The dream is this.
Let us suppose that wisdom is such as we are now defining, and that she has absolute sway over
us. Then, each action will be done according to the arts or sciences, and no one professing to be
a pilot when he is not, no physician or general or anyone else pretending to know matters of
which he is ignorant, will deceive or elude us. Our health will be improved; our safety at sea, and
also in battle, will be assured; our coats and shoes, and all other instruments and implements
will be skillfully made, because the workmen will be good and true. Aye, and if you please, you
may suppose that prophecy will be a real knowledge of the futu re, and will be under the control
of wisdom, who will deter deceivers and set up the true prophets in their place as the revealers of
the future. Now I quite agree that mankind, thus provided, would live and act according to
knowledge, for wisdom would watch and prevent ignorance from intruding on us in our work.
But whether by acting according
this is a point which we have not yet been able to determine . 17 Here, at the beginning of
Western philosophy, we witness a mind troubled by the relation between tec hnical efficiency
and ultimate human ends: a mind willing to question that relation. Socrates knew that so long as
we question something exclusively in terms of what it immediately provides us in comfort or
material well- being, we are thinking technologically, not philosophically. Accordingly, the
italicized words in the previous paragraph indicate that Socrates was unsure how (or even
whether) science and technology, viewed as means, contribute to the ul timate end of living a
good life. In this kind of questioning he is not alone in the history of Western philosophy.
Consider the brilliant twen tieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who expressed his
own doubts on the question rather more succinctly: We feel that even when all possible
scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. 18
If a Luddite is defined as someone who yearns to shatter the instruments of technology so as to
return society to a supposedly pre- technological Eden, 19 then it must be said that neither
Socrates nor Wittgenstein were Luddites. They were thinkers trying to get beneath the glitter of
technological progress to reach what is primordial about it. In Socrates case, the primordial is t
echnologys apparent indifference (or irrelevance) to what human beings ought to do with their
lives, as opposed to how they should do what they happen to have decided to do. In
Wittgensteins case, the primordial is a function of sciences commitment to methodological
rigor: th e scientific need to predetermine the realm of questions that can be sen sibly put to the
world also narrows the range of permissible answers, thus ensuring that none of these questions
and answers will ever touc h what he calls the ultimate sense and value of the world. 20 A
question like What is the end of technology? thus needs to be thought down to its roots before
any decently thoughtful answer to it can be attempted. Most of the time we tend to leap over
what is simple and original, and get hung up on the complicated and derivative. And so it is with
technology: we tend to leap immediately into seemingly intractable political controversies like
technological progress versus the threats that it poses to our privacy, or the preconditions for
inducing investment in future technology versus the needs of the poor, in undeveloped and
developed regions alike, to enjoy the benefits of present technology. These problems are
admittedly pressing a nd difficult, but they stand no chance of being solved, or even properly
understood, so long as the question that grounds them remains unasked. Preceding all questions
about particular aspects of technolog y (including the manifold that is sometimes called law
and technology) is this one: What is technology? As a grounding question, the question just
asked does not merely seek to uncover correct information about technologys instrumentalities
and support institutions. Before thinki ng about personal computers, cell phones, global
patents,
copyrights, trademarks, and unfair competition, which institutionally ser ve modern
technologys tendency to colonize ever-greater spheres of social life by transforming its
ld endeavor to grasp
technologys essence .
AT: ALTRUISM
Human nature in inherently selfish double bind either the alternative cant
solve or the alternative destroys freedom
Johnson, 2012 - Master's degree in Evolutionary Anthropology, doctoral student in the history
of science at University of British Columbia (Eric, Ayn Rand on Human Nature, 10/5/2012,
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/2012/10/05/ayn-rand-on-human-nature/
) DS
Every political philosophy has to begin with a theory of human nature, wrote Harvard
evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in his book Biology as Ideology. Thomas Hobbes, for
example, believed that humans in a state of nature, or what today we would call huntergatherer societies, lived a life that was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short in which there
existed a warre of all against all. This led him to conclude, as many apologists for dictatorship
have since, that a stable society required a single leader in order to control the rapacious
violence that was inherent to human nature. Building off of this, advocates of state communism,
such as Vladimir Lenin or Josef Stalin, believed that each of us was born tabula rasa, with a
blank slate, and that human nature could be molded in the interests of those in power.
Ever since Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand has been gaining prominence among American
conservatives as the leading voice for the political philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism, or the
idea that private business should be unconstrained and that governments only concern should
be protecting individual property rights. As I wrote this week in Slate with my piece Ayn Rand
vs. the Pygmies, the Russian-born author believed that rational selfishness was the
ultimate expression of human nature.
Collectivism, Rand wrote in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal is the tribal premise of
primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a
supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them
whenever it pleases. An objective understanding of mans nature and mans relationship to
existence should inoculate society from the disease of altruistic morality and economic
redistribution. Therefore, one must begin by identifying mans nature, i.e., those essential
characteristics which distinguish him from all other living species.
As Rand further detailed in her book The Virtue of Selfishness, moral values are genetically
dependent on the way living entities exist and function. Because each individual organism is
primarily concerned with its own life, she therefore concludes that selfishness is the correct
moral value of life. Its life is the standard of value directing its actions, Rand wrote, it acts
automatically to further its life and cannot act for its own destruction. Because of this Rand
insists altruism is a pernicious lie that is directly contrary to biological reality. Therefore, the
only way to build a good society was to allow human nature, like capitalism, to remain
unfettered by the meddling of a false ideology.
Altruism is incompatible with freedom , with capitalism and with individual rights, she
continued. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial
animal. She concludes that this conflict between human nature and the irrational morality of
altruism is a lethal tension that tears society apart. Her mission was to free humanity from this
conflict. Like Marx, she believed that her correct interpretation of how society should be
organized would be the ultimate expression of human freedom.
manner in order to meet standards and goals that exist outside of him; he is a professional forester to the extent that he is driven by
profit. Technological thinking, like the logic of domination, is a social phenomenon. Organizing
beings and making them into useful objects is part of the societal norms in places where
technological thinking has become dominant. That technological thinking works to exclude other ways of revealing
leads into Staudenmaiers charge of Heidegger as an anti-humanist. For Staudenmaier, rejecting anthropological means-ends
organizing is a rejection of humanist concerns. Letting things be and giving up technology in favor of experiencing oneness with
nature is problematic for Staudenmaier; not only can this lead to the justification of genocide, but it is a renunciation of human ends.
20 As mentioned earlier, Heidegger does not encourage a flight from machinery, nor does he
believe in a Self or oneness of all beings. Here, I shall argue that he does not even set ecological ends higher than
human ends to show that he is not an anti-humanist. In order to do this, I will turn to Heideggers explication of causality and how
technological thinking is reductive. It is not that thinking about how to achieve ones ends and utilizing things to achieve those ends
should be entirely rejected; rather, for Heidegger, we should think of nature as being more than just
something to use and existent only for human use. Heideggers critique of technological thinking
runs into a discussion of how we conceptualize causality; this is because technological thinking
is so focused on instrumentality and wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality. 21
Heidegger traces the doctrine of causality back to Aristotles four causes that we have treated as though it had fallen from heaven as
a truth as clear as daylight, at least insofar as philosophys teaching goes. 22 As we will see, Heidegger not only thinks the four
causes are themselves reductive, but that technocratsthose think technologically and work to keep its reign in placeonly pay
attention to one of the four. For Heidegger, the four causes are co-responsible for a things existence and the thing is indebted to all
of these four causes for its existence. 23 But, uniting the four causes for a beings existence is the cause of Being i tself. 24 Those four
causes that are responsible for something being revealed are: (1) the causa materialis, the material from which the thing is made; (2)
the causa formalis, which is the shape the material is put in; (3) the causa finalis is tied to Greek concept of telos, which Heidegger
translates as that which circumscribes and gives bounds to the thing; 25 and (4) the causa efficiens which is the being which brings
about the change that transforms the material into the final thing (usually understood to be the craftsman who makes the thing). 26
Heidegger, though, disagrees with the traditional characterization of the causa efficiens. He believes that it is the making itself that is
responsible. 27 I will now explain in greater detail these four causes and how in technological thinking the
existence. Heideggers example of a silver chalice explains that the silver from which it is made is partly responsible for its lying
there ready for use. 28 Silver makes possible its existence, for without it, it would not exist at all. If the chalice were made of
something else, it would be a different chalice. In technological thinking, raw materials are not responsible for a things existence,
they are simply unrefined matter to be manipulated. The causa materialis alone is not responsible for a things existence, for it must
combine with the idea or form of something else in order to be what it is. But the sacrificial vessel is indebted not only to the silver.
As a chalice, that which is indebted to the silver appears in the aspect of a chalice and not in that of a brooch or a ring. 29 In order
for the chalice to be the thing it is, then, it requires an idea or form of chalice-ness to which it is then shaped. As with the
causa materialis, technological thinking does not consider the form responsible for a things
existence.
March, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 25, Issue 1, Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency)//trepka
To conclude: This
operates according to no
historical teleology that will result in a just and equitable order for all. It is a viral, selfreproducing , hybrid strategic operation of power that poses new challenges to political
and democratic thought because of the ways in which it threatens to exhaust what politics and democracy might be about. "If you want to
help people in the disaster zone," John Ryle advises in the epigraph to this article, "you have to think politically." The problem is, How does one think
politically now in respect of this novel hybrid terrain of power that is radically productive of bodies-in-formation rather than comprised of a fixed
universe of preformed bodies transacting mechanical exchanges of intersubjectivity? Where states,
inner image of reality, into an icon of the unspeakable . The man is an image of the divine. The man
is an icon of the Deity! Thus arises their coming together. Furthermore, interpreting the poem, Heidegger says: "The shade of
the night"the night itself is the shade, that darkness which can never become a mere blackness
because as shade it is wedded to light and remains cast by it. The measure taken by poetry yields, imparts
itselfas the foreign element in which the invisible one preserves his presenceto what is familiar with the sights of the sky.
This page has received tens of thousands of pageviews since it launched, and has been simultaneously the subject of a number of
angry and accusatory comments and letters as well. I never wrote an introduction to this page before, so I'm going to take the time to
briefly do so now. The most frequent accusations that I receive in response to this page can fall into three general accusations
that I am a) attempting to police everyone's language, b) obsessed with being politically correct,
and or c) extremely hypersensitive to imagined insults and slights. I contend that none of these
accusations are true. Language is inherently political. Both as individuals and as larger social
and cultural groups, it is self-evident that the language we use to express all sorts of ideas,
opinions, and emotions, as well as to describe ourselves and others, is simultaneously reflective
of existing attitudes and influential to developing attitudes. The terms that are listed below are part
of an expanding English-language glossary of ableist words and terms. I have chosen to include
words or phrases that I know of or that are brought to my attention that meet two criteria: 1) Their literal or
historical definition derives from a description of disability, either in general or pertaining to a
specific category of disability, and 2) They have been historically and or currently used to
marginalize, other, and oppress disabled people. The rationale for including some of these words may be readily
apparent to many visitors as meriting inclusion on this list, such as for "retarded" and "invalid." For others, however, there may be
the lingering suspicion that I have opted to be overinclusive and thus, extremely hypersensitive and obsessed with being politically
correct. The reason that I have listed words that may not readily come to mind when asked to consider "insults and slurs targeting
disability" is precisely because so much of this ableist language is utterly pervasive both in everyday
colloquy and formal idiom with hardly any notice or acknowledgement, even by fellow disabled
people not using the language as part of any reclamation project. On that note, the list is not intended to
condemn or scold disabled people who use any of the words included in the spirit of reclamation or as self-descriptors. Its primary
purpose is to serve as a reference for anyone interested in learning about linguistic microaggressions and everyday, casual ableism.
And to the observation that some of the terms offered as alternatives carry analogous meanings, I have stated that the reason some
words are included while others are not is because some words have oppressive histories and others do not. For example, the word
"dumb" has a disability-specific history (referring to people who cannot speak, and often used to refer to Deaf people), whereas the
word "obtuse" does not (deriving from a meaning of "beating against something to make it blunt or dull"). Granted, there will always
be folks, disabled or not, who will disagree with the existence, purpose, and or scope of this glossary for a variety of reasons. This
brief essay is not intended as a thorough examination of and response to every possible criticism, which would merit an entire series
of essays to adequately discuss. My hope is that the glossary will continue to serve as a resource for those interested in its purpose
and contents, and that criticisms of this page might now be more nuanced and more informed, given this background and
explanation. + As a side note, it should be obvious to most readers that political correctness has little, if
anything, to do with basic human decency and respect for others, and my primary concern is, in
fact, basic human decency and respect for others. Also note that I emphatically insist on referring to myself and
my community as autistic, which is assuredly not the politically correct terminology. ++ As another side note, it is my intention to
eventually expand the entries on this page to either further explain each term's history and or to link to other pages, such as the
Ableist Word Profiles from Forward: Feminists with Disabilities (FWD), that have already done so. Glossary of Ableist Phrases This
is a list of ableist words and terms for reference purposes. Some of the entries are slurs, some are descriptions of disabled people,
some are slang that derive from ableist origins, and some are common metaphors that rely on disability and ableism. This is a living
document, constantly growing, expanding, and changing. If I've missed something, please let me know! One important note: Many
people who identify with particular disabilities or disability in general may use descriptors from this list in an act of reclaiming the
language. You may well too! BUT if you do not identify with a particular disability/disabled identity, it's probably appropriative to
use some of those terms. (Some examples are mad and crip.) After the list of ableist words and terms, I have included lists of
alternatives to ableist slurs, descriptions, and metaphors, if you're interested in unlearning the patterns of linguistic ableism in your
own language.
with intellectual disabilities and specifically Down Syndrome. Derives from a double-whammy of racism AND ableism, from the
belief that people with Down Syndrome look like people from Mongolia. Moron(ic) Refers to people with intellectual disabilities.
Nuts Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities. Psycho Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities.
Psychopath(ic) Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities. Psycho(tic) Refers to people with mental or
psychiatric disabilities. Retard(ed)/[anything]-tard Refers to people with intellectual disabilities. [you belong on
the] Short-bus/ that's short-bus material/etc. Refers to people with intellectual, learning, or other mental
disabilities. Simpleton Refers to people with intellectual disabilities. Spaz(zed) Refers to people with cerebral palsy or similar
neurological disabilities. Specially Abled Can refer to any person with a disability. Special Needs Usually refers to people
with learning, intellectual, or developmental disabilities, but can mean any person with a disability. Stupid Refers to people with
intellectual disabilities (i.e. "in a stupor"). Suffers from ____ Can refer to any person with a disability. Wacko/Whacko
Refers to people with mental or psychiatric disabilities.
subjected to violence if they do not achieve a prescribed level of quality is an injustice rarely
questioned. In fact, even though we may redefine what we mean by quality people, for example as historical minorities are
allowed to move into their ranks, we have not yet ceased to believe that non quality human beings do
exist and that they should be treated differently from people of quality. Harriet McBryde Johnson's debate
with Peter Singer provides a recent example of the widespread belief in the existence of non quality human beings (Johnson).
Johnson, a disability activist, argues that all disabled people qualify as persons who have the
same rights as everyone else. Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton University, claims to the contrary that people with
certain disabilities should be euthanized, especially if they are . thought to be in pain, because they do not qualify as persons.
Similarly, Martha Nussbaum, the University of Chicago moral philosopher, establishes a threshold below which "a fully human life, a
life worthy of human dignity:' is not possible (181). In particular, she notes that the onset of certain disabilities may reduce a person
to the status of former human being: "we may say of some conditions of a being, let us say a permanent vegetative state of a (former)
human being, that this just is not a human life at all" (181). Surprisingly little thought and energy have been
given to disputing the belief that nonquality human beings do exist. This belief is so robust that
it supports the most serious and characteristic injustices of our day. Disqualification
at this moment in time justifies discrimination, servi- tude, imprisonment, involuntary
institutionalization, euthanasia, human and civil rights violations, military intervention,
compulsory sterilization, police actions, assisted suicide, capital punishment, and murder. It is my
contention that disqualification finds support in the way that bodies appear and in their
specific appearances-that is, disqualification is justified through the accusation of mental or physical inferiority based on
aesthetic principles. Disqualification is produced by naturalizing inferiority as the justification for
unequal treatment, violence, and oppression. According to Snyder and Mitchell, disability serves in the
modern period as " the master trope of human disqualification."4 They argue that disability
represents a marker of otherness that establishes differences between human beings not as
acceptable or valuable variations but as dangerous deviations. Douglas Baynton provides compelling
examples from the modern era, explaining that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States
disability identity disqualified other identities defined by gender, race, class, and nationality.
Women were deemed inferior because they were said to have mental and physical disabilities.
People of color had fewer rights than other persons based on accusations of biological
inferiority. Immigrants were excluded from entry into the United States when they were poor,
sick, or failed standardized tests, even though the populations already living there were poor, sick, and failed
standardized tests. In every case, disability identity served to justify oppression by amplifying ideas
about inferiority already attached to other minority identities. Disability is the trope by which the assumed
inferiority of these other minority identities achieved expression. The appearance of lesser mental and physical
abilities disqualifies people as inferior and justifies their oppression. Thanks to the work ofBaynton and
others, it is now possible to recognize disability as a trope used to posit the inferiority of certain minority populations, but it remains
extremely difficult to understand that mental and physical markers of inferiority are also tropes placed in the service of disability
oppression. Before disability can be used as a dis qualifier, disability, too, has to be disqualified.
Beneath the troping of blackness as inbuilt inferiority, for example, lies the troping of disability
as inferior. Beneath the troping of femininity as biological deficiency lies the troping of disability
as deficiency. The mental and physical properties of bodies become the natural symbols of inferiority via a process of
disqualification that seems biological, not cultural-which is why disability discrimination seems to be a medical rather than a social
problem. If we consider how difficult it is at this moment to disqualify people as inferior on the basis of their racial, sexual, gender,
or class characteristics, we may come to recognize the ground that we must cover in the future before we experience the same
difficulty disqualifying people as inferior on the basis of disability. We might also recognize the work that disability performs at
present in situations where race, sexuality, gender, and class are used to disqualify people as physically or mentally inferior. At the
current time we prefer to fix, cure, or eradicate the disabled body rather than the discriminatory
attitudes of society. Medicine and charity, not social justice, are the answers to the problems of the disabled body, because
the disabled body is thought to be the real cause of the problems. Disability is a personal misfortune or tragedy that puts people at
risk of a nonquality existence-or so most people falsely believe. Aesthetics studies the way that some bodies make other bodies feel.
Bodies, minimally defined, are what appear in the world. They involve manifestations of
physical appearance, whether this appearance is defined as the physical manifestation itself or
as the particular appearance of a given physical manifestation. Bodies include in my definition human
bodies, paintings, sculpture, buildings, the entire range of human artifacts as well as animals and objects in the natural world.
Aesthetics, moreover, has always stressed that feelings produced in bodies by other bodies are involuntary, as if they represented a
form of unconscious communication between bodies, a contagious possession of one body by another. Aesthetics is the domain in
which the sensation of otherness is felt at its most powerful, strange, and frightening. Whether the effect is beauty and pleasure,
ugliness and pain, or sublimity and terror, the
concerned with invitations 'to think and feel otherwise about our own influence, interests, and imagination. Of course, when bodies
produce feelings of pleasure or pain, they also invite judgments about whether they should be accepted or rejected in the human
community. People thought to experience more pleasure or pain than others or to produce unusual levels of pleasure and pain in
other bodies are among the bodies most discriminated against, actively excluded, and violated on the current scene, be they
disabled, sexed, gendered, or racialized bodies. Disabled people, but also sex workers, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered
people, and people of color, are tortured and killed because of beliefs about their relationship to pain and pleasure (Siebers 2009).
This is why aesthetic disqualification is not merely a matter for art critics or museum directors but
attribution of natural inferiority-what some call "in-built" or "biological" inferiority; Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing
on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The
representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is
why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics-not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its
violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the
creation and appreciation ofbodi~s are openly discussed. Two additional thoughts must be noted before I treat some analytic.
examples from the historical record. First, despite my statement that disability now serves as the master trope of human
disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of
understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the
physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but
this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present moment to the
symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the
oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when
disability is the oppressed identity. "Racism" disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin
colors, bloodlines, and physical features. "Sexism" disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and
physical inferiority. "Classism" disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical
status. 'Ableism" disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and
then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that
the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of
incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. Second, it is crucial to remember the
lessons of intersectional theory. This theory rightly focuses on how oppressive systems affect the identity of the oppressed individual,
explaining that because individuality is complex, containing many overlapping identities, the individual is vulnerable to oppressive
systems that would reduce the individual to one or two identities for the purpose of maintaining power and control (Collins 208),5
Intersectional theorists restore a complex view of the individual and fight against creating hierarchies between different identities.
For example, the debate whether it is worse to be black or female is viewed as divisive and unproductive. My tactic here is similar. I
want to look at identity not from the point of view of the oppressed individual but from the point
of view-limited as it may seem and significant because limited-of oppressive systems. Disability is the master
trope of human disqualification, not because disability theory is superior to race, class, or
sex/gender theory, but because all oppressive systems function by reducing human variation to
deviancy and inferiority defined on the mental and physical plane. Intersectional analysis shows that
disability identity provides a foundation for disqualification in cases where other minority identities fail because they are known to
be socially constructed for the purposes of domination. It is not clear why disability has proven so useful a trope for
maintaining oppression, but one reason may be that it has been extraordinarily difficult to separate
disability from the naturalist fallacy that conceives of it as a biological defect more or less
resistant to social or cultural intervention. In the modern era, of course, eugenics embodies this
fallacy. Eugenics has been of signal importance to oppression because eugenics weds medical science to a disgust with mental and
physical variation, but eugenics is not a new trend, only an exacerbation of old trends that invoke disease, inferiority, impairment,
and deformity to disqualify one group in the service of another's rise to power. As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as
justifications for human inferiority-and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression the
prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the
belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will continue, I
expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction
of disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority.
AT: MYSTIFICATION
Mystification doesnt make sense we have a clear and identifiable critique
Cole 08 - Philosophy and Religious Studies, Ball State University (Daniel, Heidegger and
Social Ecology, http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/stance/2008_spring/9Heidegger.pdf,
Stance Volume 1 April 2008) //J.N.E
To close the paper, I will address a possible objection to this paper that would claim that Heideggers
prescription to technological thinking is somehow mystical. I will do this by drawing connections between the
ending of The Question Concerning Technology and Fryes loving perception. As we have seen, Heideggers critiques
are not misanthropic or mystical; and in this final section, by showing some parallels to Fryes work, we
will see that his prescription for ecological thinking is neither misanthropic nor mystical and can
help frame how we think about environmental ethics. For Heidegger, overcoming the dangers of
technological thinking lies somewhat paradoxically in resisting the drive to master the
technological, which itself would be thinking technologically. 39 It requires, on one hand, an openness and
safekeeping of the- coming-to-pass of truth. 40 It should be noted, however, that Heidegger does not want us to flee
from technology and never affect it, but rather not to reduce nature solely into what we want .
Technological objects can take nature into its responsibility without changing it,
e.g., a windmill can harness the energy without overcoming the wind and
changing it into a mere resource . 41 This helps to emphasize that his critique is of an extreme and, he
thinks, ever widely practiced technological thinking and not technological objects . His recommendation to
wait and accept the emergence of truth finds a parallel attit ude in Marilyn Fryes work. She writes that the loving eye is contrary to
the arrogant eye, which acknowledges the independence of the other. 42 She prescribes that if we want to see women, we should
gaze lovingly at them and wait. 43 It is not by mastering them or by manipulating them in such a way that they reveal something
about themselves that we already want to see; rather it is by a non-reductive acceptance of their being. The critiques of
Heidegger of technological thinking, Warren of the logic of domination, and Frye of arrogant
perception, as well as their recommendations to end oppression, show that Heideggers
philosophy is better suited to social ecology and not deep ecology. For those who find
Staudenmaiers argument against the historical use of deep ecology persuasive, this changes
how one ought to appraise Heideggers philosophy.
Scientific realism has the only explanation for the success of science
Sankey, 2004 - Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of History
and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne (Howard, Scientific Realism: An
Elaboration and a Defence, philsciarchive.pitt.edu/304/1/Sci_Rsm_Elaboration_%26_Defence.rtf ) DS
Success and truth
As we have just seen, commonsense realism contains the seeds of scientific realism. There is a
further sense in which this is the case. In the course of everyday practical activity, we routinely
employ inference to the best explanation in seeking to understand why various events occur.
Such reasoning is the basis of the best-known argument for scientific realism, the so-called
success or no miracles argument. The reasoning that forms the basis of one of the major
arguments for scientific realism is therefore reasoning of a commonsense kind.
The classic formulation of the success or no miracles argument is due to Hilary Putnam:
The positive argument for realism is that it is the only philosophy that doesnt make the success
of science a miracle. That terms in mature scientific theories typically refer (this formulation is
due to Richard Boyd), that the theories accepted in a mature science are typically approximately
true, that the same term can refer to the same thing even when it occurs in different theories
these statements are viewed by the scientific realist not as necessary truths but as part of the
only scientific explanation of the success of science, and hence as part of any adequate scientific
description of science and its relations to its objects. (Putnam 1975: 73)
In this passage, Putnam argues that realism is the best explanation of the success of science.
(Strictly, he says it is the only explanation, but this is a form of inference to the best
explanation.) Putnams argument turns on the claim that a philosophy of science which denies
that theoretical entities are real, or that scientific theories are true or approximately true, must
treat the success of science as a miracle that is incapable of explanation. An explanation which
treats the success of science as an inexplicable miracle is an unsatisfactory explanation of such
success. By contrast, scientific realism provides a compelling explanation of the success of
science. On the whole, the unobservable entities postulated by theories exist, and scientific
theories are true or approximately true. Given the reality of the entities to which scientific
theories refer, as well as the truth or approximate truth of such theories, it is only to be expected
that science should manifest the striking degree of empirical success that it does. Because
scientific realism provides a compelling explanation of the success of science, while alternative
approaches provide an unsatisfactory explanation, we should accept scientific realism as
true.
The scientific method is good uses a number of tests to prove objectivity
Sankey, 2004 - Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of History
and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne (Howard, Scientific Realism: An
Elaboration and a Defence, philsciarchive.pitt.edu/304/1/Sci_Rsm_Elaboration_%26_Defence.rtf ) DS
Success and method
In the appraisal of a scientific theory, and the choice between alternative theories, scientists
employ a variety of methodological norms, or rules of method, as I shall call them. They
consider whether a theory is confirmed by the evidence, accurately predicts novel facts, unifies
phenomena from disparate domains, and so forth. If a theory is certified by such rules of
method, then a scientist is rationally justified in accepting the theory. Certification by rules of
method therefore provides the basis for epistemic warrant in science.
The scientific realist wishes to defend the epistemic realist thesis that scientific inquiry leads to
rational belief and knowledge about the transempirical world. The realist must therefore argue
that use of the rules of method gives rise to theories which scientists are warranted in accepting
as true or approximately true. For this reason, while I am favourable to the revisions of the
success argument noted above, I suggest that emphasis should be placed instead on application
of the success argument at the level of the methods of science.