The Mailbox—#2

Welcome back! Today, in the spirit of our ongoing competition series, I am going to field a few questions about counter-advocacies, competition, and burdens of proof.

If you have your own questions, feel free to write in. A few notes:

• While the questions submitted so far have been wonderful, a few submissions have been a bit too niche for a general response. I have added an email field to the form if you want me to respond directly in the case that your submission is a little too niche.
• I won’t really be answering broad questions in the vein of ‘what are the best arguments on the topic’ here. For one thing, they are too complex for this series. For another, that’s what the rest of the blog is for!

Question #1—“Unconditional CPs and Stock Issues”

Here’s the question:

What happens when a plan does nothing (and the aff, therefore, doesn’t meet the ‘solvency’ burden of proof) but the neg has introduced a definitively bad ‘unconditional’ CP? Who should win?

Your question gets at an important difference between two different paradigms for evaluating debates: the stock issues paradigm, and the policymaking paradigm. These are worth expanding on a bit, since many primarily local-circuit debaters experience only the former, while many primarily national-circuit debaters experience only the latter.

The stock issues paradigm evaluates the affirmative through the lens of a set of academic burdens. These burdens—known as burdens of proof—can be thought of as the boxes a speaker must check in order to have advanced a complete argument in favor of a policy change. I have highlighted ‘speaker’ in that definition to emphasize that the stock issues paradigm takes a primarily rhetorical perspective—it evaluates the 1AC as a speech act of policy advocacy. Decades of scholarly investigation (you can get a sense of just how deep this well goes by looking through the papers in the ‘Affirmative and Negative Cases’ folder on this page) largely crystalized around a simple formulation: there are significant harms that are inherent to the status quo which can be solved by a topical change.

As a modern debater, you might have raised an eyebrow at the way I used ‘inherency’ in the sentence above. Most debaters would understand the ‘inherency’ burden of proof to have been satisfied if the affirmative team proves that the plan has not yet been done. To a degree, they would be correct—the plan’s non-existence is certainly a component of thinking about inherency in the traditional sense. But inherency also poses a broader question: why ought we pursue change at all? Will the status quo—conceived of as a broader incumbent system, not just as a snapshot of the present moment—resolve the issues identified by the affirmative, whether by enacting the plan or by any other means? This viewpoint is summarized effectively in this paper from J. Robert Cox, former Director of Debate at UNC Chapel Hill, from 1975.

As an aside, this conception of inherency is actually where the concept of a counterplan originated. The idea that the broad ‘status quo’ system might solve the affirmative’s harms morphed into the idea that the harms could be addressed by minor reparative action that, although it requires adopting policy, keeps the ‘structures’ of the status quo intact. As debate evolved away from the stock issues paradigm and towards a policymaking paradigm, that idea became an intellectual ancestor for the concept that the harms identified by the affirmative must be inherent to the non-plan, not just inherent to the status quo.

Here is one explanation of this idea:

A second specific view of inherency asks, "can the problem be solved without resolutional action?" Sometimes there are problems that must be solved before it is too late. This does not mean, however, that the resolution is the only way to do so. If the negative chooses to admit that there is a problem in the real world, it has three options. The negative can counterplan. A counterplan admits that there is no mechanism in the present system that can solve and that major action must be taken (i.e. it admits that there is inherency). A second option is to perform a minor repair: to take some action that does not adopt the resolution, but still fixes the problem. This does admit some level of harms, but if the harms can be solved for without adopting the resolution, then there are no inherent barriers to change.

As an aside to the aside, another way of phrasing this definition of inherency is that the plan’s benefits—the state of having solved the status quo’s harms—must be unique to the world of the affirmative among the worlds being considered. If there is a counterplan that solves a harm, the benefit of avoiding that harm is no longer unique to the case. Our excursion into the land of stock issues has revealed something interesting and often forgotten: arguments that a CP ‘solves the case’ are just arguments that an advantage is non-unique, albeit dressed up in a slightly different form.

Your question, however, was about the interaction of this paradigm with the status of a counterplan. The truth is that talking about an unconditional counterplan within a pure stock issues paradigm doesn’t make much sense. Why? Because the premise of unconditionality is that the negative’s role in introducing a counterplan is to be advocates for their counterplan’s policy. This role is fundamentally at odds with the idea that the negative’s job is to challenge the affirmative team on the stock issues. It would make no sense to limit the number of ways a negative team could argue that the status quo can address the 1AC’s harms. The goodness or badness of a counterplan under a stock issues paradigm speaks only to its ability to demonstrate that the harms of a 1AC can be resolved without changing the status quo (showing a CP is ‘bad,’ through this lens, would demonstrate that to the extent that the harms of the status quo can be avoided without a significant change, this can only be done at great cost). This means that under a stock issues paradigm, the negative would win your hypothetical debate—the affirmative has failed to meet its burdens of proof.

This question is much easier to answer under a policymaking paradigm. Here, we care only about if the plan is better or worse than the status quo or a competitive alternative. In your hypothetical, the CP is worse than the plan, and its unconditional status means no other competitive alternative is available for evaluation—so the aff wins despite not meeting its solvency burden.

Question #2—“Can You Straight Turn a Stock Issue?”

I am throwing in this question because it’s very related to the discussion above. Here it is:

Can you straight turn topicality or theory? Or can the reader of the T/theory sheet always kick it, even without defense?

You cannot straight turn a stock issue or a theory argument for the reasons I explained above. A ‘turn’ is the idea that an impact or link argument is not just incorrect—it is backwards. For example, dedev says that economic growth isn’t just not good—it’s actively bad. There is no equivalent for something like topicality.

One definitely could think of a ‘link turn’ to an advantage as a ‘solvency turn’—the aff doesn’t just not solve, it makes the issue worse. Within a policymaking paradigm, we would just think of this as a link turn; within a stock issues paradigm, the fact that a plan makes an issue worse has no relevance beyond the original implication that the plan does not solve.

You probably did not have this in mind, but there is one edge case: if a counterplan argument is a descendant of inherency, and a dispositional counterplan can be straight turned, doesn’t that mean inherency can be straight turned?

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. If you are familiar with these concepts, all I will say about this case is that it clearly demonstrates the folly of dispositionality as a model. The idea of ‘straight turning a CP’ makes about as much sense as straight turning a non-unique argument (and no wonder—as we just learned, CP solvency arguments are just uniqueness arguments against the aff advantages!).

Question #3—“Why Are National Circuit 1AC’s Structured the Way They Are?”

This question comes from a local circuit debater who was curious about why local circuit 1ACs have such a different narrative structure from national circuit 1ACs. I can’t emphasize enough how excellent of a question this is—it shows that you are thinking about the construction of 1ACs in terms of the persuasive functions that their structures serve, which is the first step to being an exceptional aff-writer! Here are a few of the writer’s observations.

On vagueness vs specificity:

…cases in Policy Debate in [local circuits] tend to field specific plans, with planks explaining each major component of a plan text along the way, such as origins of funding, exact mechanisms of execution, and other minutae. On the other hand, the National Circuit sees field more broad and curt Plan Texts, such as one that I found originating from casewiki "Plan: the United States federal government should provide a progressive basic income funded by a consumption tax" or "Plan: The United States federal government should substantially affect fiscal redistribution in the area of a federal jobs guarantee by providing a federal jobs guarantee.”

On stock issues vs advantages:

…From what I can observe, [national circuit 1ACs seem] to go ADV1-PLAN TEXT-ADV 2. For example, one AFF I read went INEQUALITY ADV-PLAN TEXT-HARMONIZATION ADV… our local circuit doesn't even present AFFs with advantages, but prefers to instead order arguments in accordance to stock issues. For example, the AFF we ran last year went INHERENCY-HARMS-SOLVENCY, with Significance and Topicality obviously excluded for relevancy. We are taught the Affs should overcome a barrier of inherency and solve certain harms. My question is why use advantages to present the benefits of an AFF? And furthermore, why not simply label out which arguments represent inherency, which are the specific harms, and how the plan solves?

Hopefully, the earlier discussion of the stock issues paradigm vs the policymaking paradigm helps to shed some light on your questions. Under the stock issues paradigm, the primary question is whether an affirmative case satisfies its burdens of proof. It is no wonder that this model rewards case-writers who put this question front-and-center.

Under the policymaking model, however, separating out a 1AC by stock issues is actively counterproductive. Since we are looking at whether the plan’s change is net costly or net beneficial compared to the status quo or a competitive alternative option, it’s quite important that we trace the exact causal mechanisms by which the affirmative interacts with each of the status quo’s harms. As a result, it makes more sense to say: here is a significant harm that the plan solves in these ways, here is another significant harm that the plan solves in these ways, and so on.

The vagueness issue is related. I have no doubt that we will discuss vagueness in much more detail as the season progresses, but the national circuit trend towards vague plans can broadly be explained by the dominance of counterplans in the argumentative meta. If the negative can win by disagreeing with any component of a plan text, it is unsurprising that teams are wary of providing more detailed proposals with which negative counterplans can clash. This issue is far less prominent in stock issues circuits, where counterplan debating is (at least historically) less common.

Question #4—“Why do Kritiks Have Alternatives?”

Here’s the question:

Why do kritiks have alternatives? If they win that representations are all that matter, then why isn’t it enough to just kritik the affirmative team’s scholarship?

The argumentative structure of a kritik evolved out of a strategic dilemma:

1. Many affirmatives embrace arguably disastrous aspects of the status quo. As kritik debaters, we want to to be able to identify examples of this and make them relevant to the debate.
2. But, since these examples demonstrate ways in which the affirmative is similar to the status quo—rather than ways in which it is different, and worse—such objections lack uniqueness.

Kritiks have several ways of addressing this issue:

1. An alternative. The 1AC might contain problematic representations, but if all language is problematic in the same way as the 1AC’s, there is not much to be done about the 1AC’s use. If there is a neg framework argument which says that representations ought to be a basis for competition, an alternative set of representations makes the objection ‘unique’ in the narrow sense that the harm of problematic language is present only in the 1AC among the options being compared (the affirmative and alternative).
2. An impact framing argument. As you have suggested, a kritik might be successful even without an alternative if it demonstrates that even being complicit with the system is sufficient to merit rejection. ‘Racism non-unique’ would be an unpersuasive response to an affirmative that advocated genocide.
3. Framework. Under some framework interpretations, negative teams can win the entire debate as long as they prove that the affirmative is problematic in some way. The justifications for these framework arguments tend to be similar to the impact arguments described in option #2.

The upshot is that although it’s possible to win without an alternative, having one is helpful because it gives judges something to vote for which avoids the issue.

I will mention one additional issue explicitly: alternatives do not necessarily create uniqueness by “solving” the systemic ills in which the aff is allegedly participating. Instead, they do so by serving as an alternative to the link arguments. If your link is that the aff has engaged in problematic representational practices, your alternative should be another representational practice. If your link is that the affirmative has advanced an objectionable ontology, your alternative should be an alternative ontology. These alternatives give the judge a way to vote for something that avoids the link arguments; they do not venture out into the world to eliminate all extant examples of the problematic practice. For this reason, it is wrong to think about alternatives and framework arguments as substitutes for one another. Under a plan-focused framework, alternative non-plan representations do not compete with the affirmative; they are largely a non-sequitur. Only a framework argument that tells the judge to center the representational practices (or whatever the link and alternative are about in a given case) of the affirmative and alternative remedies this issue.

The introduction below features my favorite explanation of these ideas. Check it out, and subscribe to the DDI YouTube channel to be notified about uploads from this year’s DDI electives (you can watch this lecture on litigation in the U.S., by the incomparable Johnnie Stupek, now)!

Conclusion

Thanks again for writing in! If this made you think of your own question, you can find the mailbox here. There have already been a few questions focused on intrinsicness—I will save these for after we have covered intrinsicness in the ongoing series on permutations.

Meanwhile, if you found this useful and aren’t subscribed, you can make sure that you’ll catch the next entry by signing up for the free newsletter. See you next time!