The standard is accepting the infinite forms of Being , that is, all objects in the

universe exist on the same plane of existence. In the end, we will all die whether it
be from the Affirmatives impacts or old age every single object in existence will
come to an end in the heat death of the universe. The criterion affirms the flux of
the cosmos as the ultimate ethical imperative, the only way to reclaim meaning to a
valueless existence. Heres why you prefer.

A. Their theory is based upon a western ethical orientation

that always-already places certain populations over others--any ethical system that prioritizes the similar spirals into
genocide---the assumption that populations are on stand by
for us takes the form of a bifurcation between the Self and the
Other that engenders nihilism---the alternative is to affirm the
absolute Otherness of every Other.
Introna 14. Lucas D. Introna is Professor of Organisation, Technology and Ethics
at the Lancaster University Management School. Ethics and flesh: being touched
by the otherness of things. Ruin memories: materialities, aesthetics and the
archaeology of the recent past. Duhbait.com
On not valuing the non-human other
One question one might legitimately ask is why do we not simply extend the realm
of ethically relevant beings, in the way Singer (2002) has done for animals? The
problem with this approach is that, in such an extension our ethical relationship with
the non-human other is determined beforehand by us, it is anthropocentric. In this
form of ethical encounter with nonhumans we have already chosen, or presumed,
the framework of values that will count in determining moral significancethat is,
who is in our circle and who is outside of it, and for what reasons. One might say a
value hierarchy which has as its apex, and measure, the human other. In this ethics,
non-human things are always and already, things-for-us in our terms. They are
always already inscribed with our gazethey carry it in their flesh, as it were. The
defining measure of such an ethics, its fundamental ontological measure, is the
human being the unquestioned and the unquestionable value from which all other
values derive their meaning. Indeed, if we look at it carefully we see that we value
most things which are like us (living, organic, etc.) and value least what is most
unlike us (inanimate beings). Thus, it starts with the idea that relative to the human
there are some non-human beings that are less significant or others which may not
be significant at all (outside of the circle). Such as the inanimate objectthe
disposable polystyrene cup, for examplewhose demise is essentially invisible to
our moral calculus. Indeed, this non-human other is so alien to our moral ordering
that its entire moral claim on our conscience is naught, at least so it seems.
If it is increasingly difficult, or impossible, to draw or enact the boundary between
our things and us, as was suggested above, and if, in this entangled networks of
human and non-humans, some things lack moral significance from the startthat is
to say they are always only mere meansthen it is rather a small step to take for an
ethics to emerge in which all things humans and non-human alikecirculate as

mere things-for-the-purposes-of the network. As means and ends interpenetrate,

switch and circulate in the network we all have the possibility of becoming, at any
moment, mere means. Thus, in the sociomaterial becoming (as heterogeneous
assemblages of humans and objects) our human becoming is ultimately also
ordered as a for-the-purposes-of, as mere means. Thus, the irony of an
anthropocentric ethics of things (of our attempt at moral ordering) is that ultimately
we also become mere means in programmes and scripts, at the disposal of a
higher logic (capital, state, community, environment, etc). In the sociomaterial
becoming other humans and our non-human others also objectify us. In
Heideggers (1977) words we all become standing reserve, on stand by for the
purposes of the sociomaterial nexusenframed (Gestell) by the calculative logic of
our way of becoming. In the becoming of the sociomaterial nexus all beings become
enframed. Enframed, that is, in a global network that has a mode of ordering that
transforms all beings into mere means: Enframing is the gathering together which
belongs to that setting- upon which challenges man and puts him in position to
reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve (Heidegger 1977,
305).
The value hierarchy presumed in a bifurcated anthropocentric ethics is in fact a
dynamic nexus of the becoming of ends and means, of values and interestsin the
flow of valuing there never was, or is, a hierarchy. Our assumed originality, in the
nexus, simply does not exist. Rather, in this nexus, the becoming of our material
objects also becomes our fate. In the bifurcated ethics of such entanglements we
are also already becoming as mere meansindeed it is possible for any being (even
god) to become mere means at any moment. Instead of a hierarchy of values we
discover a complete nihilism in which everything is levelled out, everything is
potentially, at any moment, equally valuable or valueless; a nihilistic network of
ontological entanglements in which the highest values devaluate themselves
(Nietzsche 1968, 9).
We must abandon ethics for a clearing beyond humanistic ethicsto let beings
become in their own terms. We must admit that any attempt at moral orderingbe
it egocentric, anthropocentric, biocentric (Goodpaster 1978; Singer 2002) or even
ecocentric (Leopold 1970; Naess 1990) will fail. Any ethics based on our image is
arbitrary and will eventually turn everything into an object in our image , pure will to
power (Heidegger 1977). As Lingis (1994, 9) suggests The man-made species we
are, which produces its own nature in an environment it produces, finds nothing
within itself that is alien to itself, opaque and impervious to its own understanding
(emphasis added). We should rather acknowledge that the existence of any being
comes at the cost of denying the becoming of other beingsin ethics every being is
always already implicated in the fate of every other, and that includes also us
humans. In sum: any bifurcation (into the morally significant and the insignificant) is
arbitrary and counterproductive as it always reproduces the conditions of its own
demise. The other always turns out to be already in the category of the same (as
Levinas (1999a) suggest). Indeed, our claim to value and the valuing of value
(which has endured for thousands of years) sounds quite hollow in the face of our
instrumental destruction of the non-human other (and eventually ourselves).

Instead of creating value systems in our own humanistic terms, the absolute
otherness of every other should be the only moral imperative an ethics without
any centre whatsoever. We need an ethics of things that is radically beyond the selfidentical of human beings. Such an ethics beyond metaphysics need as its ground,
not a system of values, for comparison, but rather the recognition of the
impossibility of any comparison. Every comparison is already violent in its attempt
to render equal what could never be equal (Levinas 1999a). The question of what I
value more, my child or the chair, when I have to make a decision, is a perverse and
inappropriate framing of the ethical dilemma. It allows me to dismiss the nonhuman other (chair) without going through the ethical trauma of acknowledging the
otherness of them both. My child is a being other, and infinitely more, than a mere
parent/child relation and the chair is, likewise, other and infinitely more, than a
mere tool for sitting. In framing the ethical dilemma as a value comparison I have
already violated them bothi.e. I have denied what is exactly other, and as such
already robbed them of their worth. How might we approach the other in its
otherness? This is of course a profound aporoiaone which has occupied much of
the work of Levinas and the later Derrida (Caputo 1997). But for them the other
was firstly and most definitely the human other. In his ethics Levinas (1989; 1999a;
2000) has argued for the radical singularity of our fellow human beings, the face of
the other. But what about all other otherssurely the seemingly faceless nonhuman third is also calling for justice.
One might suggest that for us human beings, the wholly other, that is indeed
wholly other, is the inanimate other. Indeed, in many respects, the destitute face of
the human other, in the ethics of Levinas for example, is already in some sense a
reflection of the human face opposite it. We can indeed substitute ourselves for the
human other (become her hostage) because we can imagineat least in some
vague sensewhat it must be like for the human other to suffer violence because
we also suffer such violence. It is possible for us to substitute us for them because
it could have been my friend, my child, my partner, etc.we are a community with
a common unity, our humanity. If it is the forgetting of the self that moves ethics
and justice (as Levinas suggests), then this is hardly the forgetting of self. To grant
the inanimate other (such as the disposable polystyrene cup) its otherness, in the
face of the many human demands of everyday life, that seems to me to be a truly
altruistic act. That is the nature of an ethical dilemma prior to, or beyond
bifurcation. In the next section I will argue that the work of Heideggerespecially as
presented in the recent work of Graham Harmanand also with some help from
Whitehead, might provide us with some hints towards such an ethics beyond
bifurcation. Or, the overcoming of humanistic ethics towards an ethos of the lettingbe of all beings in their becominga community of those who have nothing in
common, as suggested by Alphonso Lingis (1994).

AND

B. My standard precludes the affirmatives moral theory as

those are simply obsessed with the immediate living organism;
turning those human Beings into objects thats what
engenders genocide.
Jones 9
(Rachel, University of Dundee, On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be, As
presented at On Not Knowing, a Symposium hosted by Kettles Yard and New Hall College, Cambridge, 29th June
2009, to accompany the exhibition Material Intelligence, Kettles Yard, 16 May 12 July 2009)

wonder is the passion that can accompany not knowing , providing we recognize that the object we
Wonder arises before we know enough to make any
utilitarian calculation about whether an object might be pleasing or useful to us (or
not). For Descartes, as for Aristotle, it could therefore be said that philosophy begins in wonder, for this passionate state of not knowing is
what makes us think, ask questions, and seek to understand. Wonder is the first of all the passions not only because it is
our initial response to something new and unknown, but because it implies that other passions will follow , as we find out more about what
Thus described,

encounter is not the same as what we already do know.

we have encountered. 3. Although she critiques Descartes model of a self-founding subject, Luce Irigaray takes up his notion of wonder in a short essay where she writes (second quote):

In order for it [wonder] to affect us, it is necessary and sufficient for it to surprise, to be new,
not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known . Still awakening our passion, our appetite, our attraction to that which is not yet
(en)coded, our curiosity (but perhaps in all senses: sight, smell, hearing? etc) vis--vis that which we have not yet encountered or made ours. 3 The as-yetunknown is here aligned with that which we have not yet encoded, not yet
translated into the conceptual and symbolic frameworks we use to make
sense of the world; at the same time, the passage hints at an entirely different way of coming
to know someone or something, involving an attunement of the senses to that
which is other and irreducible to those frameworks. While we may still go on to grasp and appropriate the
unfamiliar, Irigaray calls on us to cultivate the sense of wonder that can inhabit all our encounters , 4

providing we remain attentive to the unique singularity of others, to the ways in which, no matter how much we know about someone else, they remain irreducibly different from us.

Wonder thus remains the first of all the passions , not simply because it is the first we experience, but because it
has an ethical priority . Cultivating wonder is a way of remaining open to the
otherness of the other without seeking to appropriate or assimilate them. For
Irigaray, the difference to which wonder holds us open is first and foremost the difference between the sexes; sexuate difference is for her the first difference in the same sense as
wonder is the first passion. Wonder is thus essential to the possibility of an erotic encounter in which each desires the other without seeking to own or appropriate. However, as well as

the wonder that arises from not knowing is, she says, the passion that inaugurates
art. And thought. 5 4. Art, thought, and not knowing are linked in a long and complex history, from which I have selected only one particular moment here, albeit a
love,

particularly influential one. In Kants account of genius, he emphasises that genius works without knowing what it is doing, insofar as no rule could be formulated in advance for
producing a truly original artwork. Rather, the rule must be abstracted after the fact, to the extent that works of genius come to serve as examples for others. In fact, Kants genius

while the artist is unable to use concepts or rules to

fully determine what will emerge from their creative activities, for these to be
productive of more than mere nonsense, they must nonetheless draw on other kinds
of knowledge. This includes the technical knowledge or skills required to work with their materials as well as knowledge of preceding aesthetic traditions which true
works in a delicate balance between knowing and not knowing, for

genius will always both break and reinvigorate. For those of us not blessed with what Kant calls genius however, not knowing remains an essential component of what he describes as
the most intense kind of aesthetic experience, that of the sublime. One trigger for the sublime is the encounter with something which seems infinite to us an ever-receding mountain

Our faculties struggle to grasp such apparent infinities, for the

moment we try to take them in and represent them in a single image, we place a
limit on them and thereby lose the suggestion of infinity which attracted us to them
in the first place. In ways that recall the poster for this symposium, we experience sublimity when we are all at sea (though the image also pokes gentle fun at the
overly serious language of the sublime, as it shows someone all at sea in a pedal-boat). On Kants account, even though we cannot
represent infinity, our very failure to grasp it makes us all the more aware of our
ability to think that which we cannot know , to have an idea of that which goes beyond anything we can take in via the senses. Thus he
range or the vastness of the ocean.

writes: [N]othing that can be an object of the senses is to be called sublime. [What happens is that] our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while our reason demands
absolute totality as a real idea, and so [the imagination], our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacy itself is
the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of
sense. 7 Note the movement that characterises Kants account of the sublime, which begins with a sense of awe at natures apparent infinities, but ends with a similar sense of awe at
our own rational faculties. On Kants model, the disruptive moment of not knowing is recuperated in ways that re-affirm the powers of the subject, and reinforce his ability to separate

himself from and transcend the material world of the senses. 5. Despite this, the French philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard, writing nearly 200 years after Kant, recognises the potential in

the sublime occurs when we

encounter something we cannot represent, but unlike for Kant, this does not have to be the grand horizons of seemingly limitless
oceans or mountain ranges. Rather, the infinite is contained within the most immediate and subtle of
sensations, insofar as any sensation is infinitely unique, irreplaceable by any other. Hence, any attempt to grasp a sensory
event, to make it present to ourselves by re-presenting it, will inevitably erase
that which we were seeking to capture. Rather than recoup this inability via our power to think the infinite, Lyotard places the emphasis
more on the value of this temporary incapacitation. It is only when we are thus undone as knowing subjects that
we are able to remain open to the singularity of the material event , which Lyotard describes in terms of:
Kants account of the sublime for a more radical challenge to the knowing subject. For Lyotard, as for Kant,

a singular, incomparable quality unforgettable and immediately forgotten of the grain of a skin or a piece of wood, the fragrance of an aroma, the savour of a secretion or a piece of

these terms designate the event of a passion, a passability for

which the mind will not have been prepared, which will have unsettled it . Nuance or timbre are
flesh, as well as a timbre or a nuance. All

the distress and despair of the exact division From this aspect of matter, one must say that it must be immaterial. The matter Im talking about is immaterial, anobjectable,
because it can only take place or find its occasion at the price of suspending [the] active powers of the mind. 8 Though Lyotard does not describe the sublime in terms of wonder here,

wonder is still present in the passion and passability that allow us to remain
open to the material event. Such events are immaterial to the knowing subject who can only betray their incomparable uniqueness by trying to grasp
them via familiar forms and concepts. For Lyotard, as for Irigaray, the moment of not knowing thus holds an ethical
promise, that of being able to do justice to the singular by letting go of the
desire to know, and allowing ourselves to be unsettled into bearing witness to the
incomparable and irreplaceable. 6. Allowing oneself to be thus undone is, for Lyotard, the
very condition of thought , and hence, the condition of doing philosophy.
Learning how to think means letting go of everything one thought one knew , so as to think
perhaps

again with an open and questioning inventiveness; teaching someone how to think means learning how to unlearn, so as to enter with them on the journey of a question. 9

Teacher and pupil both must be prepared to return to a state of unpreparedness and
unknowing that he calls infancy : You cannot open up a question without leaving yourself open to it. You cannot scrutinize a subject ... without
being scrutinized by it. You cannot do any of these things without renewing ties with the season of childhood, the season of the minds possibilities. 10 The
inventiveness of infancy allows us to judge without criteria, where there are no rules
to follow and no one to tell us what to do. Lyotard counsels us to nurture and renew the potency of infancy, the childhood of thought that
remains with us in adulthood and that grants human beings a capacity to begin again, to find new ways of thinking and being. Such infancy , he argues, is at
odds with the contemporary emphasis on performance which insists that our
inventiveness must be quantifiably productive and refuses to tolerate a
questioning that does not know where it is going or whether answers will be
found. What Lyotard calls the stifling busyness of performativity 11 cannot bear the idea of not making progress, nor find any value in the possibility of failure: from this
perspective, having to begin again is a sign of time wasted, rather than of a capacity for renewal. Yet without the risk of failure, of getting
lost or being adrift, 12 there is no real openness to the unknown, to the new
thoughts that might emerge from the as yet unthought : We write before knowing what to say and how to say it, and in
order to find out, if possible. We recommence, but we cannot rely on it getting to the thought itself, there, at the end. For the thought is here, muddled up in the unthought, trying to

To foreclose this impertinent time of infancy is to foreclose

the possibility of recommencing, of thinking again and beginning anew .
sort out the impertinent babble of childhood. 13

AND
C. Negate the resolution because it inherently promotes
carbon as a tool to be commodified with a price, which is
inherent to inherent in the Affirmative mindset. Instead we
should view carbon as an ontological equivalent and an Other
that we are in a symbiotic relationship with. Thats Introna.
AND

D. We can consistently live in fear of a death that might not

come for decades, or we can shift our politics and live life to
the fullest, a shift to ethics. The question of this debate is a
question of living life vs protecting life. The state of existence
is irrelevant eventually everything in existence will die only
the act of the alternative presents a truly revolutionary act of
life-celebration
Clark 10 Senior Lecturer in Geography at Open University
(Nigel, Ex-Orbitant Generosity: Gifts of Love in a Cold Cosmos, Parallax, Vol. 16, No. 1, Pg. 80-95, dml)

For Deleuze, and those in his orbit, the ethical is not primarily a response to the suffering that arises out of wrenching change or any kind of response or obligation at all. As the

ethics is an immanent evaluation of the

process of becoming. Although the usual term in Deleuze and Guattaris writings for the driving force of creative transformation is desire, John Protevi
affirmation of the transformative possibility that inheres in encounters and interactions,

accentuates the ethical-ontological fusion by picking up those instances in their work when this is referred to as love: When bodies join in the mutual experimental deterritorialisation

Love is
complexity producing novelty, the very process of life . 55 In this way, desire or
love is becoming, and generosity is generativity - which makes it , to borrow a formulation from Ray
Brassier, `ontologically ubiquitous .56 Effectively, there is no need for a distinctive ethics to
address the injuries of transmutation, because the catastrophe itself is ultimately
productive. With the championing of pure process and incessant becoming that
characterises much of the contemporary take on `immanence, what counts is
not so much the substantive bodies that happen to come into being, so
much as the great overarching stream of generative matter-energy from
which all individuated forms are bodied forth.Where the unlimited potential
for becoming or change takes precedence over the limited and constrained
condition of the actual bodies it gives rise to, there can be no absolute and
irreparable loss. Whatever dissolution of bodily integrity takes place, what
ever fate befalls actual beings, is less of a termination than a
reconfiguration, a temporary undoing that facilitates a renewed
participation in the greater flow. And with this prioritization of process over product, of virtuality over actuality, whatever fidelity is called for is
to the `flux of invincible life itself - rather than to its interruptions.57 `Catastrophe, in this sense, is the speedy, if painful,
passage to a fresh start, to a new life. If it is a crack that fissures the ontological
universe, then it is ultimately a self- suturing one. But for some theorists who take the event of the cataclysm to heart, a nonthat is love, we find Deleuze and Guattaris most adventurous concept: the living, changing, multiplying virtual, the unfolding of the plane of consistency.

annihilating disaster is not a disaster worthy of the name. As Edith Wyschogrod concludes of Deleuzo-Guattarian catastrophism: `Because there is nothing but the fullness of desiring
production, they cannot, strictly speaking, explain disease and natural catastrophe.... 58 For Ray Brassier, the fashionable avowal of pure process or immanence raises a more general
issue: that of how such philosophies are to account for discontinuity at all, how they are to explain breaks in pure productivity or lapses into inactivity. This is a problem not just for

engagement with solar

extinction returns us to the literal exorbitance of an earth open and
precarious in the face of an inhospitable cosmos and to the Levinasian
theme of existence fissured by impassable rifts. Whereas Harman stresses the innumerable ruptures that
punctuate a universe of heterogeneous objects, Brassier zeroes on the quandaries posed by one particular juncture. Against any philosophy that
assumes the necessity of a thinking being to make sense of the world , and equally
counter to any philosophical stance that posits an incessant stream of becoming , he
draws out the significance of the moment when terrestrial life might be or rather, will be - totally, irredeemably,
extinguished. Playing off a discussion by Jean-Franois Lyotard about our sun gradually burning out and
rendering the earth uninhabitable - an eventuality which scientists have predicted with some confidence Brassier points up the
certainty of non-existence that weighs upon all life.60 For Levinas, the impossibility of selfDeleuze, he suggests, `but for any philosophy that would privilege becoming over stasis.59 Brassiers

identity, of synchronicity, and of the closure of reciprocity is signalled by the passage

into the time of the other: the interruption of self- presence by `a
time without me .61 In his working through of the inheritance of Levinas, Derrida observes that love is always a rupture in the living present, haunted by the
knowledge that `One of us will see the other die, one of us will live on, even if only for an instant.62 This is loves exorbitance, the impossibility of its recuperation into an economy of

that fact that terrestrial life is eventually doomed by solar

catastrophe promises a time without me, without any of us, without thought or
experience, without even the life that lends death its much-touted
significance. This is a quite literal crack in the ontological edifice of the
universe: objective scientific knowledge that propels thought on the
impossible task of thinking thoughts own non-bein g. As Brassier announces: `Lyotards `solar catastrophe
reciprocal, synchronous or symmetrical gestures. For Brassier,

effectively transposes Levinass theologically inflected `impossibility of possibility into a natural-scientific register, so that it is no longer the death of the Other that usurps the

In the face of the other, in its exposure to the elements,

we catch a glimpse of our own vulnerability and finitude.64 In the face of a cyclone, or
the face of others traumatised by gale-force winds, we see forces strong enough to
overwhelm communities, cities, entire regions. We may also in some opaque sense but in a way that is currently subject to elucidation by the physical sciences - feel an
intimation of energies that could overwhelm an earth. And ultimately annihilate
every conceivable entity. In Brassiers words: roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from
now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated
the fabric of matter itself, terminating the possibility of embodiment.
Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a
state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of
collapsed matter.65 Negating the consolation of endless becoming or ubiquitous self-overflowing, this scenario implies that
ethics too is ultimately doomed: the gift of the disaster pointing finally to the
disaster of the gift. And yet, across a nation state that could have been any patch of the globe, ordinary folk offer beds to complete strangers, the
sovereignty of consciousness, but the extinction of the sun.63

townspeople of a backwater village ladle out lashings of Hurricane Gumbo to dishevelled company, and a million and one other obscure acts of love flare and fade away: tiny sparks of
generosity that arc across the cracks in daily life. And keep doing so in spite of, because of, the perishability that characterises the gift, its giver and its recipient alike. For John Caputo,

it is the very `face of a faceless cosmos that makes

of an ethical opening to an other `an act of hyperbolic partiality and
defiance.66 In this way, it is not just that each gift is an offering of flesh and the giving of a
terrain, but that every gift carries the trace of the very extinguishing of existence . In
its responsiveness to the inconsistency or the excessiveness of light, each
generous reception murmurs against the dying of all light . Somewhere
beside or beyond critical thoughts harsh cross-examination of compassion and the
neo-vitalist extension of ethical dispositions into every corner of the cosmos, then,
runs this other option, propelled by the very exorbitance, diachrony and asymmetry
that severs being from thought and unhinges ethics from ontology. If it
negates the radical passivity of generosity to demand that it enacts a
moral cost accounting before it sets forth, so too does it rebuke the idea
of a responsibility that is primordially receptive to declare that every
spontaneous energetic or material discharge is in essence a gift. Demands
might well emit from any object, but not every thing can give in or give
out in response to a summons. As biologist Lynn Margulis and science writer Dorion Sagan put it: `life is matter that
chooses.67 Which appears to makes choice fairly rare in the known universe, as well
as contingent and, in all likelihood, ephemeral. Like other living creatures, we
humans `can turn away from faces as we can turn away from the surfaces of
things. Or choose not too. Even if it is not unique, perhaps our particularly
pronounced capacity to vacillate between turning toward and turning away has a
defining quality. If not us, then who?
who also gazes directly at the coming solar disaster,

Summary
Under the aff, everything is simply seen for its use value,
whether it is this laptop I am speaking from or myself, the form
of politics they embrace simply determines us by our value,
placing things like myself higher than everything else this
creates the world as standing reserve, on stand-by for use by
us. The impact is a never ending genocide against
everything we deem less than us entire races, species, and
beings need to be destroyed because they are not useful.
The alternative is an acceptance of our insignificance as
humans and our existence no better than another Being. This
solves for the endless genocide that justifies itself on this
distinction.
The affirmative must justify their methodology before they get
access to their impacts. Otherwise they feed onto cyclical
genocide.